Guest guest Posted August 18, 2007 Report Share Posted August 18, 2007 Today for you 35 new articles about earth's trees! (223rd edition) Subscribe / send blank email to: earthtreenews- Weblog: http://olyecology.livejournal.com . --British Columbia: 1) Clayoquot Sound Logging, 2) Metlakatla's logging, 3) Bear Pine, --Washington: 4) Olympic Experimental State Forest, 5) Greening State's portfolio, --Oregon: 6) State takes logger's right to cut, 7) NEST finds vole nests, 8) BLM scam, --California: 9) Los Pardres to log again? 10) Lake Tahoe erosion planning, --Montana: 11) Fire ecology amid political favors for industry --Indiana: 12) Yellowwood timber auction protested, --New Hampshire: 13) Logging challenged on White Mountain NF --USA: 14) Bill to battle illegal logging --Canada: 15) Ontario's reckless bookeeping, 16) Ontario cuts 200,000 hectares a year, --Russia: 17) 160,000 acres of Sakhalin's forest saved, 18) Cathay buys forest and mill, --Lebanon: 19) Chouf cedar reserves --Mexico: 20) Forest defenders against Illegal logging in Oaxaca --Peru: 21) Roads lead to ruin --Costa Rica: 22) Vampire bats thrive on land cleared for cattle --Japan: 23) Mass consumption of forests --China: 24) Save the Magnolia, as well as other natives --Nepal: 25) Massive deforestation and flooding, --Malaysia: 26) Illegal loggers are bank robbers, 27) Crackdown on illegal loggers, --Philippines: 28) return of illegal logging in Sierra Madre, 29) wood rationalization plan, --Sabah: 30) reduced the number of short-term timber concessions --Australia: 31) In depth article: Tasmania's ruin, 32) Alumina industry destroying jarrah, --World-wide: 33) Fossil fuels and planting forests better than biofuels, 34) Canopy research, 35) Coalition of Rainforest Nations want carbon credits British Columbia: 1) Island Timberlands is a new company that entered the private-land logging scene in Clayoquot Sound last year. Island Timberlands clearcut old growth near Kennedy Lake without an operating protocol with Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation. Tla-o-qui-aht plan to declare the whole Kennedy watershed a Tribal Park, prioritized for restoration and non-destructive economic activities, including " continuous canopy " single-tree logging. The most contentious Island Timberlands site is at the mouth of Kennedy River, which is Tla-q-qui-aht's main salmon river. Island Timberlands has agreed to delay logging there, while Tla-o-qui-aht try to find ways to buy the company out of their traditional territory altogether. Iisaak Forest Resources, owned by Clayoquot Sound First Nations and currently managed by Ecotrust, continues to log old growth forest. The latest cutting is in Fortune Channel and Warn Bay, both across the water from Meares Island. Mamook/Coulson, a new company half owned by Clayoquot Sound First Nations and half by Coulson Forest Products of Port Alberni, is not logging in Clayoquot Sound yet. Mamook/Coulson replaces Interfor, whose tree farm license they purchased this spring. The forestry players have changed, but logging of old growth forest continues in Clayoquot Sound, it has never stopped. The good news is that logging has decreased to less than one-quarter of what it was in 1993, the year of the big Clayoquot protests. Help us to reduce ancient forest logging in Clayoquot Sound even further. Please donate online at http://www.focs.ca/support 2) With Metlakatla's logging plans across the harbour about 75 per cent complete, representatives from the forestry company and band council said they have had no complaints about the visual impact. " So far we have achieved our goal, it is called variable retention. They follow the lay of the land and cloak it, " said Dave Martin, manager of A & A Trading, a logging company out of Terrace. " I think we're looking forward to being able to show Prince Rupert that you can log in the vicinity and it works. " Metlakatla and Hays Forestry Services started falling trees May 15 across the harbour from Prince Rupert. With 15 to 20 forestry workers on the project seven-days a week, it is expected to generate $3-million for the area's economy. Work is expected to continue until September, maybe October. While there were concerns the plans would impact the visual quality of the Prince Rupert harbour, Martin explained they are selectively logging using helicopters and they have to follow a visual quality objective. About half the logging you virtually can't even see, he said. And after they are finished, they are required to replant the areas they harvested and look after the new seedlings for about 15 years. Harold Leighton, chief councilor of the Metlakatla Band Council, said that they have been operating over there for just about six or seven weeks and have cut around 30,000 cubic meters, or about 75 per cent of their planned harvest. Of that, they have transported over 7,000 meters to the log sort on Ridley Island. " Our target is between 40,000 and 45,000 cubic meters, we'll soon have that amount of wood on the ground, " he said. http://atowncalledpodunk.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html#512055190777771154\ 9 3) According to Jacques Drisdelle, spokesperson for Bear Aware British Columbia, if the mountain pine beetle continues to gorge itself on the Interior's timber buffet, the landscape will change to an environment more hospitable to bears. " It will affect them positively, " Drisdelle said. " When you remove the trees, other vegetation takes hold –grasses, berry bushes, and other types of foliage that bears eat – and it provides more habitat. That's why logging is so good for bears, and deer and other species. It removes what inhibits the growth of good food sources. " Wayne McCrory is an independent bear biologist and member of the Valhalla Wilderness Society. He's studied bears in the Chilcotin and doesn't buy into the beneficial clear-cutting scenario. " The clear-cutting may improve, in some ways, the habitat, " he said, " but if you get a plantation forest growing back, improved forest values are eliminated and marginal and far outweighed by turning roadless wilderness into heavily-roaded industrial plantation forest. " The way McCrory sees it, logging roads represent encroachment and offer previously nonexistent travel arteries for destructive recreational vehicles, as well as hunters and poachers. Complete deforestation, Drisdelle agrees, is not the way to go, as bears do enjoy the forest. Black bears favour a nearby tree canopy, as they use it for shelter and security. With some experts predicting a resurgence in grasslands as a result of climate change and the pine beetle, bears may find themselves without the food and security they need to thrive. From Drisdelle's perspective, while salvage logging and other beetle wood management strategies are undertaken, bears may find their fortunes rising. But McCrory won't budge. The beetle kill should be left undisturbed, he said, and, in the event of a wildfire, a " dynamic berry system " could take root. " In my opinion, they're logging the beetle kill forest in the wrong way by taking out everything instead of leaving the spruce understory, " he said. " They don't even attempt to deactivate or obliterate the roads to prevent recreational and motorized access. It's a pathetic almost criminal treatment of nature and the forest. They're creating ecological disaster zones. " Much of the debate revolves around food sources. According to Drisdelle, one thing is certain: If food sources dwindle, bears become more territorial and force distance between each other as they try to subsist. http://www.100milefreepress.net/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=1 & cat=23 & id=1044602 & \ more=0 Washington: 4) The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is developing their first management plan for the Olympic Experimental State Forest, 265,000 acres in the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Here, in parts of the Bogachiel and Hoh Valleys, remain some of the last stands of low-elevation old-growth