Hopes for World Forests

Deforestation has long been a troubling global trend that has affected most of Earth’s arboreal environments.  Discussions of this topic may often focus on the economic and agricultural reasons for the destruction of forestlands.  Juxtaposed are the greedy corporations and illegal loggers against indigent subsistence farmers desperate for land.  Either way, the discussion ends as so many talks of 21^st century environmental problems often do: disheartened and despondent.  However, there has been much recent buzz in the media related to deforestation, and some of it actually hopeful.

A Newsweek article believes that Haiti’s economic recovery may be contingent upon the recovery of its forest lands.  Haiti’s trees have long been mowed down by colonizers, plantations, industry and locals alike.  It is hoped that reforestation will ultimately help to minimize the impact of natural disasters, like hurricanes and floods, and to restore nutrients to overworked agricultural lands.

On a global scale, recent policies of developing countries have made a concerted effort to remove illegally logged wood from world markets.  The New York Times Green blog reports on the European Parliament’s bill cracking down on timber from illegal logging.  Other countries from the developing world like Nigeria and Ghana to the developed world like the United States have previously contributed to fining or banning wood logged illicitly.

In particular, it is the Amazon that many environmentalists lay their hopes on.  The New York Times Dot Earth blog reports on the optimism that comes with Brazil’s current demographic and economic development trajectories and with restoration and preservation efforts of environmentalists on the ground.  The Amazon has also been the subject of a year-long study conducted by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (also reported with accompanying images at Surrey Satellite Technology LTD’s Space Blog).  They analyzed satellite images of the region which revealed a slowing of deforestation rates as compared with previous years.

The link between the world’s forests and possible climate change should also be discussed in any deforestation dialogue.  Earth scientists have long been studying the carbon cycle and tracking the ways that carbon is found in active and inactive stores throughout the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.  One of the global scale puzzle pieces to this study has now been provided by NASA satellites as they mapped world tree heights.  CNN argues that this will aid in tracking world forest carbon and study the ability of world forests to continue to take up atmospheric carbon. This map will also help to produce models to understand forest fires, ecosystems, and more.

A succinct article provided by the New York Times Green blog titled, “Is the tide turning on deforestation?” is suitable for most undergrad students and sums up these hopeful developments well.  Combine that with a recent BBC News article that reports the findings of the London-based think tank Chatham House observing a marked decline in illegal logging and discusses the major contributions to that trend.

However hopeful, this deforestation discussion should also end with a sobering dose of reality:  reiterating that deforestation, especially at the hand of illegal logging, is still a harrowing global problem.

Discussion Questions:

1. How might economic recovery connect to reforestation in the example of Haiti?  Explain the benefits of reforestation and how they will contribute to economic gains.

2. Suggest comparisons or contrasts of the policies against illegal logging between the developing world and developed world.  Think about production/consumption and source/destination streams, as well as underlying motivations at various scales.

3. How will the mapping of world tree heights help scientists to track carbon and understand climate change?

4. What hopeful trend countering deforestation do you think will make the most difference and why?  Do you have any other suggestions for what the global community can do to help save the world’s forests?

Geographies of Green Diets

With the discursive onset of “global warming” in the global lexicon, seemingly inconsequential personal choices are subject to questions of ‘Greenness’ (Green indicating an alternative that is better for the environment than the status quo).  In a world that is increasingly linked technologically, economically, and culturally in a complicated web of globalization, your diet (what you eat, not your weight loss plan) raises convoluted issues of scale, politics and environment that are not always so easy to comprehend.

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the questions behind a “Green Diet” is how geography is implicated in all aspects.  Whether this is a question of agricultural and land-use practices, of environmental problems or solutions, of scale from the local to global, or of socio-economic, culture or politics, each has a spatial component and consequence.

