1. What is Global Systems Science?

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 1

2009 May 20. NASA GIVES SPACE STATION CREW 'GO' TO DRINK RECYCLED WATER - NASA RELEASE: 09-096. Excerpt: HOUSTON -- NASA's Mission Control gave the Expedition 19 astronaut crew aboard the International Space Station a "go" to drink water that the station's new recycling system has purified. ..."This has been the stuff of science fiction.
Everybody's talked about recycling water in a closed loop system, but nobody's ever done it before. Here we are today with the first round of recycled water, ...This system will reduce the amount of water we must launch to the station once the shuttle retires and also test out a key technology required for sending humans on long duration missions to the moon and Mars." ...The system has been processing urine into purified water since shuttle Discovery's STS-119 crew delivered and installed a replacement Urine Processing Assembly in March. The system is tied into the station's Waste and Hygiene Compartment toilet and recovers and recycles moisture from the station's atmosphere....

2009 May 11. Humboldt's gift. The Economist. Excerpt: AMID this year’s flurry of scientific jubilees, one seems to have passed largely unnoticed. On May 6th admirers celebrated the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian naturalist and geographer. He may no longer be as famous as some of his contemporaries, yet Humboldt’s work sheds a clear light on the great challenges the world faces today from climate change. Humboldt noticed, for example, that volcanoes form in chains and speculated that these might coincide with subterranean fissures, more than a century before plate tectonics became widely accepted. ...he championed the study of how living things were related to their physical surroundings....
Humboldt cut a remarkable figure. He travelled widely, making scientific notes of his many geographical, zoological and botanical discoveries, and formulating theories to explain the relationships he observed....
...Humboldt was a polymath. Versed in most scientific fields of the time...he later contributed to many disciplines by picking up myriad botanical, zoological and geological samples on his voyages....He was permanently on the lookout for possible interdependencies. The search for underlying relationships between different sets of geophysical and meteorological measurements, which he made by the thousand, led him to invent isotherms, the lines on maps that link points of equal temperature. This vast quantitative endeavour laid the groundwork for “the general physics of the Earth” that is now known as the Earth sciences...

2008 July 22. NEW NASA 'FIRE & SMOKE' WEB PAGE SHOWS LATEST FIRE VIEWS, RESEARCH. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- NASA satellites, aircraft, and research know-how have created a wealth of cutting-edge tools to help firefighters battle wildfires. These tools also have helped scientists understand the impact of fires and smoke on Earth's climate and ecosystems. Now, a new NASA Web site brings to the public and journalists the latest information about this ongoing effort.
The NASA "Fire and Smoke" Web site debuting Tuesday includes regular updates of NASA images of fires and their associated smoke plumes in the United States and around the world. The site also features articles on the latest research results and multimedia resources from across NASA. The site is updated regularly with new images from NASA's suite of Earth observing satellites and airborne observatories, including the unmanned Ikhana aircraft that recently pinpointed wildfire hotspots across California....

2007 July-August. EXPEDITION TO SIBERIA. NASA Earth Observatory. Blog entries from NASA scientists and Russia's Academy of Science on an expedition down the Kochechum River in north-central Siberia as they go in search of answers to the question "As Earth's temperature rises, what is happening to the great northern forests of Siberia?"

2006 November 6 NASA SUPPORTS UAS FIRE MAPPING EFFORTS ON CALIFORNIA FIRE From NASA Earth Observatory. A team led by NASA and U.S. Forest Service scientists recently collected real-time, visible and infrared data from sensors onboard a remotely piloted aircraft over the Esperanza Fire in Southern California.

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 1

2. A History of Forest Use in the Pacific Northwest

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 2

2011 March 15.  Old Trees 'Important for Forests.  Environmental Research Web. Excerpt:  Bacteria living in mosses on tree branches are twice as effective at 'fixing' nitrogen as those on the ground, say researchers....
...These findings highlight the importance of maintaining the large old-growth trees in the coastal temperate rainforests that stretch from Southern Alaska to Northern California. Lindo's findings suggest that interactions between old trees, mosses and cyanobacteria contribute to nutrient dynamics in a way that may actually sustain the long-term productivity of these forests....

2010 April 21. The Plan to Map Every Tree in San Francisco. By Alexis Madrigal, WIRED. Excerpt: Every tree in San Francisco will soon be accounted for online, thanks to a new, Wikified project that aims to plot them all.
The Urban Forest Map will officially launch Wednesday, drawing on tree information collected by the city of San Francisco and Friends of the Urban Forest, a non-profit group....
“We’re going to publish the most up-to-date data from our data sources. Then, from that point on, we’re going to allow the community to add and edit and update that information,” said Amber Bieg, the project manager of the Urban Forest Map project. “It’ll become a tree census from the community and function like a Wiki.”
The new website combines two trends: citizen science and local data projects. In the past several years, sites like EveryBlock and Yelp have had tremendous success collecting and presenting information about cities from the people, businesses, and governments there. Meanwhile, all kinds of citizen science projects have had success tracking birds and sorting through pictures from space.
...Built with open-data principles in mind, all of the tree information collected will be available for city officials and developers to play with.
The better the data about trees, the easier it is to design good policies, said Kathy Wolf, a research social scientist at the National Forest Service and the University of Washington.
“Local government can introduce policy to promote urban forestry but government just does not have the resources to follow through and do the work, and that’s where these citizen mapping projects are extremely helpful,” Wolf said....