forest in Washington State. Unfortunately, the DNR's proposed plan does not fulfill previous commitments made to protect threatened plants and animals and important wildlife habitat, nor does it include provisions to conduct the research, monitoring, and innovative silvicultural techniques required by the original 1997 Habitat Conservation Plan for the forest. The proposed plan significantly narrows the buffers on most streams and rivers, including headwaters, reducing critical protections for fish, amphibians, and birds. The plan could and should–but does not now–find innovative ways to protect important ecosystem values including clean water and rivers, older forests and spotted owls, and healthy fish and wildlife habitat. Help us persuade the DNR to seize the opportunity to make this a truly experimental forest, not just another production forest, and include a fully protected stream network to ensure that the needs for wildlife habitat are met. The DNR needs to hear from you! http://www.conservationnw.org/ 5) Environmentalists and leading Democrats are advancing a new way to " green up " the state's portfolio by setting aside $70 million of state money to buy forestland for logging. That may seem odd, but global warming has been redefining the rules of nature -- and politics, too. Environmentalists and their political allies say in the long run, logging is better for the planet than unchecked development. That's causing timberlands and forestry to be seen in a whole new light. Sen. Karen Fraser, D-Olympia, developed the budget proviso for the land purchases. " For the first time, the Legislature is providing policy direction to recognize that the long-range values of timberland is greater than the short-term financial gains from commercial properties, " she said. Fraser said previously the state calculated the return on investment for timberlands only by the value of the cut timber. " They haven't calculated the additional values of recreation, water supply, habitat and those kinds of things, " she said. " You really should calculate those, because in other parts of the budget, we spend millions and millions and millions of dollars to preserve those lands, " she said. " If you are not preserving them, there are costs. " In recent decades, urban environmentalists have been at odds with the timber industry on issues ranging from the spotted owl debate to salmon recovery. " The loss of forestland was less of a concern for the environmental community in the past, but that was before the issues associated with sprawl began to rise to the alarming levels that it has, " said Don Parks a member of the National Forest Committee for the Cascade Chapter of the Sierra Club. " And the increased understanding or the interaction of forests with climate change is another piece of this. " Environmentalists and lawmakers see the coming era as a time when carbon credits may soon become a windfall for Washington, when clean watersheds and undeveloped spaces become increasingly valuable public commodities. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/327599_logging15.html Oregon: 6) Last week, in an effort to lock up a piece of land in their newest state park, Oregon Parks Department officials took a dramatic step they'd not taken for nearly three decades: they severed a local logger's timber rights. The drastic move, using what's known as eminent domain, was an attempt to stop logging in the department's 1,650-acre L.L. " Stub " Stewart State Park near Vernonia. But for Banks timber man Jim Smejkal – who signed over 113 acres of timber land for the creation of the park but maintained logging rights on the land until last week – the move left him feeling he'd been the target of a bait and switch. Smejkal signed over the rights to the land for the park in 2002, but still held onto a 10-year timber deed. At the time, Smejkal hoped to get his hands on a swath of land south of Cannon Beach in exchange for the timber rights at Stub Stewart. The problem was, the parks department didn't own the land – the Oregon Department of Forestry did. Smejkal agreed to go forward with the deal, thinking that the details could be worked out at a later date, but said a change of personnel at the Department of Forestry nixed the swap. " Everybody was on the same page, so I thought surely I could believe them, " Smejkal said. " And like a damned fool, I signed off on the land for $600 an acre. " Smejkal told the News-Times that he wouldn't have given up his land in Washington County if he knew he wasn't going to get access to the coastal property. Havel said the clear-cut logging occurred mostly in the northern portion of the park, far from the entrance and campgrounds that most of visitors would see, But when Smejkal filed for a second logging permit on Aug. 1, his target was going to hit a little closer to home. Right next to the new park's cabin village. With that in mind, the state parks commission met Aug. 7 in a telephone conference call to see what they could do to stop the logging. " Staff laid out the options: if you want to guarantee that a harvest won't happen, there's really only one choice, " Havel said. " There's no way to finish a negotiation, so the only option is to transfer those timber rights by eminent domain, and then continue with the negotiations. " " Basically nothing has changed except the trees will not be cut because he doesn't own the rights to them anymore, " Havel said. http://www.forestgrovenewstimes.com/news/story.php?story_id=118729350022103900 7) The all-volunteer Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team has spent the summer surveying the upper canopy of older forests in the Siskiyou Mountains specifically looking for the elusive red tree vole, an arboreal mammal that spends its entire life in the upper canopy of conifer forests. The species is endemic to western Oregon, meaning it is found no where else on planet Earth. The red tree vole is required protection under the Northwest Forest Plan's Survey and Mange Strategy, which the Bush administration has been working to dismantle for over five years. Thus far, NEST has located 51 red tree vole nests at the Granite Joe timber sale, 30 nests at the Althouse Sucker timber sale and 11 at the South Deer timber sale (all located on the Grants Pass Resource Area of the Medford BLM). These are all discoveries that the Bureau of Land Management failed to located in their survey efforts. The data will be leverage to the agency in the effort to protect the threatened forests. Monetary donations for NEST's survey work can by made out to the Cascadia Wildlands Project, earmarked " NEST " and sent to POB 10455, Eugene OR 97440. http://www.siskiyou.org/ecodefense/BLM_iv_logging_map.cfm 8) Shocking new plans were just announced to ramp up logging on 2.6 million acres of public land in western Oregon by clearcutting old-growth forests and reducing protections for salmon-bearing creeks and streams. A sweetheart legal settlement between the timber industry and the Bush Administration led to the plan, which is the gravest threat to Oregon's remaining ancient forests in years. This outrageous scheme was unveiled August 10th when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released the draft Western Oregon Plan Revisions (WOPR), a new management plan for public forests stretching from the Willamette Valley to the Siskiyou Mountains. According to The Oregonian, the BLM's draft plan would boost logging of trees 200 years and older sevenfold over the next decade. Yes, you read that correctly, a 700 percent increase in logging Oregon's last old-growth forests! This huge increase in logging would come from opening up currently protected streamside forests and old-growth reserves to clearcutting. It is time for Congress to step in and legislate a solution to this ongoing problem that continues to leave our precious old-growth forests, clean water and salmon-bearing streams in jeopardy. Since the Bush Administration will likely ignore public comments that it receives on the WOPR, please take a