How Millions of Trees Brought a Broken Landscape Back to Life

/by

Author: John Vidal

Twenty-five years ago, the Midlands villages of Moira, Donisthorpe and Overseal overlooked a gruesome landscape. The communities were surrounded by opencast mines, old clay quarries, spoil heaps, derelict coal workings, polluted waterways and all the other ecological wreckage of heavy industry.

The air smelt and tasted unpleasant and the land was poisoned. There were next to no trees, not many jobs and little wildlife. Following the closure of the pits, people were deserting the area for Midlands cities such as Birmingham, Derby and Leicester. The future looked bleak.

Today, a pastoral renaissance is taking place. Around dozens of former mining and industrial communities, in what was the broken heart of the old Midlands coalfield, a vast, splendid forest of native oak, ash and birch trees is emerging, attracting cyclists, walkers, birdwatchers, canoeists, campers and horse-riders.

Britain’s trees have come under increasing attack from exotic diseases, and the grants for planting woodland are drying up, so the 200 sq miles of the National Forest come as a welcome good news story. The new woodland in the Midlands is proving that large-scale tree planting is not just good value for money, but can also have immense social, economic and ecological benefits.

KEEP READING ON THE GUARDIAN

Free People from ‘Dictatorship’ of the 0.01%

/by

“The only way to counter globalisation—just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree.”

This is how dear friend and eminent writer Mahasweta Devi, who passed away on July 28, at the age of 90, quietly laid out her imagination for freedom in our times of corporate globalisation in one of her last talks.

Our freedoms, she reminds us, are with grass and trees, with wildness and self-organisation (swaraj), when the dominant economic systems would tear down every tree and round up the last blade of grass.

From the days we jointly wrote about the madness of covering our beautiful biodiverse Hindustan with monocultures of eucalyptus plantations, which were creating green deserts, to the work we did together on the impact of globalisation on women, Mahaswetadi remained the voice of the earth, of the marginalised and criminalised communities.

She could see with her poetic imagination how globalisation, based on free trade agreements (FTAs), written by and for corporations, was taking away the freedoms of people and all beings. “Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think. In the last two decades, our economies, our production and consumption patterns, our chances of survival and the emergence of a very small group of parasitic billionaires, have all been shaped by the rules of deregulation in the WTO agreements.

“Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think.

In 1994, in Marrakesh, Morocco, we signed the GATT agreements which led to the creation of WTO in 1995. The WTO agreements are written by corporations for corporations, to expand their control on resources, production, markets and trade, establish monopolies and destroy both economic and political democracy.

Monsanto wrote the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of WTO — which is an attempt to claim seeds as Monsanto’s invention, and own seeds as “intellectual property” through patents. It has only one aim — to own and control seed and make super-profits through the collection of royalties. We have seen the consequences of this illegitimate corporate-defined “property” right in India; with extortion of “royalties” for genetically modified (GMO) seeds leading to high seed prices.

KEEP READING ON COMMON DREAMS

Re-thinking the Water Crisis: With a Little Creativity, We Can Meet Our Water Needs

/by

The human brain is 95 percent water. Water makes up more than two-thirds of human body weight. Seventy-one percent of Earth’s surface is covered with water. Yet only 2.5 percent of Earth’s water is freshwater, of which only a small proportion is actually available to meet the needs of humans and animals. (Some of it is locked up in glaciers and ice, for example).

Water is life. We are at its mercy, vulnerable to its scarcity.

If you believe the headlines, we’re running out of water: “New NASA Data Show How the World Is Running out of Water,” Washington Post, 2016; “Water Crisis in Brazil: Why the Largest City in the Americas Is Drying out,” Humanosphere, 2015;  “Brazil’s Olympics Water Crisis Is a Constant Reality for Locals,” The Weekly Magazine, 2016; “Indian Water Crisis Shuts Down Multiple Power Plants,” POWER Magazine, 2016; “Hurricane Drought Hits a New Record,” Scientific American, 2016.

But how can that be? When the amount of water on the planet today is the same as it’s always been?

Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association,  talked to Vermont-based journalist Judith D. Schwartz about her new book, “Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World,” which introduces unlikely, revolutionary and simple solutions to inspire a re-framing of the way we think about, and are challenged, by water.

“All of the news that we hear about water these days seems to be bad news,” said Schwartz said. “We hear about droughts and wildfires (caused by parched landscapes), and depleted groundwater resources. The sense we get from what we hear is that this is all inevitable.”

