Climate is everything, so essentially everything on this site is related to earth’s climate. Two of the largest impacts on climate in our opinion are wildfire and plastics, thus the two articles printed here in full. Below are links to some of the other climate related articles on this site. Additionally, every monthly Earth News, found in Earth News Archive, features a brief summary of a critical climate issue as well as a related simple action anyone can take to help “Change the World in 3 Minutes”.
How Wildfire Came to the West
Fire science is complex in some ways, simple in others. This is the simple version. Forest management for the past 100 years in the West has created the perfect conditions for wildfire by implementing three devastating practices:
- Putting Out All Fires
- Excessive Timber Sales
- Intense Livestock Grazing
Putting out all fires. Fires are good for forests and have been happening naturally for eons. When a fire starts in a healthy forest, it burns primarily on the ground, clearing away the underbrush. The big trees with their fire-resistant resin beneath inches-thick bark endure and, with the ground now cleared of underbrush, their seeds disperse and grow well away from the shade of the mother tree. They will take her place someday but are not crowded around her base.
A policy of dousing all fires over the past 100 years has allowed flammable doghair thickets (small trees packed tightly together) and flammable understory to build to spectacularly dangerous levels. These thickets comprise the perfect “laddering fuels” when lighting strikes, moving the flames from the ground – where historically they stayed – up into the bigger trees. When fire reaches the treetops, wind can easily catch the blazing embers and leap-frog fireballs into other forest canopies. These laddering fuels are largely the result of excessive logging:
Excessive Timber Sales. This “why?” is simple. Only big trees are commercially valuable to timber companies. The US Forest Service and BLM funding comes partly from timber sale proceeds, incentivizing the agencies to sacrifice the big fire-resistant trees to the timber companies who leave small trees, branches and crushed vegetation behind, awaiting a spark.
After logging, a healthy forest does not grow back. With the big trees mostly gone, there is no shade to modulate seedling growth. Trees can seed in the open sites and grow tightly packed together. Most are not able to thrive in these crowded conditions and so, reaching for sun and competing for water, they grow tall, skinny and dry in dense thickets.
Intense Livestock Grazing
According to The Wildlife News, livestock grazing across the West has contributed significantly to the intensity, severity, and enormity of fires. Livestock forging behaviors devastate life-giving streams, remove fire-resistant natives and encourage doghair thickets and invasives to overrun the lands, causing extreme wildfire-prone conditions in ways similar to logging.
Why do forest management agencies encourage this? In addition to the old adage, “it’s the way we’ve always done it”, much of their budget comes from grazing fees, incentivizing them to sell grazing permits on approximately 229 million acres (40%) of public land in the West.
The USFS and BLM charge just $1.35/Animal Unit Month; i.e. $1.35 for a cow+calf to graze for an entire month. (Feeding a gerbil costs $2.50 – $6 /month.) That is about six percent (6%) of what their private sector counterparts charge ($18/AUM in most western states).
Worse, grazing is permitted on prairies, dry forests, wildlife refuges, high desert and other ecosystems that are inappropriate for grazing and are easily and sometimes permanently damaged. Tragically, these lands provide scarce forage and, in turn, little beef… at an extraordinarily high cost to the environment. See Andy Kerr’s blog for the fascinating details.
The Alternative
Ecologists working in the Sycan Marsh Preserve in Southern Oregon got a chance to see the results of their forest-thinning experiment when the Bootleg Fire roared into the wooded areas of the refuge.
For the past decade, Preserve staff have been thinning the preserve – removing small Ponderosa pine thickets while leaving the big fire resistant trees in place, creating open meadows. The small downed trees, and understory are removed or control-burned in place. This is exact opposite management practiced by the USFS and BLM in league with timber companies. And, of course, livestock grazing is not permitted in the refuge (not the case in all preserves and refuges).
Firefighters on the ground found that when embers jumped into the thinned areas of the refuge, the resulting fires caused much less damage. The fires started or returned to the ground where they were less destructive and much easier to fight, rather than jumping into the canopy and then from treetop to treetop.
Conversely, when embers from the Bootleg Fire landed in forests devastated by decades of irresponsible logging and livestock grazing, fireballs jumped from treetop to treetop and spread quickly into neighboring forest canopies. Bootleg is expected to burn for months.
The Truth About Recycling
A shocking 91% of plastic is never recycled – and not because you didn’t put in the right bin. You did exactly what the plastics industry wanted you to do: believe that you can buy and toss unlimited plastic with no impact to the environment.