2010 Feb 16. Fog has declined in past century along California's redwood coast. By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: BERKELEY — California's coastal fog has decreased significantly over the past 100 years, potentially endangering coast redwood trees dependent on cool, humid summers, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, scientists.
It is unclear whether this is part of a natural cycle or the result of human activity, but the change could affect not only the redwoods, but the entire redwood ecosystem, the scientists say.
"Since 1901, the average number of hours of fog along the coast in summer has dropped from 56 percent to 42 percent, which is a loss of about three hours per day," said study leader James A. Johnstone, who recently received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Department of Geography before becoming a postdoctoral scholar in the campus's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM)....
The loss of fog and increased temperature mean that "coast redwood and other ecosystems along the U.S. West Coast may be increasingly drought-stressed, with a summer climate of reduced fog frequency and greater evaporative demand," said coauthor Todd E. Dawson, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and of ESPM. "Fog prevents water loss from redwoods in summer, and is really important for both the tree and the forest. If the fog is gone, we might not have the redwood forests we do now."...

2007 April 24. Researchers Probe Fossilized Rain Forest. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt: …coal miners working south and west of Georgetown have unearthed, chunk by fossilized chunk, what has revealed itself over the past few years to be the remains of a fossilized rain forest. It covers about 15 square miles, all more than 200 feet below ground, and probably is the largest intact rain forest from that period ever studied, according to Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey…..''We never encountered one whole forest preserved in one shot like this,'' Elrick said Monday. ''The fossils just didn't stop.'' ...Elrick and researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Bristol in Great Britain started working in the mines a few years ago, driving deep underground in armored vehicles and then walking along miles of 7-foot-high passages. ...People who live in eastern Illinois may occasionally long for a few more trees, but they'd find the land that now sits just above the miners' heads a tough place to call home during the Pennsylvania Age, Elrick said....Elrick and the other researchers plan to continue documenting what's above the Vermilion County mines, drawing and taking pictures and notes. But that's all they'll do, he said……The area deep underground isn't suitable for preservation. ...''Unfortunately, it will never be a visitable museum kind of piece,'' Elrick said. ''We try to document to the best of our ability what we see, and take notes ... It's sort of like asking people to go to New York City and describe every store front in a day.''

2006 March 20. Mountain Residents Fight Water Co. Logging Plans. Tony Russomanno Reporting (CBS 5) LOS GATOS. Excerpt: A Google Earth virtual fly-over along a 5-mile length of Los Gatos Creek - between Lexington Reservoir and Lake Elsman in the Santa Cruz Mountains - shows the 1,000 acres of land the San Jose Water Company wants to log. [see video] The map was created by software engineer Rebecca Moore, who lives in the area, and it's being used to galvanize opposition to the company's plans.
"So instead of having an abstract map," says resident and logging opponent Kevin Flynn, "people can actually see their houses, see their schools, see where the logging zone is, and it changes an abstract concept to something that is quite striking." Flynn lives in one of the neighborhoods bordering the area planned for logging. "The largest trees, and the largest percentage of the cut will be the largest redwoods here, as well as the largest Douglas fir. Most all of these redwoods here are about 100 years old."
San Jose Water engineer John Tang says the logging area will be divided into nine zones. One zone will be logged every other year for six weeks. "If you're a neighbor in unit one, you're going to see us for six weeks in year one, possibly, for example. You won't see us again for another 16 years."
Mountain residents worry that logging will increase runoff and sediment in their drinking water, but Tang says the logging project will actually help improve water quality.
The company does concede that water quality could be harmed if logging is not done well, but Tang says their plan is well thought out. "The water is extremely important to us and we're not going to jeopardize that part of our business for the timber." ....

California Forest Products Commission -- http://www.calforests.org

Temperate Forest Foundation -- http://www.forestinfo.org/

Maine Forest Service

Global land-use database -- an historical global land-use inventory that chronicles the massive impact humans have had as they've remade the global landscape since the 17th century.

International Canopy Network
http://www.evergreen.edu/ican/

The Forest Canopy Lab at Evergreen State College
http://www.evergreen.edu/canopylab/

National Geographic "Branching Out" Project
http://www.geocities.com/canopylab/

eForest is a collaborative effort between researchers and forest resource managers integrating satellite technologies into forest inventory and field methods.

Forest Magazine
http://www.forestmag.org/

Journal of G. Allen Burrows
when he was a fire lookout in Idaho in 1916

Rainforest web
http://www.rainforestweb.org/

Tree Identification website -- http://forestry.about.com/cs/treeid/a/tree_id_web.htm

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 2

Chapters

1. What is Global Systems Science?
2. A History of Forest Use in the Pacific Northwest
3. Case Study: The Headwaters Controversy
4. Field Trip to Wind River
5. Losing Tropical Rainforests
6. Towards a Sustainable World

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Nature's Voice Online.

Forest Magazine

3. Case Study: The Headwaters Controversy

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 3

2011 June 30. Plan Issued to Save Northern Spotted Owl. By William Yardley, The NY Times. Excerpt: ...After repeated revisions, constant court fights and shifting science, the Fish and Wildlife Service presented a plan that addresses a range of threats to the owl, including some that few imagined when it was listed as a threatened species in 1990.
The newer threats include climate change and the arrival of a formidable feathered competitor, the barred owl, in the soaring old-growth evergreens of Washington, Oregon and California where spotted owls nest and hunt….
…The spotted owl is declining by an average of 3 percent per year across its range. While some populations in Southern Oregon and Northern California are more stable, some of the steepest rates of decline are here in Washington. Some study areas in the Olympic and Cascade ranges show annual declines as high as 9 percent….