But water scarcity and crisis aren’t inevitable, according to Schwartz.

“What I’d like to bring to the conversation is that this isn’t a case of bad environmental karma, brought on by we’ve been doing to the planet. This is the result of distorted water cycles. And once we understand that, there is much that we can do to restore the water cycle, not only on a very small local basis but also on large landscapes. Most of it does turn on the extent to which we are able to mimic natural processes.”

In her book, Schwartz provides examples of how people are already managing water by mimicking nature. For example, a couple harvests dew in the Texas desert to meet their needs, and those of their many guests. Farmers in rural Zimbabwe and Mexico are greening desertified land through Holistic Planned Grazing, an approach to livestock management that mimics natural systems. Their efforts have successfully restored the water cycle and local biodiversity, and allowed rural villagers to get off international food aid.

Another approach to managing water, one that has been gaining international traction since the COP21 Paris Climate Summit, involves revitalizing soils. One-third of our excess atmospheric CO2 can be attributed to huge losses of carbon in the soil, primarily due to destructive agriculture and land use practices such as deforestation, soil-tillage and leaving soil bare.

By disrupting the carbon cycle, we’ve also disrupted the water cycle, according to Schwartz. This is because carbon is essential to keeping water in the ground.

The failure to retain water has, in turn, altered climate dynamics. According to Australian soil microbiologist Walter Jehne, more than 90 percent of our climate is driven by hydrological processes. History is littered with cautionary tales of communities and even civilizations—the Mayans, Pacific Islanders, peoples of the Fertile Crescent—who depleted their soil or chopped down forests, only to suffer from floods and drought. The moral of the story: Carbon-rich soil and the plants it sustains help manage the water cycle, and the water cycle drives weather and climate.

Can we actually avert both a climate crisis and a water crisis by, at least in part, paying more attention to how we manage water?

Yes, says Schwartz. Farmers worldwide are choosing to work with the carbon cycle. If regenerative agriculture and land-use practices are adopted by farmers worldwide, we’ll eventually restore carbon to the soil, and also restore the Earth’s natural water cycles. Even better, in the process, we’ll provide abundant and nutritious food, and increase biodiversity on the land, and in our diets.

“Every 1-percent increase in soil carbon represents an additional 20,000 gallons per acre that the land can hold,” says Schwartz. That’s the size of a 28’ above ground swimming pool—and that’s a lot of water.

“If we planted trees at a sufficiently large scale it would improve climate. Even planting on a local scale can improve groundwater recharge,” ecologist Douglas Sheil says in “Water in Plain Sight.” Why not focus on growing carbon in the soil and re-vegetating our landscapes?

RI asked Schwartz what is stopping us from scaling solutions like this on a global level. “What stops us is imagination,” Schwartz said. “It’s because most of us, in particular people who make decisions, and the policymakers, are disconnected from the natural processes that govern the flow of water.”

So, what can each of us do? Beyond shifting our attention to what’s possible and appreciating how lush our landscapes can be, Schwartz says, “a very important thing is what food you buy, what clothing you buy and learning more about the practices that are generating the food and fiber that we use in our lives.”

Water in Plain Sight is a reminder that “every acre of land on the planet offers a choice, toward enhancement and health and complexity, or toward degradation. Like animals managed well, we can act upon the land in a positive way.”

Why is water vapor the most significant greenhouse gas? Why is the Syrian migration crisis a result of mismanagement of the land? Watch the video interview to learn more.

Water in Plain Sight- 9781250069917-1

Buy “Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World.”

Check out Judith D Schwartz’s first book, “Cows Save the Planet.”

***

Article written by Alexandra Groome, Campaign & Events Coordinator for Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.

Brazil’s Blueprint for Reforestation

/by

Author: Jonathan Watts

The misty forests of Miguel Pereira, just two hours drive from Rio’s Copacabana beaches, show the scars of development. Over the past century, this part of the Atlantic forest has experienced three waves of development – logging, coffee plantations and cattle ranching – each of which ran down the environment a step further.

By 2008, there was almost nothing left to extract. The hills were stripped bare, the rivers dry and the soil degraded. Local people were left in poverty. Many moved to Rio to find work.

But now they are returning because Miguel Pereira is once again frontier territory and is being held up as a model in a new global campaign to revitalise 150 million hectares – six times the area of the UK – of degraded land around the planet by 2020. The success story at Miguel Pereira will also be food for thought for ministers and heads of state from around the globe attending the Rio+20 summit next week on sustainable development.

