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The Environmental Spectator
Earth Day 2011, Tree-Hugger Edition
China gets into the act too.
(Page 2 of 2)
Given this challenge, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, the Panama Canal Authority and the HSBC Climate Partnership are working on a 20-year study to understand what they call “water-storage services” provided by the surrounding forests. One hundred forty thousand tree seedlings have been planted.
In 2002 China committed to the mother of all reforestation projects. It embarked on a $2.4 billion, 10-year program to plant 170,000 square miles of trees — an area roughly the size of California. While addressing soil erosion, flooding, pollution and habitat concerns (e.g., the panda), the plan will also create barriers to shield Beijing and other cities from sandstorms. Trees will be planted on 10,500 miles of farmland. This is the largest such project in history, claimed the New Scientist.
China aims to use private financing to start commercial tree farms and 82 million acres of tree plantations.
If the Chinese actually achieve these goals, it will be a stunning accomplishment. Now, if they would just allow freedom of speech and jettison the mandatory one-child policy, things would be just great.
BACK IN THE UNITED STATES, there are exciting developments in reforestation and forest protection generally. Last year Washington, D.C., which actually has pretty good tree cover at 35 percent of the city, committed to expanding its tree canopy to 40 percent by 2035. The District will need to add more than 2,000 acres of canopy or 216,000 trees. A local nonprofit organization, Casey Trees, has planted more than 7,000 trees since 2003, mostly a disease-resistant, American version of Dutch Elm.
In New York 120 volunteers planted 20,000 trees just last year. The ultimate goal is to plant one million trees over the next decade.
Happily, the phenomenon of sudden aspen decline, SAD, appears to have stabilized with many stands of trees “holding their ground against any new onset,” as reported by Kirk Johnson of the New York Times. Individual trees are still dying but this current reprieve is very welcome news.
Aspen are one of the things that make the Rocky Mountains special. Unfortunately, severe drought and heat set off a decline early in the last decade. Given climate variability in the West, keep your fingers crossed on this one.
And let’s hear it for the recovery of the venerable American chestnut tree, which appears to be ready for a big come-back. More than a century ago 4 billion of these wonderful trees, which had sweeping and majestic canopies, were destroyed by a foreign blight.
“By interbreeding the American with its Chinese cousin, tree lovers have created an American chestnut with some resistance to Asian blight and have developed a virus that can be injected into affected trees to combat the fungus,” reports the Washington Post’s Julie Eilperin. Twenty-five thousand of these new chestnuts have been planted under guidance of trained scientists and devotees. It will take 75 to 100 years to know whether or not the tree can be established in its natural range, but we are playing for the long haul here.
The chestnut is hardy, thriving on rocky and acidic soil. It will be a great means of reclaiming land decimated by strip mining throughout Appalachia, again, part of its original range.
Trees and forests are incredible multi-purpose tools which, among other things, generate two-thirds of America’s clean water supply as reported by the National Research Council of the National Academies in a 2008 study entitled, Hydrologic Effects of a Changing Forest Landscape.
In light of the foregoing, and the continued need for forest and paper products, is it any wonder that, over the past ten years, private timberland investments returned 7.1 percent annualized, compared with a 0.4 percent annualized loss for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, according to Elizabeth Ody in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance (“Money Does Grow on Trees After All,” December 2010)?
Lest I conclude this year’s Earth Day column on too mercenary a note, let me recall the words of my former boss, then Governor John Ashcroft of Missouri, for whom I worked as his director of natural resources 20 years ago: “Planting a tree is an unconditional gift to future generations.”
If Earth Day is not your cut of wood, consider celebrating Arbor Day on April 29. Plant a tree. After all, it is better to give than to receive.
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) | Leave a comment
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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