2011 June 12. Killing of One Owl Species Saves Another. By Lauren Sommer, NPR News. Excerpt: ...Later this month, wildlife officials are releasing a new plan to protect the owls, and it includes a controversial new approach: eliminating their cousins….
…Northern spotted owls became famous in the 1990s, when the federal government set aside millions of acres of forest to protect them. That stoked an epic battle between loggers and wildlife groups over their habitat. Since then, spotted owls haven't come back. Biologists believe that's due to an invasion of barred owls.
Barred owls take over spotted owl territory and in some cases even attack them. They have an advantage because they eat a wider variety of prey. In places like western Washington, the spotted owl population has been cut in half since the barred owl showed up....

2011 January 25. Oregon timber groups file suit over spotted owl recovery plan. By Eric Mortenson, The Oregonian. Excerpt: Two Portland-based timber industry groups have filed suit alleging that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service improperly used outside advisors to help revise a recovery plan for the northern spotted owl.
The Carpenters Industrial Council and the American Forest Resource Council say the wildlife service's use of advisory committees violated federal law. Meetings were conducted privately with no written notes or other records that can reviewed by the public, said Tom Partin, the resource council president.
…Industry representatives worry the federal government's recovery plan for the spotted owl for the first time will include regulation or restriction of private timber land. For that reason, industry groups question the role of experts and advisors who are not federal employees...

2010 November 12. Feds give more time for owl recovery plan comments. By Jeff Banard, Seattle Times. Excerpt: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday extended the deadline for comments on its draft spotted owl recovery plan to Dec. 15...
...The timber industry and members of Congress asked for an even longer extension. They said the draft proposed significant changes to the 2008 plan, including a consideration for the first time of private lands in saving the owl from extinction.
"What's the rush," Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said in a statement. "It's as if they are trying to hide fatal flaws in the plan."...
…Conservation groups, including the Seattle Audubon Society, Oregon Wild and others, sued last year to undo the plan, arguing that U.S. Fish and Wildlife ignored the best available science and was influenced by the Bush administration...

Winter 2008. Plan in Peril. Alice Talmadge, Forest Magazine. Excerpt: The war over old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest may not be over, despite a thirteen-year truce that has curtailed harvesting, protected water quality and provided habitat protection for threatened species such as the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. Measures that were put in place in 1994 by the Clinton-era Northwest Forest Plan are in danger of being drastically cut by a combination of economics, skewed science and political pressure to increase the timber cut in Oregon and the rest of the Pacific Northwest.
This August, the Bureau of Land Management proposed tripling the current amount of logging allowed on 2.5 million acres of forests-called O&C lands-that the agency manages in western Oregon....

2007 January 20. Pacific Lumber leans Company in Headwaters deal files for bankruptcy, citing logging restrictions. Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer. Excerpt: The Pacific Lumber Co. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, saying that environmental restrictions are preventing it from cutting enough redwoods to continue making payments on the roughly $714 million debt that Texas financier Charles Hurwitz incurred more than 20 years ago.... Pacific Lumber has been an environmental lightning rod in California ever since Hurwitz, aided by junk bond king Michael Milken, bought out the company in 1986 and more than doubled its cutting of old-growth redwood trees.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein brokered the 1999 Headwaters Forest deal in which Hurwitz's Maxxam Corp. agreed to sell about 10,000 acres of old-growth forest for $480 million to the government, which turned it into a park. It simultaneously agreed to a habitat conservation plan that obliged it to follow a strict set of logging rules on more than 200,000 remaining acres. ... In a statement Friday, Feinstein said she believes "Pacific Lumber is required to meet the obligations of the Habitat Conservation Plan whether or not they are in bankruptcy." ...Pacific Lumber ... In December ...filed a lawsuit in a state court in Fresno charging that the state has not lived up to its part in the Headwaters deal.
...The forestry department and the California Department of Fish and Game signed the Headwaters deal. But the State Water Resources Control Board did not, and environmentalists have persuaded it to limit Pacific Lumber's tree cutting to prevent more silt from fouling streams. Pacific Lumber says these additional restrictions were unforeseen, unnecessary and costly, while environmentalists have pointed to obvious silt deposits downstream of logging sites and argued successfully that state law requires the company to clean up its operations.
...Arnot, the Pacific Lumber spokeswoman, said the bankruptcy filing should not immediately affect the 538 people who work for the company. But its workforce has been shrinking. In December, Pacific Lumber cut its workforce by 19 percent....See also

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 3

4. Field Trip to Wind River

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 4

2009 August 8. Avian Silence: Without Birds to Disperse Seeds, Guam's Forest Is Changing. By Brendan Borrell, Scientific American. Excerpt: The forest on Guam is silent.
Sometime after World War II the brown tree snake arrived as a stowaway on this U.S. Pacific island territory 6,100 kilometers west of Hawaii. It has since extirpated 10 of the island's 12 native forest bird species. The remaining forest birds have been relegated to small populations on military bases, where the snakes are kept in check. In the first study of its kind, a rugby-playing researcher named Haldre Rogers is documenting how the forest itself is changing.
...Of the approximately 40 species of trees on Guam, about 60 to 70 percent once depended on birds to eat their fruits and disperse their seeds. The birds may have just nicked and dropped seeds somewhere along a flight path, or they could have swallowed the seeds, digested their tough coats, and pooped them out with a splatter of high-nitrogen urea.
Rogers went to neighboring islands that still have birds along with many of the same trees, collected seeds from the tree Premna obtusifolia, and brought them back to grow in a greenhouse on Guam. She found that seeds handled by birds are twice as likely to germinate as seeds that simply land on the forest floor. They also germinate about 10 days more quickly, giving them a better shot at evading seed-destroying rodents or fungi.
In another experiment, Rogers has found that seeds on Guam now always land directly in the shade of the mother tree and always have an intact seed coat. But seeds from neighboring islands that still have birds can sometimes end up 10 to 20 meters away from the mother tree, where they are more likely to find a sunny niche with fewer enemies. About 80 percent of these have had their seed coat removed, meaning they can germinate more quickly....
..."The brown tree snake is held up as textbook example of how a destructive invasive species can eradicate birds," she says. "This shows that the effects of introduced predators reverberate through the ecosystem."