One aim of that meeting is to forge a global “green economy” from the ruins of the financial crisis and the Miguel Pereira experiment shows how environmental investments can also reduce poverty. It has done this through sustainable agriculture, renewable energy and a move away from GDP as a main measure of national wellbeing.

The Rio city government, water utility, corporate sponsors and environmental NGOs have started to pay for ecological services – clean air, fresh water, fertile soil and carbon sinks – that are provided by forest restoration.

Local landowners get an annual income of 60 Reals (around £19) per hectare and villagers are paid for planting saplings and maintaining the canopy at four sites in the region.

Three years in, the results are visually impressive. More than 950 hectares of formerly brown and barren hillsides are once again lush with the native species of the Atlantic forest, such as yellow flowering Araguaney and fast-growing Angico Artemisiana – some of which are almost 10 metres tall.

For conservationists, this is good news because it strengthens the Tinguá Bocaina corridor – one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots. The city of Rio benefits from carbon sequestration and the maintenance of the Guandu watershed, which supplies 80% of the water to the metropolitan area and 30% of its energy.

KEEP READING ON THE GUARDIAN

Look to the Soil for Water Supply Answers

/by

Author: Matt Weiser

Throughout the ongoing drought, millions of Californians have lifted eyes skyward, yearning for rain. But Judith Schwartz believes we should spend just as much energy puzzling over the ground at our feet.

In her new book, “Water in Plain Sight,” Schwartz argues that the amount of rain that falls is less important than what happens to the rain, how fast it moves across the land and where it goes. Soil health, land management and wildlife diversity all figure into the results.

Schwartz, a journalist who lives in Vermont, previously wrote “Cows Save the Planet” in 2013. In that book, she argued that restoring soil–in part through restorative livestock grazing practices–can play an important role in reversing climate change.

The new book takes that notion a step further, asserting that by restoring biodiversity to the soil and the landscape, we could boost water supplies and improve water quality. Schwartz takes a number of examples from California to make her case.

The problem at hand is that our soils have been so depleted by development and intensive agriculture that the dirt simply can’t soak up water like it once did. Instead, water rushes off too fast, leaving creeks and aquifers depleted, contributing to water quality problems. But the spongy, thirsty soil that once existed can be brought back, she says, if we change farming and grazing practices.

KEEP READING ON NEWS DEEPLY

The Drought Solution That’s Under Our Feet

/by

Author: Padma Nagappan

Now in the fifth year of an epic drought, Californians have explored ways to save water and wring it out of typical and atypical sources. The search has spanned the gamut from funding research, investing in expensive solutions like desalination plants, toying with the idea of recycling wastewater, imposing water-use restrictions, letting lawns go dry and experimenting with irrigation efficiency techniques for the crops that feed the country.

Thirsty crops, a burgeoning population and below-average precipitation have also led to seriously overdrawn groundwater sources that took a very long time to fill up. The state’s agricultural industry, which grows more than 250 crops, has also been vilified for its heavy water use.

But is the Golden State missing a solution that could offer a high payout – a solution that’s right under its feet?

Healthy soil that’s rich in organic matter has an ability to retain water that surpasses much more expensive solutions to the drought, yet not many people are aware of its potential to reduce farm water use.

“Name something that doesn’t come from the soil?” asked Tony Rolfe, a California state soil scientist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency. “It’s not just food, but also your clothes that come from cotton, construction and homes that rely on wood, even oxygen because you need soil to grow the plants that take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen.”

KEEP READING ON NEWS DEEPLY

Rise in Plunder of Earth’s Natural Resources

/by

Author: Alex Kirby

LONDON, 22 July 2016 – Humans’ appetite for gnawing away at the fabric of the Earth itself is growing prodigiously. According to a new UN report, the amount of the planet’s natural resources extracted for human use has tripled in 40 years.

A report produced by the International Resource Panel (IRP), part of the UN Environment Programme, says rising consumption driven by a growing middle class has seen resources extraction increase from 22 billion tonnes in 1970 to 70 billon tonnes in 2010.

It refers to natural resources as primary materials, and includes under this heading biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and non-metallic minerals.

The increase in their use, the report warns, will ultimately deplete the availability of natural resources − causing serious shortages of critical materials and risking conflict.

Growing primary material consumption will affect climate change mainly because of the large amounts of energy involved in extraction, use, transport and disposal.

