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The Environmental Spectator

Earth Day 2011, Tree-Hugger Edition

By on 4.22.11 @ 6:08AM

China gets into the act too.

If a man is not to live by bread alone, what is better worth doing well than the planting of trees?
-- Frederick Law Olmstead, founder of American landscape architecture & co-designer of New York’s Central Park.

Trees and forests, their decline, recovery, and the many benefits they offer to human beings and the environment, are gaining attention these days. This is due not just to concerns with the loss of biodiversity or carbon sequestration in the Amazon, or floods and erosion in China, but also a growing appreciation of the paramount role arboreal resources play in the protection and preservation of land, air, and water.

Even the preeminent bird-guide author and illustrator, David Allen Sibley, has moved into the tree business with a new contribution, The Sibley Guide to Trees (2009).

“Perhaps no other group of organisms has been as profoundly affected by humans as trees,” writes Sibley. “Only a few thousand acres of virgin old-growth forest remain in the eastern United States, the rest has been cut, and most of the eastern forest has been cut down many times. What the average person thinks of as ‘mature forest’ is usually fifty- to seventy-year-old new growth, covering land that was open pasture or farmland less than a hundred years ago.”

Still, this is much better than abandoned, rocky, infertile farm land in New England or cut-over, burned-over landscapes in the Upper Great Lakes states as was common decades ago. Even in their reduced state, recovering forests bring with them a generous increment of environmental improvement in terms of air and water quality, not to mention habitat. The regeneration of forests in the eastern United States is a magnificent thing to behold.

Another Earth Day has arrived, and your writer will attempt, counter-intuitively, to look for the proverbial silver lining through the clouds of environmental doom that engulf so much commentary on such matters.

I first offered TAS readers these sunnier reflections on conservation and the environment for Earth Day 2006 and have done so ever since. Fortunately, good things continue to happen that are deserving of more attention than they normally get.

In last year’s column, I recognized the towering accomplishments of the late Nobelist Norman Borlaug in bringing about the “Green Revolution” in world agriculture. While his work on high-yield, high-input agriculture is not without its environmental critics, Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out that it not only fed a growing population but also protected countless hectares (equal to 2.471 acres) of forest that would have to be cut down in order to expand production in the absence of such techniques.

The state of the world’s forests is perilous indeed, but there are signs of improvement. The Economist, a magazine that blends a free-market outlook with a lively interest in all things environmental, has been following this issue closely. In February it reported that the Food & Agriculture Organization, a UN body, estimates that the world’s forests covered 4.03 billion hectares in 2010.

“Although the world as a whole continues to lose forests, the annual rate of deforestation in the past decade has fallen to 5.2m hectares, compared to 8.3m hectares between 1990 and 2000,” stated the Economist. “Some large countries, including China and India, increased their forest cover between 2000 and 2010.” China’s increased at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent, India’s by 0.5 percent. Then there is Nigeria which “has been chopping its forests down at a rate of 3.7% a year.” Only one-tenth of its land remained forested.

In September of last year, the Economist also noted that Brazil, which razed 2.8m hectares (10,700 square miles) of the Amazon in 2004, only leveled 750,000 hectares in 2009. The magazine has attributed this decline in the rate of deforestation to Brazil becoming “the first tropical agricultural giant and the first to challenge the dominance of the ‘big five’ food exporters” (America, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union).

Nevertheless, the outlook for the Amazon is “grave.” Eighteen percent of the rainforest has been cleared. It will be necessary for Brazil and other nations, with the support of the international community, to change their policies. “The cost of failure would simply be too great,” argues the Economist.

The magazine also ran another item that highlighted the functional benefits of trees and forests to a key artery of international trade-the Panama Canal, through which passes 5 percent of world commerce. In December the canal closed for the first time since the U.S. invasion in 1989. Evidently, heavy rains had resulted in massive, disruptive mudslides in and around Panama.

Generally, a steady supply of water from the surrounding hills is crucial to the canal’s operation. “Too much water and the canal stops as gates are opened to allow the flood water to subside. Too little water, though, and there is not enough to operate the locks and allow ships to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”

If the canal’s watershed is well-forested, “this evens out the water supply throughout the year,” observed the Economist. “Cut the trees down, and there the variability in the water supply rises. And the canal needs reliability, not variability.”