The United Nations International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management argues in a June 2010 report that, “Current patterns of production and consumption of both fossil fuels and food are draining freshwater supplies; triggering losses of economically-important ecosystems such as forests; intensifying disease and death rates and raising levels of pollution to unsustainable levels.”  The report calls for a controversial shift in global diets to reduce such environmental pressures.  This shift would be away from those including a large amount of animal-based products to those including more vegetable-based foods.  This report was certainly not the first to call for such a dietary shift, another contribution came from well-known author and activist, Michael Pollan who challenged readers to eat whole fresh foods, a little meat, and avoid processed foods.

Yet, after the UN-backed report, there seems to be a resurgence of dialogue over the greenness of our diets.  An author from the Atlantic asks, “Can Meat Eaters be environmentalists?” arguing that the two are not a contradiction.  She has also authored the New York Times article “The Carnivore’s Dilemma” researching the connection between meat and global warming.  An excellent Mother Jones article tackles the “merits of vegetarianism” by taking the question to a panel of experts and to readers, cheekily poised as “Bacon Lovers vs. Soy Huggers.”  This article is an outstanding source for both sides of the debate and includes plenty of interesting, albeit covert, geographical references from trophic structures to cultural preferences.  Another aspect of greening diets comes from the Local Foods movement, dubbed by the USDA as “Know your Farmer, Know your food”, which focuses more on where your food comes from rather that what you eat.  An NPR program and article offers a very interesting once over of the movement, but also of the economic and logistical challenges, combined with the overall reluctance of food distributors to make the change.

Overall, the underlying issues behind these questions have to do with various ‘costs’:  energy costs, food supply costs, economic costs, and environmental costs.  Each of these costs indicates difficulties that can be best understood in a holistic, interconnected way.  Indeed, geographers best understand the human-environment connections behind our diets:

-  How fossil fuel use may be translating into warmer climates;

-  How most crop agriculture is devoted to animal agriculture, creating fossil fuel and economic entanglements in between, and then topping it all off with the addition of more heat-trapping methane into the atmosphere;

-  How the economic networks associated with status quo crop and animal agriculture mean jobs, taxes, and livelihoods to large populations of Midwestern and Central United States;

-  How environmentally costly, both looking back and forward, commercial agriculture has been for native grassland ecosystems and rainforest ecosystems, freshwater supplies, and perhaps for climates throughout the globe.

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you know where your food comes from or how it is produced?  When you are out at your local grocery store, favorite restaurant, school cafeteria, café, farmer’s market, etc. look for clues about where food products come from, how they are produced, and how they are delivered.
2. What do you think about the arguments made in the “Bacon Lovers vs. Soy Huggers” article?  What conclusions can you draw about which diet is greener?  What are some further questions you might have?
3. Think about the connection between food production (meat, vegetables, and processed foods) and climate.  List the various ways that production, distribution, and consumption contribute or neutralize effects on climate.

Sarah Goggin

Cool Globes and Climate Change

Description:  While attending the 2010 Annual Meeting for AAG in Washington, D.C., Associate Editor Veronica Armour took some time off to see the sights.  While at The National Mall the Cool Globes exhibit on climate change caught her eye.  Here she shares the photographs she took of the globes in a PPTs slide show and the website where you can learn more about the exhibit that is going on around the globe!

Link: http://www.coolglobes.com/ 

Date last accessed: 21 April 2010 

Discussion Question:
How do you discuss climate change in the classroom?

 

Climate Change Forever: Truth and Consequences

Stopping Climate Change, shouts the cover of the 5 December 2009 Economist. Its accompanying editorial ‘leader’ states that “we do not believe that climate change is a certainty … there are no certainties in science” (so much for plate tectonics and evolution). As a preface to such nonsense, the same highly respected newsmagazine, in a leader several years ago, asserted that, after anthropogenic emissions into the atmosphere are brought under control, “climate change will be with us for at least another century.” One supposes that, after billions of years of it, we should all heave a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, the quip is rubbish.