2009 January 22. Out on a Limb: Global Warming May Be Killing Old-Growth Forests. By Katherine Harmon, Scientific American. Excerpt: The majestic old-growth forests of western North America...may be far more vulnerable to subtle climate change than scientists previously believed. A study published today in the journal Science reveals that these western forests are dying at faster rates as regional average temperatures climb more rapidly than the global average.
"Tree death rates have more than doubled," says study co-author Phillip van Mantgem, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
He and his team analyzed data (collected from 1955 to 2007) on about 58,000 trees, including firs, pines, hemlocks and others, in 76 old-growth forest plots covering six western states and a Canadian province.... Their findings: 11,000 trees had perished during the observation period, even though no logging, development or other major activities occurred in the study zones.
The researchers pinpointed the rise in regional temperatures as the likely culprit in their demise...
They note that the average regional temperature, though a mere one degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius) warmer, translated into less snow, longer dry seasons, and increased soil evaporation, which stress out trees, making them more vulnerable to destructive insects and disease. Meanwhile, bugs and pathogens, which thrive in hotter temperatures, grow stronger, making them an even bigger threat to the fading forests, according to Kenneth Raffa, a professor of forest entomology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
...Exacerbating the problem: not enough new trees are sprouting to replace the dead and dying old ones.
...This pattern could eventually lead to sparser forests in which trees are younger and about half the size of what they are now....

2008 February 29. The Giving Trees. By Sharon Levy, OnEarth. Excerpt: ...Mass deforestation, particularly in tropical countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, accounts for more than 20 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, recent studies show that Northern Hemisphere forests, now beginning to bulk up as they recover from centuries of logging, capture large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere...
People who cut down trees for a living tend to measure their value in dollars and cents. Traditionally, the timber industry has seen mature forests, with massive trees left standing and big logs rotting on the ground, as examples of waste; replanted clear-cuts...represent an ideal of economic productivity. Now global warming has forced foresters to address the impact of logging on the flow of carbon between forests and the atmosphere, and many in the industry have insisted that stands of young, fast-growing trees capture carbon more efficiently than do older forests. Using a recently developed technology called...eddy flux measurement, Bev Law and her colleagues are showing that those assumptions are wrong.
It turns out that forests hundreds of years old can continue to actively absorb carbon, holding great quantities in storage. Resprouting clear-cuts, on the other hand, often emit carbon for years, despite the rapid growth rate of young trees. On the dry eastern face of the Cascades, for example, where trees grow slowly, a replanted clear-cut gives off more CO2 than it absorbs for as much as 20 years. "That's a long time," Law observes, "during which microbes respiring in the soil, rather than trees photosynthesizing aboveground, dominate the carbon balance."
Can we develop a new model of forest economics that draws on this knowledge -- a model that makes sense to foresters as well as the policy makers and conservationists who are now taking the first steps toward developing a viable market in forest carbon? Depending on how we treat forests...they can be either major emitters of CO2 or highly efficient "sinks" that remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Because financial pressures drive deforestation, the hope is that putting a cash value on the carbon captured and stored by living trees will one day provide an alternative economic incentive to those who do the cutting...

Forest Fires

October 2003. Wildfires in Southern California [1.3MB PDF NASA Lithograph] Uncontrolled wildfire is one of the most destructive natural forces known to mankind. An average of 20,234 square kilometers (5 million acres) burns every year in the United States, causing millions of dollars in damage. But not all wildfire is destructive; prescribed and controlled fires can be beneficial by naturally thinning overcrowded forests and reducing fuel supplies, preparing sites for seeding or planting, managing competing vegetation, and creating varied vegetation patterns that provide diverse habitat for plants and animals.

August 2002. MODIS - Rapid Response [3MB PDF NASA Lithograph] In mid-July 2002, lightning started a fire in the Klamath Mountains in southwestern Oregon that eventually burned over the state line into California and consumed more than 400,000 acres by late August. The Biscuit fire became one of the largest in the state's history, threatening not only human life and property, but also three nationally designated wild and scenic rivers and habitat for several species of plants and animals already at risk of extinction. Firefighters also had their hands full with other fires across the state, including the Tiller Complex Fire to the northeast.

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 4

5. Losing Tropical Rainforests

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 5

2011 March 29. NASA RELEASE 11-090: NASA Satellites Detect Extensive Drought Impact On Amazon Forests. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- A new NASA-funded study has revealed widespread reductions in the greenness of Amazon forests caused by last year's record-breaking drought….
…The comprehensive study was prepared by an international team of scientists using more than a decade's worth of satellite data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). Analysis of these data produced detailed maps of vegetation greenness declines from the 2010 drought….
…The maps show the 2010 drought reduced the greenness of approximately 965,000 square miles of vegetation in the Amazon -- more than four times the area affected by the last severe drought in 2005.…

2011 March 21. As Larger Animals Decline, Forests Feel Their Absence. By Sharon Levy, Environment 360 (Yale). Excerpt:…Today native Mauritian plants, under siege from a tide of invasive competitors and predators, hang on only in a few small conservation management areas. Even where invasive plants are laboriously weeded out by hand, large-fruited native tree populations are dwindling because of a lack of fruit-eating animals to disperse the trees’ seeds….
…As part of a restoration effort on Ile aux Aigrettes, an uninhabited islet off the Mauritius coast, the Mauritius Wildlife Federation and the Mauritius government in 2000 introduced giant Aldabra tortoises to test whether the tortoises could help revive native vegetation. The tortoises are now dispersing the seeds of several native plants and are knocking back an invasion of the exotic tree, Leuceana leucocephala, by devouring its seedlings….

