Green Options

Results recently published in the journal Global Change Biology show a population drop of 60% in worldwide caribou and reindeer numbers over the last three decades.

The dramatic decline in population is likely due to climate change and increased industrial development in boreal forests around the world.

Trees for the Future, a US-based NGO, has planted 65 million trees in dozens of countries. And they’re still going.

For almost exactly 20 years now, Trees for the Future has been coaching farmers on sustainable agroforestry techniques. That’s a fancy way to say farmers can improving their soil and crop quality by planting trees around the farm. The trees help by holding in soil moisture and drawing water back to refill water tables, preventing erosion and improving soil fertility.

If it works for one San Fran hotel then it must work for another. No, we’re not talking about more upscale mini bar items but Greening a hotel. In this case, the Orchard Garden Hotel’s (which garnered LEED-NC certification) sister property the Orchard Hotel just nabbed LEED-EB certification.

The Orchard represents San Francisco’s only hotel to earn this honor, the Orchard Hotel is the second hotel in California and fourth hotel in the world with this certification. The inspiration from these green hotels comes from its 85-year-old owner, Mrs. S.C. Huang, who has pushed her environmental agenda and created more environmentally safe and sustainable hotels after the untimely cancer-related deaths of three family members.

By Lester R. Brown

Protecting the earth’s nearly 4 billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health, an important foundation for the new economy. Reducing rainfall runoff and the associated flooding and soil erosion, recycling rainfall inland, and restoring aquifer recharge depend on simultaneously reducing pressure on forests and on reforestation.

There is a vast unrealized potential in all countries to lessen the demands that are shrinking the earth’s forest cover. In industrial nations the greatest opportunity lies in reducing the quantity of wood used to make paper, and in developing countries it depends on reducing fuelwood use.

The rates of paper recycling in the top 10 paper-producing countries range widely, from China and Finland on the low end, recycling 33 and 38 percent of the paper they use, to South Korea and Germany on the high end, at 77 and 66 percent. The United States, the world’s largest paper consumer, is far behind South Korea, but it has raised the share of paper recycled from roughly one fourth in the early 1980s to 50 percent in 2005. If every country recycled as much of its paper as South Korea does, the amount of wood pulp used to produce paper worldwide would drop by one third.

The use of paper, perhaps more than any other single product, reflects the throwaway mentality that evolved during the last century. There is an enormous possibility for reducing paper use simply by replacing facial tissues, paper napkins, disposable diapers, and paper shopping bags with reusable cloth alternatives.

By Lester R. Brown

In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo “ordered the military and police to crack down on illegal logging, after flash floods and landslides, triggered by rampant deforestation, killed nearly 340 people,” according to news reports. Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin. Each of these governments had belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the earth’s forested area was estimated at 5 billion hectares. Since then it has shrunk to just under 4 billion hectares, with the remaining forests rather evenly divided between tropical and subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/boreal forests in industrial countries. Since 1990, the developing world has lost some 13 million hectares of forest a year. This loss of about 3 percent each decade is an area roughly the size of Greece. Meanwhile, the industrial world is actually gaining an estimated 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year, principally from abandoned cropland returning to forests on its own and from the spread of commercial forestry plantations. Thus, net forest loss worldwide exceeds 7 million hectares per year.

Unfortunately, even these official data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) do not reflect the gravity of the situation. For example, tropical forests that are clearcut or burned off rarely recover. They simply become wasteland or at best scrub forest, yet they still may be counted as “forest” in official forestry numbers. Plantations, too, count as forest area, yet they also are a far cry from the old-growth forest they sometimes replace.

This just in, the city of San Francisco is having a hearing Monday that will decide if a resolution calling on California to create a Do Not Mail Registry will come before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A Do Not Mail Registry would give citizens the choice to stop receiving unwanted junk mail.

Can you imagine?

Because I’m so green I won’t be taking my private jet up to San Francisco, but I am extending an invitation to all you.

Around $10,000-worth of timber was confiscated from a lumber company after their illegal activities were exposed on their very own reality TV show on the History Channel.

Before we get into the details, let this sink in for a second: there’s a reality TV show that documents people competing to cut down trees. We’ve all seen some horrible television, but how on earth is this considered entertainment? Apparently 2 million people think so.

Editor’s note:  The following is a guest post by Tim Magner, an environmental educator and children’s book author. For more resources on Growing Green Minds, visit Green Sugar Press.
What are your best memories from childhood? Catching fireflys?  Building forts? Making mudpies? Climbing trees?

I’ve spent a lot of time with kids and there’s one thing I know makes sense: Letting kids be kids. They’re curious. They need time to imagine and play and explore. They want to be inspired and nature does the trick.

Paper appears to be high on the agenda of a number of organizations this week. It’s necessary. Paper is so ubiquitous – from tissues to toilet paper to memo pads to catalogs to the mess on your desk - that it is easy to forget, or perhaps more convenient to ignore, that paper manufacturing has significant environmental repercussions.

Paper production is the third largest contributor to climate change, the biggest source of deforestation and has a significant impact on water issues. It’s a dirty business, from the use of toxic chemicals and chlorine bleaches to clear cutting of forests like this one on the North Carolina Coast:

Friday the 13th just got a little scarier. Here are 13 facts about the realities of global warming.

The numbers speak for themselves — we must make 2009 the showdown year for global warming action. There is no time to lose.

35%

Increase in the global carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1992.

388.57 ppm

Average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in May 2008, a record high.

541 – 970 ppm

The projected concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 2100 under a business as usual scenario where we don’t dramatically reduce global warming emissions.

260 – 280 ppm

Average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before industrial emissions.

A huge increase in China’s demand for rubber is leading to the destruction of vast swathes of the country’s precious old-growth forests, and could cause irreversible environmental damage.

The shocking findings have been revealed in a new study by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Science’s flagship conservation institute, the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG). The team have discovered that China is producing a third more rubber than it was in 2007 to feed its booming automobile and tyre industries, which has led to an astronomical rise in the number of rubber plantations.

According to one of the scientists, “We will soon hit the wall in an ecological credit crunch. This is hardly a viable investment.”