– is the rainforest actually growing?

“By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.”

This we learn in a story from Elizabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times.   It raises the question of whether second growth forests are as valuable as old growth.  They certainly have a similar carbon-absorbing quality, but aren’t comfortable habitats for many species that liked the old growth.

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– the tree thieves; a must-read

It’s a busy life being an EarthQuaker — especially if you aspire to live it slow, to some degree.  So we’re just now reading last month’s New Yorkers and found this fascinating but depressing insiders look at the growing trade in illegally-logged timber.  It’s essential reading.

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– will environmentalism lead to less drug abuse?

Here’s a great reason not to do drugs — it’s bad for the environment!  And here’s Gawker’s take on the idea:

Yuppie cokeheads, stop snorting massive rails for the sake of the endangered tree frogs! That’s the new anti-drug message coming out of the UK. And it just might work!

Could that be the one thing that really speaks to Western cocaine buyers?

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– why frogs are disappearing: toxic pesticide mixes

“Ten of the world’s most popular pesticides can decimate amphibian populations when mixed together even if the concentration of the individual chemicals are within limits considered safe, according to new research,”

reports Science Daily today.  It makes complete sense and speaks to the need for far more comprehensive testing of chemical treatments of all kinds before they are approved.  Shockingly, SD tells us:

“endosulfan-a neurotoxin banned in several nations but still used extensively in U.S. agriculture-is inordinately deadly to leopard frog tadpoles. By itself, the chemical caused 84 percent of the leopard frogs to die. This lethality was previously unknown because current regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) do not require amphibian testing.”

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– (you never promised me) a rain garden

Ah, now here’s an idea to warm (or perhaps wet) an ecologically-minded gardener’s heart: Rain Gardens.

Rain gardens, I guess, aren’t exactly new concepts.  But they are making ever more sense.

What are they?  Areas where you direct the runoff from your non-permeable surfaces (like your roof and asphalt driveway), essentially.   The idea is to stop potentially toxic runoff from racing into your local storm drain system.  Instead, you provide a place where it can pool temporarily and flow back into the underground aquifer.   So it’s an environmental win-win.

What the gardener gets is a rainy season wet area that, with the right planting ought not to become a mosquito breeding ground.  Instead an area that should support native meadow plants (which are used to wet and dry seasons).

If the idea intrigues you, here’s the place to go for more: www.native-raingarden.com.

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– as oil dries up, should we expect no landscape to be sacred?

Here’s just a tiny example of what’s likely to be a growing phenomenon — increased pressure to extract oil from much-loved, environmentally sensitive areas all over the world.

It’s not just vast wildernesses like ANWR that will be threatened as oil prices soar.

As this plan to drill in the UK shows, we can expect that pressure to occur on the micro-scale also.

What’s at threat in Southern England is just 2.5 acres of woodland. But it’s in an area likely to soon be designated as a national park. And in a country where just about every square mile of land has been managed for millennia, any woodland has the status of national treasure.

How many such places will we be prepared to destroy in the name of extracting the last few usable barrels of oil left to us? How, too, can we create a proper accounting structure for that extraction, so that we factor the cost of the amenity destroyed (not to mention its history, ecology, intrinsic beauty etc.)  against the income derived from the small amount of petroleum that it will yield?

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– the worst species loss since the time of the dinosaurs

. . . and we’re clearly to blame.

So says a new report by the WWF, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network. The finds, the Independent reports today, that land species have declined by 25 per cent, marine life by 28 per cent, and freshwater species by 29 per cent.

“You’d have to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs to see a decline as rapid as this,” says Jonathan Loh, the report’s editor.

It’s shocking and saddening reading. Let’s hope it will also help galvanize action on a global level — what’s needed for there to be any hope for the thousands more species threatened by pollution, invasive species, habitat loss and climate change, all but the last of which are unarguably the result of human actions.

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– a distopian Earth Day

Gloom — appropriately perhaps — seems to be the theme this Earth Day.

Joseph Romm in Salon thinks it’s already too late to save much of the flora and fauna on our planet. It’s time to worry out ourselves, he says.

Over at Alternet, Michael Klare worries at length about a ‘new world order in energy.’ The comments are as interesting as the article: some alarmed, some thoughtful, others desperate, crazy, excited even.

In the New York Times, Paul Greenberg reviews two novels that conjure ‘ecological end-times.’ Ecotopia, first published in the 1970’s, imagines a better life (for a part of America, at least) emerging from eco-crisis. The more recent novel, The World Made by Hand, is based in an East Coast town of the future in which most people return to laboring and can now only dream of driving. Says Greenberg:

I would prefer to live in Ecotopia, but the verisimilitude of Kunstler’s world leads me to think the future is Union Grove. Thirty years from now, it will be interesting to see if that little town seems excessively sad, richly luxurious or spot on. But for now, I’m hedging my bets. Where I live, one block east of ground zero, I’ve started keeping a compost bin and am thinking about adding a micro wind generator.

Meanwhile columnist Paul Krugman fears that we’re running out of commodities. That won’t mean the immediate collapse of civilization, he reassures us. But

rich countries will face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living. And some poor countries will find themselves living dangerously close to the edge — or over it.

No critique from Krugman, though, about whether the way we’ve come to define a good life is part of the problem. And no ideas for how we might resolve the crises that will come when countries do tumble over the various precipices upon which they teeter.

Over in the UK, the Independent is doing its usual best to add to the bad news. Yesterday they mourned the decline of birds that usually migrate to the UK.

So what are we to do? For an exhortation not to give up — but to act both personally and politically we can turn, thankfully, to Michael Pollan — writing in the Time’s magazine this Sunday.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live.

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– miss those ferocious native species? Just ship them in and set them free . . .

Scotland used to have native moose, wild boar, brown bears, lynx and wolves.  Now “landowner Paul Lister aims to bring back long-vanished species to his 23,000 acre Alladale estate, north of Inverness,” the UK’s Independent tells us.

Lister’s already installed the wild boar, but his neighbors are less than excited about the bears, wolves and lynx to come.

Fencing the estate could officially make it a zoo, interestingly, where it would be illegal to put predators and prey together.  Watch for worms and other invertibrate prey to petition for the expulsion of robins from all fenced gardens — er, zoos — in the UK.

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– a new culprit for bee collapse: your cell phone

For those of us alarmed by the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder that has wiped out swathes of the American, and now European, honey bee population, here’s a new potential cause: cell phones.

The evidence so far, though, seems slim. Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross write in this weekend’s Independent on Sunday that “German research has long shown that bees’ behaviour changes near power lines.” Now, they say:

a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a “hint” to a possible cause.

Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: “I am convinced the possibility is real.”

That ‘hint’ and ‘possibility’ leave us, unfortunately, still a long way from knowing what’s really been going on.

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