Here’s a snippet from a joint investigative report by Frontline and NPR:
Plastic Wars: Industry Spent Millions Selling Recycling — To Sell More Plastic
For decades, Americans have been sorting their trash believing that most plastic could be recycled. But the truth is, the vast majority of all plastic produced can’t be or won’t be recycled. In 40 years, less than 10% of plastic has ever been recycled.
Starting in the late 1980s, the plastics industry spent tens of millions of dollars promoting recycling through ads, recycling projects and public relations, telling people plastic could be and should be recycled….
The industry promoted recycling to keep plastic bans at bay
… three former top officials, who have never spoken publicly before, said the industry promoted recycling as a way to beat back a growing tide of antipathy toward plastic in the 1980s and ’90s…. Recycling, the former officials told NPR and Frontline, became a way to preempt the bans and sell more plastic.
NPR, Laura Sullivan, as heard on All Things Considered, March 30, 2020, 8:00 AM ET. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/822597631/plastic-wars-three-takeaways-from-the-fight-over-the-future-of-plastics
A better option is, of course, to buy sturdy reusable bottles. But because of the pervasive use of plastics in or on almost everything we buy, sometimes a flimsy bottle cannot be avoided. Reusing or upcycling plastic at least gets a few more uses out of plastic before it’s discarded and, more important, reduces our need to buy more plastic.
REUSE: First, and most obvious, reuse your water bottles by…. using them as water bottles. Bottlers warn that you should NEVER reuse bottles. The FDA disagrees. According to the FDA, you should wash the bottle out with hot soapy water between each use; and if you do that, you can reuse your plastic water bottle as long as it doesn’t appear to be breaking down or showing any cracks, which the only way plastic chemicals could leach into the water.
UPCYCLE: “Upcycling” is the transformation of waste materials into new materials or products. For instance, plastic bags large enough to hold 2-3 gallons of soil make great containers for growing potatoes. See “Organic Gardening Tips“ for simple how-to instructions.
Plus, see Eco-Cool Kids, Project 2″ for a unique triple-bonus Upcycling idea for mesh produce bags.
Related Climate Articles
Global Impact of Deforestation
THE SAN PEDRO: A RIVER AT-RISK
How can a river die? Is it not composed of a renewable resource that falls from the sky and rises from underground? Water has never been endlessly renewable. Just 30% of the Ogallala Aquifer’s ancient waters remain after less than 100 years of intense farm irrigation. It will take 6,000 years of rain and snow to refill this aquifer.
The San Pedro River, snaking from Mexico into southwest Arizona, is fed by groundwater emerging from its aquifer in springs and seeps. This thin ribbon of life and its surrounding forests and wetlands supports an astonishing variety of creatures. But two insidious impacts threaten to run the river dry.
First, unlimited and unregulated groundwater pumping—more than 900 wells have been drilled in the upper San Pedro sub-basin since 2015 as population swells, chocking off the only source of the river’s lifegiving water. Second, and even more destructive, is cattle grazing.
For the full article, see Earth News Archive, January 2022
Airlines Fight Emission Rules, Lie about “Green”
The airline industry’s carbon emissions doubled between 1990 and 2019. Their emissions are forecast to rise from 3% of the global total to a whopping 22% by 2050 as other industries reduce pollution output while airlines furiously fight more strident emissions rules for their own industry.
The global airline trade association: International Air Transport Association (IATA) has lobbied successfully for years against climate rules. “Corsia” the emissions program that the airline industry negotiated for itself exempts all domestic flights as well as some of the biggest polluters including China and India. It is so weak that “Corsia is unlikely to materially alter the direct climate impact associated with air travel,” the European Commission concluded in a 2020 report.
See the complete articles in Earth News Archive, October 2022
In “Wild Things & Pets”: Sea Creatures
Drought-ravaged cities say no to developers
When I wrote “The Colorado: A River at Risk” 15 years ago for a respected mainstream environmental organization, its board of directors insisted that while the Colorado River was facing severe depletion, water would never limit development. There would always be ways to conserve or “create” more water.
As I repeated the company line during the following press conferences, symposiums and lobbying efforts, I had a sinking feeling that they were wrong.
They were.
Water creation schemes, from prohibitively costly desalination to desperate plans for towing massive icebergs from Antarctica, have largely gone unrealized.
For the full article, see Earth News Archive, May 2022
