Month: November 2015

Today’s demonstrations are in response to climate change. We want to show our leaders that we want them to take steps to stop global warming. We must also ask our leaders to change the human activities that are causing climate change.

1. We want them to block corporate control over our government and the decisions it makes.
2. We want them to end international sales of weapons and begin to encourage peace and a focus on life style and resource use.
3. We want them to discourage unsustainable resource harvests.
4. We want them to encourage human rights and equality.
5. We want them to speak out for wild animals and natural ecosystems.
6. We want them to call for restoring the damaged lands and seas.
7. And finally, we want them to oppose gender inequality and overpopulation.

We know that even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today, activities causing climate change would continue. Farming, deforestation…

The BBC reports  Earth’s trees number ‘three trillion’

The figure is eight times as big as the previous best estimate, which counted perhaps 400 billion at most.

Read story at Earth’s trees number ‘three trillion’ – BBC News

Short days continue to minimise birding opportunities however you never know when something new will come your way if you keep eyes and ears open. Ears are particularly important with birds and this morning the laughing call or ‘yaffle’ alerted me to a green woodpecker in the centre of the village. These are rarely seen away from fields and park lands locally but perhaps some Autumn fare has brought them in.

Green Woodpecker Credit: David Sargant via Compfightcc

I have taken the limited late afternoon opportunities to walk the local patch before the birds go to roost. The nights quickly sweep in and many local birds are tucked up and quiet before I get out. The most noticeable recently have been the larger birds and the smallest. Pheasants have been noticeable in the local fields and tend to roost later in trees and high hedges but perhaps more surprising…

“Today, many still think of the coastal redwood forests as a dark, primeval rainforest, such as those depicted in the likes of Star Wars and Jurassic Park. However, the progress of human activity over the last 150 years has resulted in a reality which is in stark contrast to the idyllic images portrayed in Hollywood.

“The “progress” of human activity over the last 150 years has resulted in a landscape that would be unrecognizable to those first European-American settlers. Once, the ancient coastal redwood forests spanned some two million acres of California’s scenic and rugged coastline, from Big Sur all the way to the Oregon border. By the time Redwood National Park was created in 1968, a mere 100 years after the advent of European-American settlement, the once vast and mighty coastal old-growth redwood forest had been reduced to an estimated 10 percent of its original range. By the close…

Working with SAFE, climate scientist Stephen Hardwick found that palm oil plantations are on average 6.5 degrees Celsius hotter that primary (never logged) rainforest. This disparity means the difference between life and death for sensitive species like termites and earthworms that play a drastically important role in the rainforest ecosystem by controlling the rate at which things decompose. Even lightly logged forest was 2.5 degrees hotter than primary forests. In these forests, Hardwick found that the hotter it got, the more water trees used and the more vulnerable they became to droughts. This discovery casts doubt on the eco-friendliness of selective harvesting – a method of logging that in which only trees above a certain size are felled and which was previously perceived as sustainable.

“That doubt that was furthered by studies showing how the extra, unclaimed logs left behind in selective harvesting are actually doing harm to the environment…