Not Seeing Forests for Trees
The news from Pine Falls, Manitoba confirms that the world’s forests—those presumed saviors of the environment, are poised to bite us in the collective ankle.
The news from Pine Falls, Manitoba confirms that the world’s forests—those presumed saviors of the environment, are poised to bite us in the collective ankle.
(A Doug Struck Washington Post piece)--Nearly half of the carbon that exists on land is contained in the sweeping boreal forests, which gird the Earth in the northern reaches of Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia. Scientists now fear that the steady rise in the temperature of the atmosphere and the increasing human activity in those lands are releasing that carbon, a process that could trigger a vicious cycle of even more warming.
Maybe you don’t know what a ‘boreal’ forest is. I didn’t. Boreal is nothing more than ‘northern.’ But Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia account for a huge hunk of the green part of the earth and the thrust of the article is that these exte…