minute to call Senator Ron Wyden at (503) 326-7525 and request that Congress find a solution to this madness. Ask that Congress pass legislation to protect our remaining mature and old-growth forests on public land, and instead focus management in previously logged areas that are in need of thinning. If you live outside of Oregon, click here to find your Senators' phone numbers and urge them to settle this problem once and for all. Visit our website to learn more, read talking points and send an automatic email to the BLM and your elected officials. http://www.oregonheritageforests.org California: 9) Forest service officials plan to make a final decision soon on plans for a commercial timber sale — the first in recent memory in the Los Padres — that could allow logging companies to salvage wood from trees burnt in the Day Fire, which scorched more than 162,000 acres. Under terms of a draft decision from the forest service, 1,430 commercial sized trees met the criteria defining " hazard " trees. If cut down, those trees could equal a volume of approximately 774,000 board feet of lumber. A public comment period on the draft decision ended Aug. 8, but Los Padres ForestWatch Executive Director Jeff Kuyper has urged supporters to comment on the plan until the Forest service issues a final decision later in August. " We understand the need for the Forest Service to ensure safe recreation opportunities, " Kuyper said. " No one wants a tree to fall on them. At the same time those safety issues have to be balanced with economic realities and environmental impacts. " Kuyper said that with the closest lumber mill in Terra Bella, in Tulare County, commercial logging isn't economically feasible. He also said that a study on the salvage efforts after the 2002 Biscuit fire in Southwest Oregon showed that logging hurts a forest's recovery potential and could increase fire risk in the future. " In general, allowing logging in an area that has burned, but slowly and surely recovering, is not compatible with allowing the area to recover, " Kuyper said. " We don't think it's appropriate to allow a commercial timber sale in an area that is recovering from the effects of a high-intensity wildfire. It's too fragile to allow that right now. " http://www.vcreporter.com/article.php?id=5046 & IssueNum=137 10) " So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! " Twain wrote in " Roughing It. " He said even below 80 feet the water was as clear as glass. " Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's-breadth of sand, " he wrote. " Down through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. " UC Davis experts say the clarity has deteriorated because fine particles from erosion, urban runoff and pollution have entered the lake. The particles fuel the growth of algae, which absorb light and increase temperature. Their 45-page report, the most comprehensive ever done on the lake, outlines significant changes in weather patterns over the years, including less snowfall and more rain, deteriorating lake clarity and increasing water temperature in the Lake Tahoe Basin - all of which could increase invasions of exotic fish and plant species. But there is reason to be concerned about the second-deepest lake in the United States, researchers said. Conditions appear to be getting worse, even as environmental and planning agencies work to reduce runoff from residential and commercial development and improve water quality in the lake. The regional planning agency has been working closely with UC Davis and other research institutions and agencies in an attempt to preserve the Tahoe ecosystem. They developed the Lake Tahoe Environmental Improvement Program 10 years ago. The organizations are developing plans to reduce commercial and household runoff into the lake and restore water quality with the help of state forestry officials in California and Nevada. Officials have said they intend to bring water clarity in the lake back up to 100 feet. " Our environmental goals are long range, " Regan said. " We know that some of our goals - lake clarity for instance - may take many generations to achieve. " Schladow said such goals will be more difficult as new homes and businesses, parking lots and roadways continue to be built in the region. The Angora Fire, which burned 3,072 acres in South Lake Tahoe earlier this summer, destroying 254 homes and causing an estimated $153 million of damage, didn't help matters. " The majority of the runoff comes from where we are, these urban areas, " he said. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/16/MN3CRJ7R3.DTL Montana: 11) " What's happening is that climate change is colliding with past land-management abuses, " says Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of the Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Decades of patchwork clear cutting, forest thinning and road building has left a landscape ripe for extreme fire behavior, says Ingalsbee. Increasingly extreme weather-stronger winds, lower humidity, higher temperatures-is combining with hotter, more open, dryer and windier forests, creating disastrous conditions. George Wuerthner, editor of the 2006 book The Wildfire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy, points out that recently logged terrain does not necessarily create fire breaks: " Big logs don't burn very readily " But after a logging operation you have a lot of branches that are one to four inches in diameter, and that kind of stuff burns really well, " Wuerthner says in an interview. Commercial logging also opens up the forest to rapid growth of shrubs, bushes and small trees, Wuerthner says. Those fuels dry out quickly and burn readily, making them a prime ignition source for larger logs and trees. While many of the state's biggest fires are burning on land that has been heavily logged, or are burning within wilderness boundaries, Montana Sen. Jon Tester recently implied that lawsuits over timber sales are partly to blame for what he termed, " the buildup of dry, ready-to-burn fuel in Montana's forests. " Forest protection advocate Matthew Koehler of the Missoula-based WildWest Institute points out that only one timber sale in the state-the 1.35-million board feet Keystone Quartz sale in the Beaverhead/Deerlodge National Forest-is under a court-ordered injunction to halt logging: " To give you some indication of how small of a timber sale it is, " Koehler says, " that's approximately one one-thousandth of the total volume of timber that's harvested in Montana annually. " Koehler agrees that more people ought to be working in the woods, but he says the focus should be on reducing fire danger around homes and communities rather than cutting trees deep in the forests, potentially creating prime conditions for fires to spread. http://www.missoulanews.com Indiana: 12) Protesters blew whistles and kazoos and chanted anti-logging slogans during an auction where officials sold the timber rights for sections in two state forests. Ten timber buyers watched Thursday as state Department of Natural Resources staffers opened the logging bids at the Yellowwood State Forest headquarters while a dozen protesters stood to the side, holding signs that read " stop logging our forests " and chanting, " Hey, hey, ho, ho, state forest logging has got to go. " The sales cover almost 6,500 trees in Yellowwood and Morgan-Monroe state forests, both near Bloomington. State Forester Jack Seifert said that while four times more timber is being sold a year in state forests than before 2005, only about 60 percent of timber growth on that land is being cut. " We think the reality is the forests that are managed have a better diversity, " Seifert said. Members of the Indiana Forest Alliance said they believed commercial logging was inappropriate on state-owned lands. They cited a study by Purdue University foresters that included a survey showing 56 percent of Americans opposed cutting trees on public forests, with a survey of Indiana residents finding similar results. " When the landowner doesn't want the