Here is the real inconvenient truth: climate change will shadow humanity’s future whether or not the global campaign to limit greenhouse-gas emissions achieves even its most comprehensive goals. If we were indeed able to eliminate all anthropogenic emissions immediately, climate change would not end. What would happen is that, over millennia, the complex, interlocked natural cycles that have always driven planetary climate change would again prevail, and all life on Earth would once more be subject to nature’s long- as well as short-term variations that have always been part of evolutionary processes.

These variations range from slow and inexorable transitions to abrupt and even violent reversals. A global warmup of almost unimaginable intensity drove back the great sheet glaciers, products of the most recent glaciation that covered the heart of North America as far south as the Ohio River less than 20,000 years ago. Then, just when it would have seemed that such warming was irreversible, the Northern Hemisphere was plunged back into glacial cold some 12,000 years ago, a catastrophic cooling that lasted more than a millennium. This episode, known as the Younger Dryas, seemed to presage a return of the glaciers – but nature had other plans. The warmup resumed, and subsequent variations (such as the misnamed “Little Ice Age” starting around AD 1300) were nothing like the Younger Dryas. For nearly nine thousand years, global climate has varied, but within far narrower limits.

None of this means that climate has stabilized or that future events such as the Younger Dryas (or, for that matter, a return to full-scale glaciation) are inconceivable. One lesson of the geologically recent past is that even comparatively minor climatic fluctuations can have enormous impact on regional environments, shifting biomes, threatening species, desiccating farmlands, generating weather extremes. On this basis alone, mitigating humanity’s prodigious pollution of the planetary atmosphere is a sound objective. Should current anthropogenic greenhouse-enhancement coincide with a natural warming phase, the combined effect could indeed be calamitous, a Younger Dryas in reverse.

However, we do not know enough as yet about the periodicity of planetary climate change, except in the most general terms. Planet Earth today is experiencing an ice age; ice ages last tens of millions of years and display alternating periods of cooler and warmer climate, the cooler glaciations lasting much longer than the warmer interglacials. The cooler glaciations are not uniformly cold, and the warmer interglacials are not invariably toasty. That’s why Neanderthals and modern humans managed to survive and compete in Europe during the most recent, 100,000-year-long glaciation: time and again bitter cold gave way to milder interludes. But then, just before the warm interglacial we are experiencing today, this most recent glaciation got serious and pushed huge continental glaciers southward into the heart of North America and Eurasia. The boreal forests of present-day Canada and Scandinavia shifted southward into Iberia and Mexico. Ice covered the Midwest north of the Ohio River. Between the ice and the forests lay the Siberia of America, a tundra of mosses and lichens.

The surge of global warming that melted those glaciers almost as fast as they had appeared heralded the warm interglacial that witnessed the rise of human civilizations and the population explosion that followed. Except for the inconvenience of the Younger Dryas, we have been living the good life in the warmth of an interglacial that has endured – depending on where we start counting – for longer than average.

So might the greenhouse-effect-enhancing gases we are pouring into the atmosphere counter a cooling trend rather than exacerbate a warming swing? No doubt about it: the numerous cycles – solar, orbital, atmospheric, oceanic – that generate nature’s environmental seesaws continue even as humanity has become a major factor in the process through massive modification of the planetary atmosphere. But supercomputer models and IPCC projections notwithstanding, no one knows the proportional contribution to the current phase of climate change from natural and human sources. Contrary to what some scientists are asserting, we do not know with any satisfactory level of confidence what form climate change would be taking today in the absence of human interference. What is clear is that humans have become an additional factor driving climate change, and that reducing the rate of pollution of the atmosphere should have priority as a public health as well as environmental matter. But don’t expect a reward in the form of “stopping climate change.” Ice ages will continue to come and go. Glaciers will wax and wane. Sea levels will fall and rise. Species, cultures, and civilizations will flourish and fail. Nature’s power will prevail.

Harm de Blij, John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University, is author of The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2009).