Page: 1 2  

About the Author

G. Tracy Mehan, III served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the administrations of both Presidents Bush. He is a consultant in Arlington, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at George Mason University School of Law.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (34) |

Hillel| 4.22.11 @ 7:29AM

"Of all the things I'd hate to be/I'd hate like heck to be a tree.
Standing there upon the street with little doggies at my feet/and who is there to say alas,a comfort station in the grass....

axman| 4.24.11 @ 11:01AM

If you hug a logger
you'll never go back to a tree.

JustJP| 4.25.11 @ 9:46PM

LMAO ax! classic!

Ken (Old Texican)| 4.22.11 @ 7:51AM

Yes Mr. Mehan,
trees are good. Duh.

chuck| 4.22.11 @ 8:11AM

And now my favorite memory of Earth Day:
It was Earth Day, 1992, and I pulled up to my 10 acres in the woods to celebrate the beautiful sight of trees sacrificing their lives(being mowed over by a large front-end loader) so we could build our dream home. Still brings a tear to my eyes.

MTM| 4.22.11 @ 9:30AM

What? No mention of the wonders of the CCC? All those beautiful tamarack swamp pines, glorious in a row...?

Steve A| 4.22.11 @ 9:42AM

When I burn trees in my fireplace it helps roast the tasty animals I shoot.

JustJP| 4.25.11 @ 9:47PM

LOL! With garlic.

Sam Vaughn| 4.22.11 @ 12:17PM

I deplore todays environmentalists. Though I've been an environmentalist for longer than the word acquired meaning, today's environmentalists hijacked a movemnt and turned it into tool to spread socialism. Environmentalists like myself have been advocating stewardship of our natural resources balanced against economic needs. Our legacy is one of hunting when we were young, acquiring a profound appreciation for the woods, animals, the silence and the appreciation of responsible use. What we pack in we pack out..... Today's environmentalists are posers' failing to recognize that when you destroy an economy the destruction of the environment is not far behind. Today's environmentalists would be perfectly untroubled over the notion of people freezing in their homes due to energy costs and perfectly happy to throw them in jail when all they have left is to burn wood.

FTM| 4.24.11 @ 9:05AM

You're right.

Remember the paper published by one of the Green Peace nuts back in the '70s that advocated the reduction of the earth's human population from six billion to less than one billion? Guess who it was that had to go? Bet it wasn't the tree huggers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.....Greenpeace

http://american_almanac.tripod.com/green.htm

Just one time I'd like to see a genuine, card carrying, otter washing, chrystal-clutching, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, leaf-peeping circus freak actually do what they want me to do.

Cheryl Crowe would die on the spot of a heart attack, vapor-lock right in front of God and everybody if she were to find a tick stuck to her butt let alone a leech.

Exhibit Number one, these buffoons wouldn't last a week in their precious, ever so precious "green hell." No vaccines, no electricity, no digital communication and before you know it somebody would say, "when was the last time that you saw 'ol whatshisname? You know, hippy boy, pony tail, whined a lot? yeah, that guy."

Exhibit Number two, notice that the lifestyle that these people advocate they themselves do not live and in the rare case that they do live the lifestyle that they advocate they live this lifestyle at someone else's expense, government research subsidy, university fellowship, something along those lines.

If you're an enviro-mentalist, impress me. Go live in the Amazon basin someplace in your skin for a year. The ones that last a year will then earn the credibility to make a comment on my lifestyle.

Dixie Pixie| 4.22.11 @ 1:56PM

Has anyone else noticed the "Environmentalists" are the members of the Ruling Class or Ruling Class wannabes.
Has anyone else noticed they always are of the Upper Economic Class and are rich enough to go from "Protest" to "Protest".

Has anyone else considered that the "Environmentalists" are simply front groups for the Ruling Class in an attempt to revoke the gains of the Industrial Revolution to the Middle Class.

Osamas Pajamas| 4.22.11 @ 3:35PM

I'll start hugging trees when all the other tree-huggers are hanging dead from them --- and the trees have fulfilled a useful social purpose apart from foliation, beauty, chemicals, cells, and lumber.