land to be logged, they shouldn't be logging it, " said David Haberman, a religious studies professor at Indiana University. Haberman said the logging breaks up southern Indiana's stretches of forest, which provide essential habitat for certain rare songbirds. Seifert said the state forestry division has hired a wildlife biologist and is spending $230,000 a year to study the impact of logging on wildlife and plant communities. http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070817/LOCAL/708170533/1196\ /LOCAL11 New Hampshire: 13) Two environmental groups are suing the federal government to halt a logging project in the White Mountain National Forest, saying the plan was not adequately reviewed and would ruin a unique forest environment. The Sierra Club and Forest Watch say planned clearcuts and road building in the White Mountain National Forest would open up the Wild River Inventoried Roadless Area, a more than 70,000-acre stretch of forest near the Wildcat River watershed. " They did a very short, brief examination and determined that there would not be any harm, and therefore they did not have to do an in-depth examination, " he said. " This is the largest roadless area east of the Mississippi River. They're going to clear-cut -- cut all the trees down -- several hundred acres. ... Common sense would tell anyone that that's going to result in some environmental harm. " The complaint names Thomas Wagner, White Mountain National Forest Supervisor, Abigail Kimball, U.S. Forest Service Chief, the U.S. Forest Service, Michael Johanns, Secretary of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture as defendants. Wagner was not immediately available to comment on the lawsuit yesterday afternoon; a Forest Service spokeswoman said she had not seen the complaint and could not comment. The Sierra Club has been fighting the project for more than a year. " It is really the last part of the Northeast that has this kind of wild country, " said John Harbison, a Vermont-based lawyer for the Sierra Club. He said the Forest Service broke the law and did not sufficiently review the environmental impact of the logging project, which calls for 1,700 feet of permanent roads and cutting of 929 acres of forest, including 464 acres within the Wild River roadless area. http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Environmental+groups+challenge+\ logging+plan & a rticleId=a92ceea1-36fc-4479-b460-d0e62389fd7c USA: 14) On matters related to the harvesting of timber, Greenpeace members are more likely to form human blockades against the practice than to make nice with the industry. But the environmental group has indeed linked arms with its usual foe to support a bill giving the Justice Department new powers to stop the importation of illegally harvested wood, in what is surely one of the odder lobbying alliances this year. Companion measures introduced by Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in the Senate and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) in the House prior to recess would expand the Lacey Act, a law that for decades has blocked the import, sale or trade of certain birds and animals, to cover trees as well. The legislation is the result of many hours of negotiation between environmental activists from Greenpeace and a number of other groups and business industry leaders that are more likely to view one another with suspicion than as potential allies. According to Carroll Muffett, Greenpeace USA deputy director for campaigns, as much as 80 to 90 percent of logging in places like Peru and Indonesia is illegal. " This bill would allow us to reach them for the first time, " he said. Demand in the United States and Europe often drives the push to harvest forests even if the practice skirts a nation's laws, Muffett said. Timber companies are supporting the bill in part because the imports eat into their own bottom lines by driving down prices. The legislation " recognizes the 'lose-lose' effects of illegal logging, " said Donna Harman, president and CEO of the American Forest & Paper Association, in a statement. Blumenauer had introduced a similar measure earlier this year. But the bill was " less detailed " than the new version, which created some anxiety within the industry, Muffett said. " It's definitely kind of a strange bedfellows moment, " said Greenpeace spokesman Steve Smith. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/327599_logging15.html Canada: 15) A leading Ontario conservation group released a report questioning the amount of logging allowed in public forests. The study by the Wildlands League, a chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, finds many key assumptions that are fed into the Strategic Forest Management Model (SFMM) to be unsubstantiated. The assumptions matter because Ontario predicts the amount of allowable logging using the SFMM computer model. When the model assumptions are dubious, then the results are also doubtful. This could prove disastrous for our public forests. " The government's current focus is in maintaining a system of logging that guarantees feeding logs into mills instead of maximizing the number of jobs per cubic metre and the long term sustainability of our forests, " says Dave Pearce, Forest Conservation Analyst for CPAWS Wildlands League. " Think of it as a bank account on which you keep writing cheques without having any idea how much money you have. Sooner or later the cheques are going to bounce. " The new report titled, 'Ontario's Timber Harvesting Levels: science or wishful thinking?' analyzes forest management units covering over 5 million hectares of Ontario's public forests that are currently open for logging. This is an area equivalent to 78 times the size of the city of Toronto. The report authors found that Ontario's harvest levels modeling is based on: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2007/16/c7381.html 16) It is estimated that more than 200,000 hectares of Ontario's public forests are logged each year - an area more than three times the size of the entire City of Toronto. By removing the vast amounts of carbon stored in the trees, scientific estimates suggest that these logging and associated disturbance activities release the equivalent of 15 MT of CO2 each year. " Intact forests shield us from the worst impacts of global warming. We can't afford to lose them and to only plant trees, " Ms. Sumner adds. In some cases, it may take up to 100 years, for planted trees to absorb and store the same amount of carbon as found in a natural wild forest. Protecting the carbon stored in intact Boreal Forest must be an important part of any response to global warming. " Ontario could prevent 7 MT of CO2 from going into the atmosphere by protecting the last vestiges of woodland caribou habitat in the commercial Boreal Forest in the province right now, " adds Ms. Sumner, " and Ontario should also be coming up with rules for development in the Boreal Forest located north of the 51st parallel as Mr. McGuinty promised to do four years ago. " http://cpaws.org/news/archive/2007/08/tree-planting-only-part-of-the.php Russia: 17) Sakhalin Environment Watch secured protection of 160,000 acres of Sakhalin's last ancient forests and watersheds. Sakhalin Environment Watch has fought for the Vostochny Wildlife Refuge for years, protecting it from salmon poachers and loggers. Thanks to their work, some of the most valuable dark coniferous taiga forests of the Russian Far East with their incredible biodiversity and salmon populations will be protected forever! This victory is a direct result of your support and we can't stop now! Help us turn these victories into even larger changes, please click here to make a secure online donation today! Thank you for all of your support! Together we can protect the living environment of the Pacific Rim! http://www.pacificenvironment.org/article.php?id=2550 18) Cathay Forest Products Corp. today announced a joint venture agreement whereby Cathay has purchased a 51% interest in DalEvroLes Co. Ltd, a