Rainforests

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – My late friend Fernando Coronil once observed that in order to understand the people of the past we must also understand their own visions of the future. In the 2014 science fiction film Edge of Tomorrow, based on a Japanese young adult novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi […]

Desertification

Demand for meat is driving deforestation in Brazil – changing the soy industry could stop it

The Conversation

By Angela Guerrero and Malika Virah-Sawmy | – Soy may have a pretty innocuous reputation thanks to its association with vegan food and meat alternatives. But don’t be fooled – crops of this pale legume are behind much of Brazil’s epidemic of deforestation. Since 2000, Brazil has doubled its total area of soy plantation to […]

Climate Crisis

UN Report: Human Environmental, Climate Destruction could unleash 800k Animal Viruses on Us

The Conversation

By Katie Woolaston and Judith Lorraine Fisher | – Human damage to biodiversity is leading us into a pandemic era. The virus that causes COVID-19, for example, is linked to similar viruses in bats, which may have been passed to humans via pangolins or another species. Environmental destruction such as land clearing, deforestation, climate change, […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Emergency feedback Loop: Trees are growing faster, dying younger – and will soon store less carbon

The Conversation

By Roel Brienen and Emanuel Gloor | – As the world warms and the atmosphere becomes increasingly fertilised with carbon dioxide, trees are growing ever faster. But they’re also dying younger – and overall, the world’s forests may be losing their ability to store carbon. That’s the key finding of our new study, published in […]

Desertification

Pandemic Karma: Destroying Forests to Raise certain Foods Put us Closer to Viruses

The Conversation

By Terry Sunderland | – As the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion in about 50 years, industrial agriculture has increased the output from fields and farms to feed humanity. One of the negative outcomes of this transformation has been the extreme simplification of ecological systems, with complex multi-functional landscapes converted to vast swaths […]

Climate Crisis

The Other Pandemic: We haven’t Even begun to Flatten the Curve on the Climate Crisis

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – We are living with two life-threatening crises: Covid-19 and the climate crisis. They pose a common stark fate for us – the risk of illness in the case of Covid, and injury and destruction of our environment in the case of climate; both are harbingers of death for […]

Climate Crisis

Heat the Earth more than 3.6° F. and Rain Forests will Release Hundreds of Billions of Tons of CO2

The Conversation

By Aida Cuní Sanchez and Martin Sullivan | – As they photosynthesise and grow, tropical forests remove enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, reducing global warming. However, forests are also themselves affected by this warming. If it gets too hot or too dry, trees will grow less and may start to die faster, decomposing […]