MTM| 4.23.11 @ 8:20AM

You really are Osamas Pajamas. With statements like that, who needs obsessed leftist investigative reporting when they need only read your comments...

idalily| 4.22.11 @ 3:42PM

Ab, yes, Earth Day, co-founded by that murdering SOB Ira Einhorn, who after murdering his girlfriend, Holly Maddox, put her in a trunk in his closet, and after his arrest, skipped bail, fled the country and was only recently brought back after a LONG extradition battle. Earth Day. What a crock.

Mel Torme| 4.22.11 @ 10:42PM

Yes, but he COMPOSTED her. You people have got to read the whole story. Composting is pretty damn green. It's any good Commie's fantasy to kill and compost; for a good American, it's "work hard and play hard" just as for a good Commie, it's "kill many and compost many".

Anthony| 4.22.11 @ 4:02PM

If only when I enjoy eating watermelon, I could spit the pits at the watermelons who are destroying America.
Hey, maybe when the revolution comes, instead of waterboarding lefties we can spit watermelon seeds at them.
Hmmm, wonder what Amnesity International would say about that, or Cindy Sheehan, speaking of goards?

Dixie Pixie| 4.22.11 @ 4:28PM

Ahhh....The Glorious vision of the Environmentalists.

To be one with the Earth by living in grass huts without electricity or indoor plumbing.
Yes, To worship Gaia by living a low impact lifestyle by farming on hardscrabble plots and cooking our vegetable gruel food over animal dung fires.
The spirituality of having the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War, Pestilence, Famine, Disease) as your personal living companions.
The comfort of being ruthlessly exploited by the Environmentalist Aristocracy for their pleasure and profit just because they "Care".

All the Environmentalist Aristocracy wants is a return to the good old days before the rise of the Modern Era and back to Feudalism pure and simple.
Didn't our ancestors flee Europe to escape this kind of quasi-religious aristocratic exploitation?
Why are we putting up with it now.

RWinks| 4.22.11 @ 6:31PM

Ah yes, quite a picture; The aristocracy, picnicking, hunting and gamboling through the King's forest while driving the starving peasants away.

I believe you're perfectly correct. This exactly captures the attitude of the ruling class in their disdain and contempt for the people.

Yes, everyone should find a good tree----and hang a Democrat from it.

voted against carter| 4.22.11 @ 10:14PM

Global - What ever you call it this week,...

IS A SCAM. PERIOD.

The BIG LIE.

If you tell it often enough, people WILL believe it is true.

Or so the theory goes.

Theoretical Rationale = made up stuff

Empirical Evidence = MORE made up stuff

Scientific consensus = "Scientific" made up stuff

The self-correcting nature of the scientific method = More "Scientific" made up stuff

OH NO!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! RUN!!

And we ALL know how THAT worked out.

Eco-fascists will control you

100% natural

You will jog for the master race

And always wear the happy face.

The Bruce| 4.22.11 @ 11:08PM

I always love Earth Day, as it's the one time per year I think about these nutters:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_JPcBwYGmo

skip| 4.26.11 @ 9:40PM

Thanks for the link.

I didn't realize how long it's been since I laughed hysterically with tears in my eyes.

Holy Moon Bats Bat Man

Jive Bomber| 4.23.11 @ 2:50PM

I am a volunteer at a charity on a local navy base and yesterday the base recycling manager phoned apologizing for being unable to pick up our office’s recylables.

The reason?

It’s Earth Day.

Yep, to quote the recycling office, they were “too busy to make the weekly pick-ups on account of ongoing Earth Day related events". When I mentioned our paper bin was overflowing, and that that condition was predicated on them doing their weekly rounds, the recycle manager recommended we simply throw out the excess papers.

And I did.

The only thing I like about liberal ideas are that the jokes just write themselves.

FTM| 4.24.11 @ 12:13PM

Jive Bomber, now that's original. May I please, please use the phrase? Please? You really ought to copywrite that one. That's a hoot.

In regards to the local enviro-mental nut on a Navy base being too busy with "Earff Day" to pick up the recyclables, why is it that I'm not surprised?