Russian company, which owns a 270,000-hectare concession of standing timber in Khabarovsk, Russia. Cathay is purchasing the 51% interest in DalEvroLes through a combination of US $2.7 million cash, 800,000 common shares of Cathay Forest, as well as a loan to the joint venture. The loan amount and schedule will be determined after Indufor, a third-party forest industry consulting firm, has completed a capital expenditure analysis. The remaining 49% of DalEvroLes interest is controlled by Finmasheri Co. Ltd., which has been Cathay's joint venture partner harvesting roundwood in the Khabarovsk region for 9 years and has supplied one of Cathay's subsidiaries with roundwood for seven years. The joint venture partner is currently constructing a 150,000 m3 per year sawmill, which requires 300,000 m3 of roundwood. Permission has been granted to increase the production scale of this saw mill to 300,000 m3 - requiring 600,000 m3 of round wood. http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=760599 Lebanon: 19) A leading environmentalist urged Lebanese to unite to combat major challenges threatening their environment and their health, in a conference on Saturday. The head of the Association for Forests, Development and Conservation (AFDC), Mounir Bou Ghanem, was speaking during a news conference days after forest fires wiped out at least 1,200 hectares of Chouf cedar reserves on the Bekaa side of the mountains. The conference discussed ways to work with the government and other foundations and ministries to provide fire engines at various points around reserves and forests, so the engines would be able to mobilize quickly during future forest fires. The conference also comes at a time when Lebanon's coastline has yet to recover from its worst environmental crisis, the oil spill caused by an Israeli air raid on the Jiyyeh power plant during last summer's war. The bombing of the Jiyyeh power plant dumped some 15,000 tons of oil into the sea, fouling about 120 kilometers of Lebanon's coast. " The environment is something that binds everyone together, whatever their political affiliations. It is imperative that we unite to combat the most crucial concerns threatening our environment, " Bou Ghanem said. " Our main aim in this talk is to foster youth participation with regard to environmental issues and provide awareness and communication on the environment, " said environmentalist Nabil Hassan. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1 & categ_id=1 & article_id=84499 Mexico: 20) San Isidro Aloapam is a pueblo in the Sierra Norte mountains. The people here speak their indigenous language, Zapoteco, and many speak Spanish. They hosted this three day event on defending the forest surrounding their pueblo and the life of their community. About sixty five people from many parts of Mexico and Spain, U.S.A., Italy, Brazil, Germany, and England came to participate in this encuentro. Originally the people of San Isidro Aloapam and neighboring San Miguel Aloapam lived together as a community. In the early to mid 1900's, part of the community which is now San Isidro, moved further away to cultivate their crops. There are family members in both of these towns, and the forest is the ''property'' of both communities. Serious problems have arisen because San Miguel ( probably not supported by the whole community, but definetely those in power) has been and wants to continue logging the forest illegally. San Isidro feels very differently, ''We have lived here for more than five hundred years and we have the responsibility to take care of and protect our mother earth.'' In the forest, people from S.M. were logging. In S.I., most of the men had already gone to work that day, so the women gathered together. A woman from S.I. shares her experience, ''When we came they were drunk. When we tried to have dialogue they started to beat us. The mayor of S.M. was there and drunkenly shot his pistol in the air.'' State police stood by and watched as the Mayor ordered the people of S.M. to attack the women. Two of these women were pregnant and lost their babies because of this violence. '' I came here to defend this forest. From the forest comes the water that we drink, and our nutrition. This forest is the future of our children. If they destroy it, where will we get water? Where will we get fire wood to make tortillas? How will our children eat, how will our children grow?'' ''We are here defending our forest and the paramilitaries of S.M. are saying that we don't have rights, for example the case of July 18th, 2007''.... Seven hundred people from S.M. returned again to log. And again the mayor was inebriated, pistol in hand. Fourty to fifty people from S.I. came again to talk them out of cutting the trees. Again the mayor ordered for the people of S.I. to be rounded up. The people of S.I. dispersed, returning to the pueblo, but several were caught, beaten, threatened with death. Two people from San Miguel were killed from gunshot wounds in an internal conflict. In a corrupt fabrication by the S.M. government, six people from the community of San Isidro ( including a mother of three children) were arrested for the murders. They are currently being held in jail. ''I want the release of my compañeros, they are innocent!'' http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/08/363536.shtml Peru: 21) Rainforest conservation policies are reducing the rate of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, but roads are unquestionably the drivers of change, new satellite data reveal. Although Brazil's Amazon forests draw the most international attention, Peru's 661,000 square kilometers of rainforests are recognized as a unique and important ecosystem. However, the impacts of human activities throughout the region have been poorly understood, until a study published Aug. 10 in the journal Science. " Peru's forest reserves and conservation areas appear to be working well, " said Greg Asner, director of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, at Stanford University in California. Deforestation and other disturbances of forested areas — selective logging, oil exploration and mining — increased about 127,700 hectares per year on average from 1999 to 2005, with just two percent occurring in protected areas, according to the study by Asner and colleagues. By contrast, Brazil's four million-square-kilometer Amazon forest region loses 2.0 million to 2.4 million hectares annually, with about 10 percent occurring in protected areas. Better land use policies and the remoteness of the forest in Peru are likely reasons why there has been much less forest loss there, Asner told Tierramérica. Peru has also long had a national forest policy that granted logging concessions, whereas Brazil has only recently implemented a similar system, he said. Loggers are chasing " red gold " , the valuable wood of mahogany trees, which are still found in commercial quantities in the Peruvian Amazon, says David Hill, a campaigner for Survival International, a Britain-based non-governmental organization supporting tribal peoples worldwide. " 'Tree laundering' is going on, with mahogany supposedly coming from legal concessions being brought in from outside, " Hill told Tierramérica. It is very difficult to monitor or trace the origin of logs in such remote regions, he said. http://stephenleahy.