political

Protecting The Amazon Rainforest | Earth Wise

September 5, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The Amazon rainforest absorbs one-fourth of all the carbon dioxide absorbed by the land of the Earth. It is by far the world’s largest rainforest, bigger than the next two largest – in the Congo Basin and Indonesia – combined. Nearly two-thirds of it is found in Brazil but the more than 2 million square miles of rainforest includes portions in 8 countries.

The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the Amazon rainforest is 30% less today than it was in the 1990s as a result of deforestation, to a great extent driven by cattle ranching as well as other agricultural activities.

In early August, the leaders of the eight countries that are home to the Amazon River basin agreed to work together to conserve the rainforest. The agreement, called the Belém Declaration, provides a roadmap to stave off the rampant deforestation.

The agreement provides coordination between the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela to establish law enforcement to combat illegal mining and logging as well as to pool development funds for conservation and sustainable employment. Despite the unity portrayed at the meeting, many of the governments in South America are in a precarious position because of various economic and political struggles

Apart from its critical climate impact, the Amazon rainforest is a haven for biodiversity and further deforestation would be disastrous for tens of thousands of species and could transform it into a net emitter rather than absorber of greenhouse gases. Some parts of the region have already reached that point.

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Amazon Countries, Led by Brazil, Sign a Rainforest Pact

Photo, posted October 17, 2016, courtesy of Yeoboya via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A War On Wolves

March 17, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

America has a long history of persecuting wolves. In 1905 the federal government tried biological warfare, infecting wolves with mange. In 1915, Congress passed a law requiring the eradication of wolves from federal land. By 1926, all the wolves in Yellowstone National Park had been poisoned, shot, or trapped. By 1945, wolves had been essentially eliminated from the American West.

All of this was driven by the fantasy that wolves were a major menace to livestock and a threat to big game.

In the 1990s, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho and the result was one of the greatest success stories in the history of wildlife management. There were multiple improvements to the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Wolves as important predators are essential elements of healthy ecosystems in the American west.

For reasons difficult to fathom, the status of wolves has become political. Conservative lawmakers in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Wisconsin have essentially declared war on wolves, radically liberalizing wolf trapping and hunting regulations. In Wyoming, it is now legal to kill wolves at any time by virtually any means, including running them over with snowmobiles and incinerating pups and nursing mothers in dens. Idaho has bounties as high as $2,000 for killing wolves.

The reasons are just as bogus as ever. Livestock predation is the big claim. In 2015, 1,904 wolves shared the Rocky Mountain West with 1.6 million cattle. Wolves killed all of 148 of them.

Evidently, wolves have become identified as a liberal cause and, as such, are now the enemy of conservative politics.

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America’s New War on Wolves and Why It Must Be Stopped

Photo, posted April 6, 2016, courtesy of Yellowstone National Park via Flickr.

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Understanding Geoengineering | Earth Wise

September 7, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change includes discussion of a number of extreme and untested solutions to the climate crisis. Among these are solar geoengineering – modifying clouds or spraying tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere in order to block some of the sun’s light and thereby cool the planet. The underlying principles are relatively straightforward.

There have been various models that predict the extent to which solar geoengineering would lower the earth’s average temperature. What hasn’t been modeled to any real extent is what other effects it would have.

The new report discusses the results of models that predict how temperatures would vary at different latitudes and how geoengineering would affect rainfall and snowfall. According to the models, releasing sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight would lower average precipitation. But every region would be affected differently. Some regions would gain in an artificially cooler world, but others might, for example, suffer by no longer having suitable conditions to grow crops.

The drop in temperature would allow the planet’s carbon sinks (plants, soils, and oceans) to take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, as long as people continue to pollute, carbon dioxide would continue to make the oceans more acidic, causing significant harm to marine ecosystems. Furthermore, solar geoengineering would have to be an ongoing process that would go on indefinitely and if it were to suddenly stop, it would lead to rapid warming.

The more we learn about geoengineering, the more it becomes clear that there would be many side effects as well as serious moral, political, and practical issues. Society has to consider if all these things represent too much danger to allow us to seriously consider such a strategy.

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In the New UN Climate Report, a Better Understanding of Solar Geoengineering

Photo, posted September 9, 2012, courtesy of Kelly Nighan via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Genetic Engineering And Conservation

September 8, 2017 By EarthWise

Genetic engineering, or equivalently synthetic biology, is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise involved in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, biofuels and, of course, agriculture. In these fields, it is already the source of a great deal of controversy. But there is increasing interest in using synthetic biology (or synbio) technology as a tool for protecting the natural world, which is a prospect some find tantalizing and others find absolutely terrifying.

Long Island Wind

April 15, 2016 By WAMC WEB

The Interior Department has recently defined a “Wind Energy Area”, consisting of about 81,000 acres, located 11 miles south of Long Island. The designation is a first step to opening up the acreage for large-scale, competitive wind energy leasing through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

[Read more…] about Long Island Wind