Mimi Anka | 4.23.11 @ 5:45PM

I think it's funny how people that are so small in relationship to the planet think they can actually have an impact on the climate or air quality, etc..

How big do you think we are? When it comes down to it.....the oceans on this planet produce approximately 1 million times the carbon dioxide that all the humans do combined.

We could all stop producing carbon dioxide completely and we would reduce co2 by one millionth of a percent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And to think we could change the planet!

FTM| 4.24.11 @ 12:20PM

You have a point there Mimi Anka but the reality of the situation is that you're outnumbered ten to one with people with university degrees in Social Work ( at least the oxymoron that "Military Intelligence" is) and Political Science (Another Oxymoron). Matter of fact in university degree programs that are lumped together and called "Humanities," critical thinking skills are not only not taught they are outwardly discouraged. Daughter has graduated and son is currently enrolled in university education programs. University education programs will disenroll you for questioning the Status Quo. I have to routinely remind both of the children to keep their mouths shut and get paid.

Now, if you are "educated' in such an environment is it really any surprise at all that people actually believe that their use of toilet paper matters worth spit to the environment?

Dee See| 4.24.11 @ 12:56AM

FORGET 'Earth Day' and all that.

Do your own thing.

Hang up bird houses.
(the Bill Gates EUGENICS project is in fact
using mosquitos for sterilization)

Demand you stores get rid of plastic packaging
as much as possible. Demand they sell re-usable
shopping bags. Demand GMO foods be identified,
if not removed.

Call for capital crimes prosecution for any and
all involved with the deliberate tainting of food,
meds, water, air for the purposes of EUEGNICS
and 'social engineering'. In serious cases, ie
mass sterilization and lethal virses, surely the
sentence should be for life, if not the death penalty.

Call for the break up the world food consortiums
(monopolies a la Monsanto) ---IMMEDIATELY.

Throw out tv's and radio, BOTH mind control
instruments. Get the PCs out of your personal
space, it's a surveillance tool.

HAPPY EARTH DAY!

chuck| 4.24.11 @ 8:26AM

Can you give us the instructions for a properly designed tin hat?

FTM| 4.24.11 @ 11:19AM

Basically what it all comes down to in this, in a nut-shell, modern day, main stream enviro-mentalism is based on lie after lie after lie after lie.

To categorize:

Remember acid rain? Remember the hippies and other sundry, self-appointed "intellectuals" that assured everyone at every turn that if "we" (meaning, you) didn't do something about the sulpher dioxide emissions from coal fired power plants that sulpheric acid was going to end life on the planet. Remember that? Remember the do-gooders rolling limestone "Tums" antiacid tablets off of boats into lakes and streams in order to make a symbolic statement and to neutralize the acid. One piddly volcanic eruption in the Phillipines put more sulpher dioxide into the atmosphere in the space of a month than mankind has since the onset of the industrial revolution. If what these loons espoused was anything even close to the truth that volcano should indeed have wiped out life on planet earth. I feel fine this morning, how about you?

Remember ozone depletion? Remember that? Now, truthfully what these nuts had was a mechanism. Chlorine is indeed catlytic in regards to ozone. Chlorine bonds to an ozone molecule till another ozone molecule comes along then unbinds three oxygen molecules. Refrigerants like R-12 Dichloromonofluromethane and R-22 Monofluromonochloromethane (if memory serves) both contain chlorine. Both of these synthetic molecules are at least twenty times heavier than air and are infinitely soluable in water. What that translates into is that these refrigerants rain out of the atmosphere rapidly and do end up in deep ocean water where they have been found by legitimate scientists along with several microbes that metabolize these molecules. Never one has an R12 or an R-22 molecule been recovered from a stratospheric air sample. Not once. Yet somehow or another the use of these refrigerants in the US and the EU is somehow or another in some feverish, bed-wetting left wing nightmare is going to kill us all. The use of these refrigerants by the rest of the world hasn't even slowed down. Matter of fact, smuggling R-12 and R-22 from Mexico is a fairly lucritive business. Truth is that more chlorine evaporates off of the earth's oceans in a year's time than all of mankind has released into the enviroment in all of human histroy.