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/roads-lead-to-deforestation-in-unto\ uched-peruvian -amazon/ Costa Rica: 22) A new study confirms that vampire bats are thriving due to the clearing of rainforest for cattle pasture in Costa Rica. Instead of having to seek out scarce wildlife in the forest, vampire bats now prey on cattle kept in high densities on ranches. While previous work has speculated that cattle are the driver behind growing vampire populations, Christian Voigt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and colleagues add more evidence to the case by analyzing isotopes in exhaled carbon dioxide from both captive and wild vampire bats. Their work, published online in the Journal of Comparative Physiology B, shows the chemical marks of cattle on the breath of wild bats. Cattle were " almost always " the source of the vampires' last blood meal. Vampire bats are found across Latin America from Mexico to Argentina and Chile and feed on the blood of warm-blooded animals such as birds, horses, cattle, and, from time to time, humans. Vampires, which are only active in the darkest hours of the night in order to avoid predators, feed by using their chisel-like incisor teeth to make a small incision in the skin of its prey. The bats lap blood that flows freely from the wound due to an anticoagulant, which incidentally, has been chemically isolated to create a drug for treating heart attack victims. Animals fed upon by vampires are rarely injured or killed by the feeding unless of course the bats are rabid. http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0815-vampires.html Japan: 23) There was often more to Japan's consumption of forests than the naïve eye could detect. For example, the casual observer of a high office tower in downtown Tokyo would only see a skyscraper of concrete, glass and steel. Captured by the glittering stimuli apparent to the eye, a naïve observer might scoff at the idea that forests fell so that the skyscraper could go up. But every concrete slab in every such building was made by pouring wet concrete into a mold made of plywood. During the '80s, Japanese builders were using these plywood molds – construction frames – only once before throwing them away. Then the builders turned to L, the logging industry, which turned to forests as far away as Montana and Malaysia. No casual visitor to Tokyo see the falling forests of the world. But the grizzly bears of Montana and Alaska felt the pressure as forests fell all around them. So did the sun bears of Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Even the polar bear, whose homelands are typically north of the tree line, was and will be affected by the Japanese FRECL's contributions to global warming. For example, while the sun bear of tropical Malaysia took direct hits as forests fell there, the polar bear's icy world began to melt as carbon dioxide from Malaysia's falling forests contributed to the overheating of the atmosphere. People around the planet felt the pressure of logging as directly as any bear did. In fact, people are the ultimate canary in this worldwide mine, because we can predict what will be happening to the likes of bears by simply recording what happens to people. http://www.newwest.net/index.php/citjo/article/when_forests_fall_on_banks_part_t\ wo/C33/L33/ China: 24) When the infamous plant hunter Ernest Henry Wilson trekked across China's western mountains in 1904, he reported a profusion of pure white Magnolias growing amid the scrub, moist woodland and open fields. Yet a century on, the voluptuous pendant flowers and medicinal bark of Wilson's White Magnolia (Magnolia wilsonii) are rarely seen even by the most adept local, highlighting the ecological and healthcare issues facing the region. " The main problem we have is finding the tree nowadays, " says Wen Xiang Ling, a traditional healer from Yunnan Province, " when I was a girl this grew plentifully near our village, but each year we have to go higher into the mountains to find it. " The bark, harvested from the branches, leaves and roots, is an important part of traditional local medicine and has been demonstrated to have powerful anti-anxiety and anti-angiogenic properties, as well as being useful in reducing allergic and asthmatic reactions. Clear-cut logging, the spread of intensive farming and the continuing over-harvesting for the bark itself, have taken their toll on these trees, which are now confined to a few small scattered populations in the provinces of Sichuan, northern Yunnan and Guizhou. However, clinging to the steepest slopes of the mountains of western China, new hope is emerging for Wilson's White Magnolia. Coming in the face of what scientists are calling a " burgeoning ecological crisis " , this year China is launching a radical new " National Strategy for Plant Conservation " . Representing the country's first ever coordinated, country-level response, the strategy aims to halt China's continuing loss of plant diversity, helping safeguard the future of some 5,000 threatened plant species. The launch of this plan couldn't be more timely, " said Sara Oldfield, secretary general of charity Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), who proved key in initiating the strategy. " With the number of threatened Chinese plant species leaping an astonishing tenfold in the 12 years between 1992 and 2004, and some 20% of China's flora now considered at risk, now is the time to act to save plants like Wilson's White Magnolia. " http://www.chinalyst.net/node/20232 Nepal: 25) Massive deforestation, haphazardly constructed infrastructures including roads, bunds and canals in the bordering areas are the major reasons behind the floods in the plains, people in the flood hit areas of the district said. Entire Terai region suffers from floods every year and finally the plain may turn into a desert, if the deforestation as well as haphazard construction continues in Terai, they claimed urging the government to pay proper attention for a durable solution. Providing relief packages to the victims is not a genuine solution so far, as it is a protracted problem in the Terai, they said. The unplanned construction of roads and buildings without managing water outlet has become a big issue in Terai. The elevated riverbed resulting from soil deposition cause the rivers to flow over their banks destroying whatever comes on the way. The havoc caused by floods becomes acute in the rainy season, even the zonal headquarters Janakpur Municipality and Mahottari district headquarters Jaleshwor suffer from flood during the monsoon, they said. The government should initiate construction of embankments and launch special programmes to control deforestation and protect the Chure Bhawar Pradesh from where the rivers carry soils and other materials and dump in the plains. The entire plains might turn into a desert in 10 years time, as massive flow of soil and sand is increasing every year by cutting the land of Chure Pradesh, said Dhanusa Red Cross Society Secretary Naresh Prasad Singh who is actively involved in the rescue process of flood victims. Over a hundred thousand people and thousand hectors of cultivated land has been damaged by the recent flood in Dhanusa and Mahottari district. The districts hold fertile land for paddy crops. Over 13,000 hectare paddy cultivated land, 50 hectare of vegetables, 1007 hectare of Rahar and 175 hector of fruits have been swept away by the flood in Mahottari districts, according to the preliminary report of the Mahottari District Agriculture Office. Over hundred thousand people have been affected by the flood in Dhanusa and Mahottari district. http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np/content.php?nid=25058 Malaysia: 26) Commenting on illegal loggers in Sabah, Sothinathan described them as " bank robbers, " saying these people conduct a survey of the forest area, target the suitable areas and within a short time, go in and collect as much wood as they can and disappear. He said the illegal logging is taking place sporadically everywhere but has been controlled with the able vigilance of the forest rangers and tip-offs from the public. " These illegal loggers are very well-organised. If they know they will get caught, they will run away. If they know they have the time, they will take whatever they want from the forest, " he said. Sothinathan was commenting on reports that the Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) had busted a major illegal logging operation in the interior of Sabah, seizing 1,000 logs on 22 lorries yesterday. He said it was difficult for the forest department, as it does not have the manpower to physically check the forests in the country. " We tried satellite