Irreversibly depleted

“The alarming rate at which materials are now being extracted is already having a severe impact on human health and people’s quality of life,” says the IRP’s co-chair, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra.

“We urgently need to address this problem before we have irreversibly depleted the resources that power our economies and lift people out of poverty. This deeply complex problem, one of humanity’s biggest tests yet, calls for a rethink of the governance of natural resource extraction.”

KEEP READING ON CLIMATE NEWS NETWORK

India Set a Record by Planting 50 Million Trees in One Day

/by

Author: Katie Herzog

Trees are a valuable tool in the fight against climate change. It’s the ultimate in carbon-capture technology — but all natural, and without the licensing fees.

On July 11th, volunteers in India took this old-school climate-fighting tool to a whole new level by planting a record number of trees in a single day, beating Pakistan’s previous record of planting 847,275 trees in 2013.

It took 800,000 volunteers to plant just under 50 million tree saplings along India’s roads, rail lines, and on public lands. This is all a part of India’s commitment to reforest 12 percent of its land — a commitment made at the Paris climate talks last year. The goal will increase the total amount of India’s forested areas to 29 percent of the country’s landmass, or 235 million acres.

KEEP READING ON GRIST

Beans’ talk

/by

The idea that plants have developed a subterranean internet, which they use to raise the alarm when danger threatens, sounds more like the science-fiction of James Cameron’s film “Avatar” than any sort of science fact. But fact it seems to be, if work by David Johnson of the University of Aberdeen is anything to go by. For Dr Johnson believes he has shown that just such an internet, with fungal hyphae standing in for local Wi-Fi, alerts beanstalks to danger if one of their neighbours is attacked by aphids.

The experiment which suggests this was following up the discovery, made in 2010 by a Chinese team, that when a tomato plant gets infected with leaf blight, nearby plants start activating genes that help ward the infection off—even if all airflow between the plants in question has been eliminated. The researchers who conducted this study knew that soil fungi whose hyphae are symbiotic with tomatoes (providing them with minerals in exchange for food) also form a network connecting one plant to another. They speculated, though they could not prove, that molecules signalling danger were passing through this fungal network.

Dr Johnson knew from his own past work that when broad-bean plants are attacked by aphids they respond with volatile chemicals that both irritate the parasites and attract aphid-hunting wasps. He did not know, though, whether the message could spread, tomato-like, from plant to plant. So he set out to find out—and to do so in a way which would show if fungi were the messengers.

As they report in Ecology Letters, he and his colleagues set up eight “mesocosms”, each containing five beanstalks. The plants were allowed to grow for four months, and during this time every plant could interact with symbiotic fungi in the soil.

KEEP READING ON THE ECONOMIST

Loss Of Animals’ Poop Disrupts Nutrient Cycles, New Study Shows

/by

Author: Samantha Mathewson

Believe it or not, we rely more heavily on animals’ feces than you would think. Essentially, the poop from wild animals keeps the planet fertile by transporting nutrients deep from the ocean floor all the way to mountain tops, a recent study revealed. This makes the extinction of large animals even more devastating.

“This once was a world that had ten times more whales; twenty times more anadromous fish, like salmon; double the number of seabirds; and ten times more large herbivores–giant sloths and mastodons and mammoths,” Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont (UVW) and co-author of the recent study, said in a news release. “This broken global cycle may weaken ecosystem health, fisheries, and agriculture.”

The ability of animals to readily transport nutrients over a wide area has significantly decreased since the mass extinction following the end of the last ice age, according to researchers from UVM. This proves that animals act as major “distribution pumps” that transport large amounts of nutrients to areas that would otherwise be less productive, including surface waters and remote inland areas.

Basically, the more animals eat, the more they poop. When animals eat a lot of plant matter, they release nutrients from vegetation through processes of digestion. Then they transport these nutrients from feeding areas, or nutrient-rich “hot spots,” to more remote areas. The valuable nutrients are introduced to scarce areas when animals excrete poop and urine, or when their bodies decompose after death, the release explained.

So how do nutrients cycle through different ecosystems? Marine animals transport vital nutrients, such as phosphorous, to the surface from otherwise unreachable areas deep within the ocean. Then, seabirds and fish spread the nutrients across seas, up rivers and deep inland, where land animals then help transport the nutrients to high mountainous areas, researchers explained. Humans, in turn, depend on these fertilized ecosystems to perform natural life-sustaining functions, such as agriculture or carbon storage.

KEEP READING ON NATURE WORLD NEWS