2010 Nov 26. The Fight for Yasuni. By Eric Marx, Science.  Abstract: Over the past decade, biologists working in Ecuador's Yasuni National Park and the adjoining Waorani Ethnic Reserve, a 17,000-kilometer section of the Amazon Basin that was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1989, have documented Yasuni's remarkable biodiversity, providing evidence that its forest has the highest number of species on the planet, including an unprecedented core where there are overlapping world richness records for amphibians, reptiles, bats, and trees. Through a group called Scientists Concerned for Yasuni, these researchers have waged an international campaign to protect the location, which happens to sit atop Ecuador's second largest reserve of crude oil. This unabashed science-based advocacy has had an impact...

2010 July 17. Ranchers and Drug Barons Threaten Rain Forest. By Blake Schmidt, The New York Times. Excerpt: EL MIRADOR, Guatemala — Great sweeps of Guatemalan rain forest, once the cradle of one of the world’s great civilizations, are being razed to clear land for cattle-ranching drug barons.
Other parts of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Central America’s largest protected area, have been burned down by small cities of squatters.
Looters and poachers, kept at bay when guerrilla armies roamed the region during the country’s 36-year civil war, ply their trades freely.
…President Álvaro Colom has grand plans to turn the region into a major eco-tourism destination, but if he hopes to bring tourists, officials say, he will have to bring the law here first.
...“Organized crime and drug traffickers have usurped large swaths of protected land amid a vacuum left by the state, and are creating de facto ranching areas,” Mr. Álvarez [the region's governor] said. “We must get rid of them to really have conservation.”
...To Mr. Hansen, an Idaho State professor of archaeology, the risks of not protecting the region are obvious in every stone he unearths. The Maya, he said, largely sealed their fate through deforestation and erosion.
“The Maya destroyed their environment,” he said. “They cut down their jungle” and it ruined them forever. “And we’re doing the same thing today.”

2010 July 1. The Cost of Saving the Rainforest. By Tom Hennigan, The Irish Times. Excerpt: …For decades it seemed a losing struggle, as the annual dry season led to the setting of fires that burned away ever more of the jungle’s southern rim. But now there is tentative hope that this decades-long cycle of destruction is drawing to a close. In the past three years Brazil’s government has finally moved to control the region and is clamping down on deforestation. Jungle is still being cleared, but at just half the rate of before. Last year was the Brazilian Amazon’s best since 1988. Even many environmentalists are cautiously hopeful that the rainforest now stands a chance.
…The ranchers of Castanheira, 800km north of Cuiabá on the western edge of the BR-163’s corridor of destruction, all agree that times have changed. Today only a foolish or desperate man would burn down a patch of forest without a permit, and the authorities are no longer handing those out. “The government is watching too closely now. If you clear land then you get fined, and the fine is worth more than the land you clear,” says the town’s former mayor Genes Oliveira Rios.
…Brazilian governments long feared that the largely uninhabited Amazon was vulnerable to covetous outsiders, and in the 1970s the military dictatorship decided it was time to settle it. Under the banners “Integrate or Forfeit” and “A Land without Men for Men without Land” it handed out chunks of the forest for a pittance to anyone who wanted them. The only condition? To secure their claim settlers must clear half their property of jungle.
…But still the fear lingers that the outside world wants to force them from their homes, an idea reinforced when a leading official in Brazil’s environment ministry once told them that if they wanted to remain cattle ranchers they would have to move out of Amazonia.
…“The government doesn’t understand us and Europeans do not know our reality. We are not leaving this land,” says local community leader Lincoln Brasil Queiroz. “We are here now 30 years. Our whole lives are here. We have buried our parents here, and some of us have buried our children. We are linked to this land emotionally. We now are tradition.”

2010 June 24. The Other Oil Spill. By The Economist. Excerpt: …EARLY on April 21st 2008, Greenpeace activists dressed as orang-utans stormed Unilever’s headquarters in London. Similar raids took place at the multinational’s facilities on Merseyside, in Rome and in Rotterdam. Furry protesters scaled buildings, occupied production lines and unfurled banners. Many read: “Unilever: Don’t Destroy the Forests”. Dove, one of the company’s best-known brands, was singled out by name.
…The tactic was a simple one, intended to draw attention to the damage done to Indonesian tropical rainforests by the production of palm oil, an ingredient in many of Unilever’s products. It was also effective: soon after the orang-utan invasion the company said it would draw all its palm oil from “sustainable” sources by 2015.
…The charges against palm oil are serious: environmental groups regard it as a danger not only to Asian wildlife but also to the health of the planet. Between 1967 and 2000 the area under cultivation in Indonesia expanded from less than 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) to more than 30,000 square kilometres. Deforestation in Indonesia for palm oil and illegal logging is so rapid that a report in 2007 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said most of the country’s forest might be destroyed by 2022. Although the rate of forest loss has declined in Indonesia in the past decade, UNEP says the spread of palm-oil plantations is one of the greatest threats to forests in Indonesia and Malaysia.
…In fact in response Nestlé went further than any company had gone before. It undertook to exclude companies running “high-risk plantations or farms linked to deforestation” from its supply chain. To make this happen, Nestlé has recruited the Forest Trust (TFT), a charity based in Switzerland, to provide an independent review of its palm-oil supply chains, right down to ground level. Every supplier will be audited for evidence of illegal activity.