sensing but the data is only available after two weeks. We are looking at options which can provide us with real-time information so that action can be taken, " he said. http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/8/14/nation/20070814132519 & sec=n\ ation 27) ACA Director SAC 1 Mohd Jamidan Abdullah, who came all the way from Kuala Lumpur to lead the operation, stopped the logging trucks along Jalan Nabawan in Sook last Friday. Mohd Jamidan was quoted and saying that duties on 500 of the round logs were suspected not paid while the rest were still under investigation. He also said that of the 20 logging trucks, only one was found to be with all the necessary documents such as licence, Good Driving Licence (GDL) and road tax. Commenting further on the matter, Sam said that on Aug 6, his officers made a surprise inspection on a sawmill in Keningau located at Mile 30 Jalan Nabawan where several piles of round logs within the compound of the sawmill were without proper markings to indicate their origin. Sam said his officers immediately issued verbal instruction urging all activities at the sawmill suspended to facilitate further investigations. He stressed that on Aug 8, official instruction was issued to the sawmill of the suspension, followed by a police report on Aug. 11. However, Sam said on Aug 13, he received reports that ACA was in Keningau checking all logging trucks transporting round logs. On another matter, Sam said logging trucks were only allowed to transport logs between 7am and 7pm daily. However on certain circumstances they were allowed to operate beyond the stipulated hours but not encouraged. Meanwhile, in KENINGAU, the ACA said some 5,000 round logs believed untaxed had been seized, besides 22 logging trucks, during the five-day operation since last Friday. ACA's Mohd Jamidan said they also inspected seven timber factories and found five to have allegedly purchased illegally-felled logs. He said three out of the five factories were instructed to cease operation to enable ACA to conduct a full investigation while the remaining factories were allowed to operate but being monitored. " We will carry out a thorough investigation, " he said, adding the 5,000 logs were believed to have originated from Tibou and Nabawan, here. http://www.dailyexpress.com.my/news.cfm?NewsID=52043 Philippines: 28) Pimentel said the return of illegal logging in Sierra Madre was in defiance of the " total log ban " policy declared by the President. That total ban was put in place following the catastrophic flashfloods and landslides in Aurora and Northern Quezon in December 2004, which killed more than a thousand people. Philippine Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel, Jr. on Thursday called for protecting the nation's forests. Pimentel called on Congress and Malacaang to make the protection and preservation of the forests the core of the government's master plan to mitigate the bad effects of global warming.Pimentel called a bill to ban logging long overdue. He urged President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to certify the bill as an urgent measure so that Congress can give its approval the highest priority. Despite disasters that are caused by the forest destruction such as drought, killer floods, soil erosion and landslides, logging takes place. Pimentel bewailed the reported resurgence of illegal logging in the Sierra Madre mountain range, the provinces around Lake Lanao and other critical areas.The return of illegal logging in the Sierra Madre has also been denounced by Catholic Bishops in Quezon province. http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7008219329 29) The Department of Environment and Natural Resources regional office here has started crafting the regional wood processing rationalization plan to accommodate new players in the wood industry following the lifting last month of the moratorium on wood processing plants. Jim Sampulna, regional environment director, said newly-appointed Environment Secretary Lito Atienza has directed each region to produce a plan that will guide the wood processing industry. " We hope to consider, among others, the combined output or the daily rated capacity of the wood processing plants against the volume of harvestable planted trees in the region. We hope to match also the requirements of the wood-based industry against the capacity of the wood processors, " he noted. But Sampulna said that until Atienza approves the plan, they will not process application of new wood-based industry players. Aside from lifting the moratorium wood processing plants, Sampulna said that Reyes, before moving over to the Energy department, also lifted the suspension on harvesting and transporting of trees in plantation forests covered by forestry tenure instruments. The lifting is nationwide except the provinces of Aurora and Lanao del Norte and municipalities of Infanta, Real, and General Nakar in Quezon. http://mindanews.com/index.php?option=com_content & task=view & id=3046 & Itemid=50 Sabah: 30) The Sabah government has reduced the number of short-term timber concessionaires in a pro-active step to promote sustainable forest management (SFM) in the state, Chief Minister Datuk Seri Musa Aman said Tuesday. Instead, Sabah had to date appointed 15 timber concessionaires which had signed Sustainable Forest Management Licence Agreements (SFMLAS) covering a combined area of two million hectares and a period of 100 years to ensure that timber production in the state would be based on sustained yield and Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) techniques for harvesting logs, he said. " We have no choice but to do it for a better forest tomorrow despite the slow progress, " he said in his speech at the workshop on Sustainable Forest Management organised by the Organisation of Asia Pacific News Agencies (Oana) here. Bernama, the national news agency of Malaysia, is the current chairman of Oana. His speech was read out by Datuk Masidi Manjun, Sabah's Minister of Tourism, Culture and Environment, as Musa is away in Bandar Seri Begawan accompanying Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on a visit to Brunei. Prior to the implementation of SFM in Sabah in September 1997, the state used to have more than 100 timber concession holders with short-term licences of 10 to 15 years each and these concessionaires usually did not have much time to undertake SFM because of the short time-frame. But with 100-year leases, SFMLA concessionaires will be able to replant timber species which they will be able to re-log when the trees mature and adopt RIL techniques which means felling mature trees without damaging immature trees in the same locality. " Short-term licences are being phased out. Logging is very much regulated now. And the forests are put into a better perspective under the Forest Management Plan, " said Musa. The Sabah state government adopted SFM in Deramakot with the initial signing of 10 long-term SFMLAs in September 1997 for leases of up to 100 years, a move described as a smart partnership between the state government and the private sector. http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v3/news.php?id=279185 Australia: 31) This story begins with a Tasmanian tree fern (Dicksonia antarctica) for sale in a London nursery. Along with the healthy price, some £160, is a tag saying that it " has been salvage harvested in accordance with a management plan approved by the Governments of Tasmania and the Commonwealth of Australia " . In 2004 Prime Minister John Howard promised to save this area of forest in Tasmania's Florentine Valley. It is now being logged with government subsidies. If you were to believe both governments, that plan ensures that Tasmania has a sustainable logging industry, which, according to the Australian forest minister, Eric Abetz, is " the best managed in the world " . The truth is otherwise. The fern – possibly several centuries old – comes from native forests destroyed by a logging industry that was at one point ruled