Remember the char-broiled hamburgers that were going to off every hamburger eating human being? (If you ate something like seventy to eighty pounds of the stuff a day for a year straight.) Fine print is a killer.

Remember the God-awful odorless, colorless and tasteless radon gas that was in the basement of your house and the bottled spring water that you drank that was going to kill you? Remember that? Remember how that the most heavily contaminated basement ever documented exposed you to less ionizing radiation per unit measure of time than standing outside in the sunlight?

The disaster-celeb of late is of course global warming, er... climate change, uh... global climate disruption, ah... it's hard to keep up with what this fairy-tale global killer is being called this week. On the one hand a cooler than average year according to the "experts" is not an indication that the earth is not warming but if there's a blizzard then it's, "see, see, we have to stop burning fossil fuels today!" How many times do professors Michael Mann, Phil Jones and James Hanson, et. al. have to be busted deliberately and with malice afforethought falsifying their secret, proprietary climate databases in order to prove their mythological point? Matter of fact, release their e-mail database to the general public along with a read-me file from a programmer that contains the statement, "F**K-it, I made it up" and somehow or another the lay-population just doesn't understand the context under which the communication originated. The translation being, "the fix is in, you can commence operation White-Wash at will."

Have you heard about the mat of plastic that the tree-huggers assure you is floating around the Pacific Ocean that is supposed to be bigger than the state of Texas and as deep as the Golden Gate Bridge is tall? Some oceanographer chick from Oregon State University spent a summer out in the Pacific ocean trawling around trying to find all this plastic. The most she ever came up with was less than a quart mason jar jull at one time.

Then there was the guy at Woods Hole that staked a plastic six-pack binder in the surf some place and determined that this horrible, dolphin and turtle killing six pack binder lasts about six weeks in the ocean. Instead of talking to his graduate advisor about his research he wrote it up on some blog someplace and damned near got kicked out of school for it.

Speaking of which, did you hear about the seventeen year old kid from Canada that identified four different microbes that metabolize polypropylene? He did it for his science fair project. He can make a plastic shopping bag from Kroger go away in six weeks. He's a multi-buttzillionaire now and they plow these microbes into landfills by the dump truck load.

I'm sorry for going on like this for so long. Basically, from my chair what I see going on is would-be "researchers" are looking to make a living at tax payer expense investigating some proposal or another that is concieved to get some under-educated, progressive leaning soccer mom's thong all in a knot. Look up the process for applying for an NSF (National Science Foundation) grant on google. Anybody can do it. Come up with some odorless, colorless and tasteless something-or-another that's going to kill everybody and the folks with university degrees in education and sociology will buy it as sure as politicians lie.

In closing, remember one thing, if you really, really from deep down in the bottom of your heart or hearts want to piss off a liberal cite facts and figures.

'K everybody, rants over.

FTM| 4.24.11 @ 11:33AM

Sorry, I forgot.

Have you ever noticed that to the liberal mind, research that is funded by Exxon is biased and tainted and can't be trusted and research funded by the Sierra Club isn't biased or tainted and can be ultimately trusted? Have you ever noticed that?

Truthfully I'd have to say that the truth of the matter in regardes to envirmentalism actuall lies somewhere in the middle ground between the EPA and the Sierra Club and the free market.

No One Is Listening To You| 4.24.11 @ 11:38AM

Why didn't Obama push his green agenda on Brazil when he went to visit? That would have been the perfect time for him to ask them to quit cutting down the rain forests... instead they get a loan for more oil drilling. He's a fraud and the lefties that are following him are being fooled and taken advantage of.

Negro X| 4.24.11 @ 8:17PM

Earth day, founded by a murderer.

JustJP| 4.25.11 @ 9:50PM

Classic moonbats mourning trees. (it's a crack up)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_JPcBwYGmo

Occam's Tool| 6.17.11 @ 2:58AM

Norman Borlaug. The greatest humanitarian of the 19th and 20th centuries (combined). His work saved at least a Billion People.

Did his academic work at University of Minnesota. Just like Peter Graves.

Creative Recreation | 8.10.11 @ 9:55PM

is good

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http://spectator.org/archives/2011/04/22/earth-day-2011-tree-hugger-edi

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