Amerika

You would never guess it from media sources, but a lot is going well. We can all make a positive difference as opposed to a negative one. Here’s one where the good guys are totally winning.

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the State University of New York and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has found that new global tree growth over the past 35 years has more than offset global tree cover losses. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes using satellite data to track forest growth and loss over the past 35 years and what they found by doing so.

This, of course, is not what gets written up in The Gnu Yawk Times. We hear instead that:

The Amazon could soon “self-destruct” reports The Times. It would be “a nightmare scenario that could see much of the world’s largest rainforest erased from the earth,” writes Max Fisher who notes, “some scientists who study the Amazon ecosystem call it imminent.” “If enough [Amazon] rain forest is lost and can’t be restored, the area will become savanna, which doesn’t store as much carbon, meaning a reduction in the planet’s ‘lung capacity,’” reports The New York Times.

The Gnu Yawk Times ordered Brazilians not to vote for Bolsonaro. The people ignored their journalistic overlords. Now those stupid peasants get the hell-fires they deserve. Or, not.

In reality, there was a whopping 25 percent decrease in the area burned from 2003 to 2019, according to NASA. Between 2003 and 2015, the area burned in Africa declined by an area the size of Texas (700,000 square kilometers or 270,000 square miles. And against the picture painted by celebrities and the mainstream media that fires around the world are caused by economic growth, the truth is the opposite: the amount of land being burned is declining thanks to development, including urbanization.

As people grow more food on less soil, they kill fewer trees. We see the planet flex its resilient muscles as these fallowed areas quickly take seed and become forests. The natural order of things in Amerika, for example would have nearly half of our country forested.

In the last two decades, America has been getting closer to this level of forestation as we have gained trees since 1990..

In the United States, deforestation has been more than offset by reforestation between 1990 and 2010. The nation added 7,687,000 hectares (18,995,000 acres) of forested land during that period. The trend in reforesting areas has been driven by organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Arbor Day Foundation. Reforestation efforts were critical to maintain forest cover starting at the beginning of the 20th century, and they are the reason that there is a net positive trend in forest growth today.

The takeaway from this is twofold. Our media lies to us to make us feel worse. Like the bad Christian Preacher who tells us we all suck and are worthless without him (not Jesus, him personally), we are deliberately made to feel that every process necessary for our survival and success is some sort of secular sin against the commonweal. This is garbage. The better we get at succeeding and surviving, the less impact we have on others per individual while we get on with it.

The other key takeaway is that yes, we can reverse ecocide. Trees were being exterminated in Amerika from 1610 to 1990. In nearly four centuries, we chopped down, burned and bulldozed under 25% of this precious resource. We got smarter, we stopped messing up, and now the trees are coming back. An angel gets its wings every time we successfully add another one. Nature can be returned to its true and proper granduer. We , or at least our grandchildren, can live to see America as it truly should be.

An old Greek Proverb states that “Old men with hope plant trees under whose shade they will never get to sit.” Those trees are getting planted. My grandkiddoes will get to sit under them. That’s a darn positive way to start off a truncated work week. That, Amerika, is the good news.

Tags: amazon, environment, forests, trees