illegal by the Federal Australian Court. It comes from either primeval rainforest that has been evolving for millennia, or wet eucalypt forest, some of which contain the tallest hardwood trees in the world, the mighty Eucalyptus regnans. In Tasmania, in spite of widespread community opposition and increasing international concern, these forests are being destroyed. Clearfelling, as the name suggests, begins with the complete felling of a forest by chainsaws and skidders. Then the whole is torched, the firing started by helicopters dropping incendiary devices made of jellied petroleum – commonly known as napalm. The resultant fire is of such ferocity it produces atomic-bomb-like mushroom clouds visible from considerable distances. In consequence, every autumn, the island's otherwise most beautiful season, china-blue skies are frequently nicotine-scummed, an inescapable reminder that clearfelling means the total destruction of ancient forests unique in the world. At their worst, the smoke from these burn-offs has led to the closure of schools, highways and tourist destinations. In the Styx Valley in the south-west of the island, the world's last great unprotected stands of old-growth Eucalyptus regnans are being reduced to piles of smouldering ash. These kings of trees are aptly named – some are more than 20 metres in girth and more than 90 metres in height. More than 85 per cent of old-growth regnans forests are gone, and it is estimated that less than 13,000 hectares of these extraordinary trees remain in their old-growth form. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/06/28/eatas128.xml 32) One of the most interesting anomalies in Australian environmentalism is that the alumina industry is destroying the jarrah forest - and nobody seems to care. At least, nobody is complaining. Open cut mining of State Forests in Western Australia by two alumina producers (Alcoa and Worseley) has been going on for about 40 years. Mining involves clean cutting of the forest (removal of all saleable timber, including woodchips), full agricultural clearing, blasting with explosives and then removal of the forest soil. This converts the jarrah forest into a patchwork of pits 8-10 metres deep and up to 40 hectares in size. In and around the pits the remnant forest is criss-crossed with haul roads, crusher sites, conveyor belts and power lines. The rate of forest clearance is about 1,000 hectares a year. It is estimated that mining will proceed for at least another 50 years. The mined-out pits are " rehabilitated " by smoothing the edges, ripping the pit floor (a white kaolinitic clay) with bulldozers and replacing a film of topsoil. Various tree and shrub species are then sown or planted. Pre-1988 the revegetation was basically a plantation of exotic species, mostly eucalypts indigenous to New South Wales; post 1988 the main tree species planted or sown is jarrah. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6241 World-wide: 33) It sounds counterintuitive, but burning oil and planting forests to compensate is more environmentally friendly than burning biofuel. So say scientists who have calculated the difference in net emissions between using land to produce biofuel and the alternative: fuelling cars with gasoline and replanting forests on the land instead. They recommend governments steer away from biofuel and focus on reforestation and maximising the efficiency of fossil fuels instead. The reason is that producing biofuel is not a " green process " . It requires tractors and fertilisers and land, all of which means burning fossil fuels to make " green " fuel. In the case of bioethanol produced from corn – an alternative to oil – " it's essentially a zero-sums game, " says Ghislaine Kieffer, programme manager for Latin America at the International Energy Agency in Paris, France (see Complete carbon footprint of biofuel - or is it?). What is more, environmentalists have expressed concerns that the growing political backing that biofuel is enjoying will mean forests will be chopped down to make room for biofuel crops such as maize and sugarcane. " When you do this, you immediately release between 100 and 200 tonnes of carbon [per hectare], " says Renton Righelato of the World Land Trust, UK, a conservation agency that seeks to preserve rainforests. Righelato and Dominick Spracklen of the University of Leeds, UK, calculated how long it would take to compensate for those initial emissions by burning biofuel instead of gasoline. The answer is between 50 and 100 years. " We cannot afford that, in terms of climate change, " says Righelato. http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn12496 & feedId=earth_rss20 34) Travel 10,000 miles to an island off the coast of Africa, go deep into a remote rainforest, climb 70 feet up into the canopy and look inside a water-filled hole in a tree. You won't believe what you can find. Dante Fenolio and his buddies did this and discovered all sorts of things, from crabs and giant tree spiders to new species of frogs. It's just part of the life of a biologist, especially one whose work gets him out of the office and into some of the most unusual places. For instance, Madidi National Park in Bolivia, or the upper Amazon River in Peru, or the dry Cerrado region of Brazil. " A lot of times, we'll have people take us out on trucks or jeeps and drop us off and come back in two or three weeks, " said Fenolio, former University of Oklahoma graduate student. Among Fenolio's most successful trips was to Madagascar, where he and other researchers evaluated life among the trees. Researchers took advantage of innovative equipment developed by a French company. One called the canopy raft is a platform made of inflated tubing with netting stretched beneath it. The platform is dropped on top of the rainforest from a blimp so researchers can work from treetops. For more on this trip, other gear the researchers used and things they found there, see Science & Health, Page 1E http://newsok.com/article/3104776 35) A Coalition of Rainforest Nations, led by Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica and the Democratic Republic of Congo have told the UN climate change summit in Nairobi, Kenya that they want to be rewarded for rainforest they have left intact, reports Panos Features. The Coalition says it wants to receive 'carbon credits' similar to ones given to countries like Brazil, which has chopped down many of its rainforests and is now receiving credits for new plantations. The carbon credits system evolved out of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. That agreement, aimed at mitigating climate change, assigns emissions targets to signatory industrialized nations, which in turn divide them among businesses involved in large air-polluting activities. Firms that exceed their targets have an option to 'buy' credits from others who are not using up their full allowance, or offset their excess emissions by 'buying' an equivalent amount of carbon that is naturally trapped in trees. The seller must have approved 'carbon credits', which are endorsed under the CDM and given only to new afforestation projects. That, the Coalition says, is wrong. " The positive impact of [intact] forests has not been taken on by the Kyoto Protocol, " complained Georgette Koko, the minister of environment of Gabon, where 70 per cent of forests remain. " Central African countries consider that their efforts made in managing forests deserve to be recognized and supported, because they are positive for climate, " the Coalition said in its proposal to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It says the proposal which describes the claim for credits as 'avoided deforestation' - should be adopted after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and a new regime is put into place. http://www.pacificmagazine.net/news/2007/08/17/png-joins-rainforest-coalition-pr\ oposing-rewards -for-avoided-deforestation Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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