2010 June 8. Using the Internet to Save the Rainforest. By Juliane Von Mittelstaedt, ABC News. Excerpt: …The Surui will be soon be one of the first indigenous peoples that will be paid by the world to preserve its forest. They are being advised by investment bankers, lawyers, and managers. But the decisions will be all their own, taken at a gathering of 1,300 native Indios. Almir Surui believes his people need modernity to help them maintain their traditional way of life, that this is the only way they can save their forest, their culture, and their tribe. But because it is an experiment, the outcome is uncertain -- for both the Surui and the rest of the world.
…Just last year, 130,000 square kilometers of forest was cut down or burnt, at least 10,000 square kilometers of this in Brazil. That may be the lowest figure in decades, but it's still too much. Twenty percent of the Amazon rainforest has already disappeared. The same amount has been damaged. On a purely proportional scale, the greatest amount of forest has been lost in the state of Rondônia.
…When the chief returned to his village, he brought with him a computer and an idea: that the Surui's only hope for survival lay in combining the two worlds of technology and tradition. It was the dawn of a new era.
…The chief's words convinced nearly all the Surui, who avidly began breeding and planting seedlings. Gradually the forest returned. Ignoring the rain and the heat, they planted more and more species: Açai palms, Ipé (trumpet trees), Brazil nut, mahogany. Women, children, and the elderly all lent a hand, clearing scrubland that looks like forest but is no more than brushwood, palm trees, and ferns. They are still planting to this day.
…Almir Surui first heard the term REDD -- or "retchy", as he pronounces it -- three years ago. The acronym stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. He discovered that forests trap carbon dioxide, and companies around the globe are willing to pay a lot of money to have the trees soak up carbon dioxide on their behalf. They don't pay for a forest that is merely in existence, but rather for preventing its destruction.

2010 May 26. Kids' Books not Safe for Rainforests. By Rebecca Tarbotton, Huffington Post. Excerpt: …What do major U.S. publishing houses, China and tropical rainforest destruction have in common? Children's books. That's right, a report put out this week by Rainforest Action Network found that a majority of the top ten U.S. children's publishers have sold at least one children's book that tested positive for paper fiber linked to the destruction of Indonesia's endangered rainforests. And all of those books were produced in China.
...The razing of the Indonesian rainforests for commodities like paper and palm oil has destroyed the habitats of these endangered species and contributed to making the archipelago the third-largest source of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China. Worldwide, the degradation and destruction of tropical rainforests is responsible for fifteen percent of all annual greenhouse emissions. The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesia's rapid deforestation account for up to five percent of global emissions: more than the combined emissions from all the cars, planes, trucks, buses and trains in United States.
…There is no reason that Indonesia's critical rainforests need to be cut down for our children's books. Rainforest- free paper is a readily available alternative that publishers can demand from suppliers. If top U.S. book publishers demand cleaner paper, Chinese manufacturers will give it to them.

2010 Feb 16. Big business leaves big forest footprints. By Andrew Mitchell, BBC News. Excerpt: ...A new report by Forest Footprint Disclosure reveals for the first time how global business is driving rainforests to destruction in order to provide things for you and me to eat.
But it does also reveal what companies are doing to try to lighten their forest footprint. Sadly, however, the answer is: not much, at least not yet.
Consumers "eat" rainforests each day - in the form of beef-burgers, bacon and beauty products - but without knowing it....
Because of growing demand for beef, soy and palm oil, which are in much of what we consume, as well as timber and biofuels, rainforests are worth more cut down than standing up.
...The gargantuan farms of Brazil's Mato Grosso State can boast 50 combines abreast at harvest time, marching across monoculture prairies where once the most diverse ecosystem on Earth stood, albeit in some cases many years ago.
Further north, thousands of square miles of rainforest natural capital is going up in smoke each year, often illegally, to provide pastureland for just one cow per hectare to supply beef hungry Brazilians or more prosperous mouths in China and India.
Many of the hides from these cattle then go into the designer trainers, handbags or luxury car upholstery that wealthy markets have such an appetite for.
...None of this would matter but for three things. Firstly, evolution is being changed forever. Most of us, sadly, can live with that.
Secondly, burning tropical forests drives global warming faster than the world's entire transport sector; there will be no solution to climate change without stopping deforestation.
Finally, losing forests may undermine food, energy and climate security. Yet saving them could, according to UN special adviser Pavan Sukhdev's forthcoming review on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), reduce environmental costs by $3-5 trillion per year....

2009 March 9. Amazon Rainforest Carbon Sink Threatened By Drought. Science Daily. Excerpt: The Amazon is surprisingly sensitive to drought, according to new research conducted throughout the world's largest tropical forest. The 30-year study, published in Science, provides the first solid evidence that drought causes massive carbon loss in tropical forests, mainly through killing trees.
...The study...was based on the unusual 2005 drought in the Amazon....
The 2005 drought sharply reversed decades of carbon absorption, in which Amazonia helped slow climate change.
In normal years the forest absorbs nearly 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The drought caused a loss of more than 3 billion tonnes. The total impact of the drought - 5 billion extra tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - exceeds the annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined.
"Visually, most of the forest appeared little affected, but our records prove tree death rates accelerated. Because the region is so vast, even small ecological effects can scale-up to a large impact on the planet's carbon cycle," explained Professor Phillips.
Some species, including some important palm trees, were especially vulnerable", said Peruvian botanist and co-author Abel Monteagudo, "showing that drought threatens biodiversity too."...

