Amazon Degradation

An area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from the effects of a megadrought that began in 2005, finds a new NASA-led study. These results, together with observed recurrences of droughts every few years and associated damage to the forests in southern and western Amazonia in the past decade, suggest these rainforests may be showing the first signs of potential large-scale degradation due to climate change. ..."The biggest surprise for us was that the effects appeared to persist for years after the 2005 drought," said study co-author Yadvinder Malhi of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. "We had expected the forest canopy to bounce back after a year with a new flush of leaf growth, but the damage appeared to persist right up to the subsequent drought in 2010." ...The researchers attribute the 2005 Amazonian drought to the long-term warming of tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures. "In effect, the same climate phenomenon that helped form hurricanes Katrina and Rita along U.S. southern coasts in 2005 also likely caused the severe drought in southwest Amazonia," Saatchi said. "An extreme climate event caused the drought, which subsequently damaged the Amazonian trees."  http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20130117.html

We cannot survive if we destroy our home.

The overall productivity of the biosphere is therefore limited by the rate at which plants convert solar energy (about 1 percent) into chemical energy and the subsequent efficiencies at which other organisms at higher trophic levels convert that stored energy into their own biomass (approximately 10 percent). Human-induced changes in net primary productivity in the parts of the biosphere that have the highest productivity, such as estuaries and tropical moist forests, are likely to have large effects on the overall biological productivity of the Earth.  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/66191/biosphere/70861/The-importance-of-the-biosphere

Are we suicidal?  Consider the Alberta government's position.

Trains to Alaska. Pipelines to Churchill, Man. New refineries in Alberta. Oil shipments to Saint John. A step back from costly environmental rules. Alberta's government wants them all. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/alberta-scrambles-as-oil-pipelines-clogged-revenues-slashed/article7536306/
 

If we're not - if you're not - please  lobby your provincial and federal government.

We NEED to phase out fossil fuels! 

Terra Preta

Perhaps 100 million people lived in the Americas before Columbus and before contact. What on earth were all those people doing? In the Amazon, they created soil. Soil in the Amazon is typically orange bauxite - incapable of supporting crops - terrible stuff if you are a farmer silly enough to clear the land. (The nutrients in a rain forest are held in the vegetation.) Some anomalies exist though - large patches of something called terra preta show up where indigenous populations had their cities. Those black soils are prized by farmers as they are highly productive. When archaeologists analysed terra preta they discovered it is full of pre-Columbian ceramics, charcoal, and lots and lots of microbes. In other words, terra preta was created hundreds of years ago - and has maintained its productivity over that huge length of time.

This is good news. For one thing, we can learn from "los indios" how to create soil instead of destroying it. (Agribiz tends to "mine" soil and therefore destroy it.)  Secondly, bio char soils sequester carbon.

The charcoal, acting a lot like humus, had been colonized by myriad microbes, fungi, earthworms, and other creatures; these soil organisms produced carbon-based molecules that stuck to the charcoal, gradually increasing the soil's carbon content. ... Crops have been shown to grow 45 per cent greater biomass on unfertilized terra preta soil versus poor soil fertilized with chemical fertilizers. Page 70, Organic Gardening, Dec/Jan 2011

So if we create bio char from organic waste that goes to landfills now, we help sequester carbon while we farm organically and increase crop yields.  A triple win!  And a solution to one of the problems created by peak oil.  Chemical fertilizers are made from oil - and now we don't need them!