2008 March 5. Amazon Fires on the Rise. By Rebecca Lindsey , NASA Earth Observatory.
In 2006, fires and smoke in the Amazon declined significantly for the first time in nearly a decade. Is Amazon burning under control?

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 5

6. Towards a Sustainable World

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 6

2011 April 29.  Azavea Launches PhillyTreeMap.org, a Web Application to Inventory Philadelphia's Urban Forest. San Francisco Chronical. Excerpt: Azavea, a geospatial analysis (GIS) software development company announces the launch of PhillyTreeMap (www.PhillyTreeMap.org), a wiki-inspired web application that enables the public to collaborate with the project partners -- City of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission - to map, inventory, and preserve the Philadelphia urban forest….
…While the initial database load has resulted in over 175,000 trees in the system, public help is needed to ensure the data is both current and complete. With a free registration, users can add trees to the system, edit or add to existing tree records, and upload tree images. All changes are immediately visible in the system, but a group of trained administrators will also review changes and new entries to ensure accuracy….

2011 March 28. Forest Service adopts climate-change 'scorecard.' By Bob Berwyn, Summit County Citizens Voice. Excerpt: Recognizing that climate change calls for a coordinated response, the U.S. Forest Service is implementing a climate change road map to guide the agency’s efforts in the face of potentially staggering impacts to the landscapes and watersheds it manages across the country….
…The scorecard approach will help field-level rangers plan actions that fit into a broader scope of landscape-level action aimed at addressing climate change, rather than relying on “random acts of conservation,” said regional agency planners familiar with the effort….

2010 July 20. NASA RELEASE: 10-173: First Map of Global Forest Heights Created From NASA Data. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- Scientists have produced a first-of-its kind map of the height of the world's forests by combining data from three NASA satellites. The map will help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world's forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere.
…The primary data… used was from a laser technology called lidar on the ICESat. Lidar can capture vertical slices of forest canopy height by shooting pulses of light at the ground and observing how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the surface than from the top of the forest canopy. Since lidar can penetrate the top layer of forest canopy, it provides a detailed snapshot of the vertical structure of a forest.
…Measuring canopy height has implications for efforts to estimate the amount of carbon tied up in Earth's forests and for explaining what absorbs 2 billion tons of "missing" carbon each year. Humans release about 7 billion tons of carbon annually, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide. Of that, 3 billion tons end up in the atmosphere and 2 billion tons in the ocean. It's unclear where the remaining 2 billion tons of carbon go, although scientists suspect forests capture and store much of it as biomass through photosynthesis.
…Sassan Saatchi, senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., already has started combining the height data with forest inventories to create biomass maps for tropical forests. Global biomass inventories will eventually be used to improve climate models and guide policymakers on carbon management strategies.

2010 Feb 1. Study Finds a Tree Growth Spurt. By Leslie Kaufman, The NY Times. Excerpt: Forests in the eastern United States appear to be growing faster in response to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a new study has found.
The study centered on trees in mixed hardwood stands on the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland that are representative of much of the those on the Eastern Seaboard.
All are growing two to four times as fast as normal, according to a study published in Tuesday’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
After controlling for other variables, scientists concluded that the change resulted largely from the increase in carbon dioxide, a major factor in climate change....
Geoffrey G. Parker, a co-author of the paper and an ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., said his research indicated that the local forests were adapting to the rise in carbon dioxide by absorbing more....
But Dr. Parker said it was unclear whether the trend could be sustained. “We don’t think this can persist for too long because other limiting factors will come into play, like water availability and soil nutrients,” he said....

Winter 2010. Can Forests Save the Planet? By Patricia Marshall Forest Magazine, Winter 2010. [after winter 2010, click back issues] In the 1980s, as chainsaws chewed their way ever deeper into old-growth forests, the movement to save and preserve forests in the United States claimed the national spotlight.
... in the early 1990s the idea that forests played a vital role in the carbon cycle of the planet was barely on the radar screen for preservationists. A handful of scientists understood the concept, of course, but saving the forests for their carbon-storing ability was hardly center stage in the fight to retain the last of the old growth. As it turns out, what's been good for the forests has been good for the planet, too. While scientists wrestle with how to mitigate the effects of ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, forests have become a significant factor in the carbon cycle equation. According to the World Resources Institute, forest soils and vegetation store 40 percent of all carbon in the terrestrial biosphere, and deforestation generates about 20 percent of human-caused carbon emissions, second only to fossil fuel combustion.
...In the following section, we tackle some of the issues surrounding forests and carbon sequestration. In "To Thin or To Store", Joshua Zaffos examines the vexing decisions facing forest managers as they deal with the tradeoffs between forest health and maximum carbon storage. Late in 2008, the U.S. Department of Agriculture set up the Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets, headed by Sally Collins, the former associate chief of the U.S. Forest Service. In "Green Economy", Jennifer Weeks interviews Collins about the goals of the new office and its push to put a market price on clean water and carbon storage....

2009 July 3. Pacific Northwest Forests Could Store More Carbon, Help Address Greenhouse Issues. ScienceDaily. Excerpt: The forests of the Pacific Northwest hold significant potential to increase carbon storage and help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in coming years, a recent study concludes, if they are managed primarily for that purpose through timber harvest reductions and increased rotation ages.
In the complete absence of stand-replacing disturbances – via fire or timber harvest – forests of Oregon and Northern California could theoretically almost double their carbon storage.
Although it isn't realistic to expect an absence of disturbance, the estimates were based on average conditions up until now that include variation in forest biomass, age, climate, disturbances and soil fertility. If all forest stands in this region were just allowed to increase in age by 50 years, their potential to store atmospheric carbon would still increase by 15 percent, the study concluded.
That would be a modest, but not insignificant offset to the nation's carbon budget, scientists say, since this region accounts for 14 percent of the live biomass in the entire United States.
..."We have known that forests in this region have high productivity, and in recent years we have learned they have a high potential to store large amounts of carbon even at very old ages," said Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at OSU. "The forests west of the Cascade Range are also wetter and less likely to be lost to fire. We suspected these forests might provide more opportunity for carbon storage than has been recognized, and these data support that."...

2009 February 25. Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests. By Leslie Kaufman, The NY Times. Excerpt: Americans like their toilet tissue soft: exotic confections that are silken, thick and hot-air-fluffed.
...But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.
...With the recession pushing the price for recycled paper down and Americans showing more willingness to repurpose everything from clothing to tires, environmental groups want more people to switch to recycled toilet tissue.
“No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council.
In the United States, which is the largest market worldwide for toilet paper, tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands. Most manufacturers use a combination of trees to make their products. According to RISI, an independent market analysis firm in Bedford, Mass., the pulp from one eucalyptus tree, a commonly used tree, produces as many as 1,000 rolls of toilet tissue. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year....

2008 May/June. Tar Sands Rush Threatens to Devour Canadian Boreal Forest. Nature's Voice, NRDC. Excerpt: In the old-growth boreal forest of Canada's Alberta Province, a sprawling network of bogs, lakes and rivers provides a pristine breeding ground for millions of North America's songbirds and waterfowl. Lynx and caribou roam undisturbed among the forest's dense stands of aspen and poplar. But in recent years, soaring demand for oil has driven energy companies to strip bare thousands of acres of this thriving wildlife habitat to produce fuel from buried tar sands -- an immensely polluting and energy-intensive process even by oil industry standards.
...The tar sands found deep beneath Alberta's vast old-growth forests are made up of 90 percent sand, clay, silt, and water and 10 percent bitumen, a tarlike substance that can be converted to oil. Currently, most tar sands production relies on open pit mines, some as large as three miles wide and 200 feet deep. Because less than 20 percent of the oil-producing bitumen deposits are close to the surface, the rest of the deep reserves must be extracted by injecting steam underground and pumping out the melted bitumen. The amount of natural gas used daily during these processes could heat about four million American homes. Once separated from the sand, clay and silt, the bitumen is still of low grade and must undergo yet another energy-intensive process to turn it into a crude oil that more closely resembles conventional oil.
Over the past ten years, oil production from Alberta's tar sands has doubled to more than one million barrels per day. Seventy-five percent of that oil is bound for the United States as both raw and refined products. Driven by skyrocketing U.S. demand, the tar sands rush has spawned a rapidly expanding web of pipelines, roads and wells that threatens to destroy and fragment more than 55,000 square miles of boreal forest habitat -- an area the size of Florida.
...The massive amount of energy needed to extract, upgrade and refine tar sands oil generates three times the amount of global warming pollution as conventional oil production.
...Most Americans are unaware that fully 8 percent of our oil supply already comes from Alberta's tar sands....

2008 Apr 24. Plight of the pines. Brian Hoyle, Nature Reports. Excerpt: Under attack from pine beetles that are thriving in a warmer climate, Canada's boreal forests could become a sizeable source of emissions in the coming decade. Brian Hoyle reports. ...By the end of 2006, the mountain pine beetle...had ravaged 130,000 square kilometres of forest in western Canada.
...Not only is this bad news for the affected trees, whose fate is sealed once the beetle takes hold; the infestation also packs an atmospheric punch. According to scientists who have published a new study in this week's Nature, the assault on British Columbia's pine trees could cause the region to release more carbon dioxide than it absorbs from the atmosphere over the coming decade.
...Led by ecologist Werner Kurz at the Pacific Forestry Centre of the Canadian Forestry Service, the study used a carbon budget model to assess the cumulative impact of various factors - including tree deaths from beetle infestations, forest fires and logging - on the carbon balance of British Columbia's pine forests between 2000 and 2020....

2008 March 17, A Forest of Change. By Beth Daley. The Boston Globe. Excerpt: Scientists have long thought it would take generations if not centuries for tree populations to shift in response to a warming world. But climate change might affect New England forests far sooner than scientists thought . …a study published earlier this month that found that the boundary between northern hardwoods and colder-loving trees shifted about 350 feet uphill in the last 40 years in response to warming temperatures. Climate change is likely only one factor in the forest transformation.
…New England has warmed 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 40 years and it's the consensus of scientists that part of the warming is due to the release of heat-trapping gases from power plants, factories, and vehicles.
…Still, many questions remain. Trees on mountains don't only respond to temperature; precipitation, cloud cover, and wind also determine everything from height to health to the location of the tree line… the answers are complicated. Other factors such as beech bark disease may have killed off enough trees to trigger some of the changes he found in forest composition. Acid rain also likely contributed to the decline of red spruce trees at high elevations.
The long-term prognosis for New England's iconic sugar maples is mixed... But it may be centuries before farmers see any dramatic change in species composition in their carefully managed maple forests.

2008 Feb 1. Ancient Forest to Modern City. By Holli Riebeek, NASA Earth Observatory. To understand how local weather shifted when the towering forests of the eastern United States gave way to fields and cities, scientists must reconstruct the region's historical landscapes.

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 6

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