By Rhishja Larson •
October 15, 2009
Today’s elephants are under increasing pressure from habitat loss (due to explosive human population growth), poaching for ivory, and illegal trafficking.
Asian elephants are classified as endangered, and their population is declining. African elephants are considered near threatened, but a resurgence in elephant poaching is taking its toll.
To help raise awareness for these magnificent mammals, here are 12 things you didn’t know about elephants - and a compilation of beautiful photos (with baby elephants who will steal your heart)! Enjoy!
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.
By Brady Swenson •
July 13, 2007
As any movement for change develops and grows, it will face challenges to its original intentions. When a movement grows to the point that it begins to move from the fringes into the mainstream, as the Fair Trade movement has, it will face a host of difficult challenges. Most dramatically, the Fair Trade movement faces a trial of integrity as some of the largest corporations in the world are trying to
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By Cassie Walker •
June 5, 2007
Always on the lookout for new green events, I’m excited to have found something that promises to be more than just networking (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) On Thursday, June 7th, the Los Angeles Net Impact chapter, in partnership with SustainLane, is hosting an event dedicated to sustainability.
The event features guest speaker Gillian Christie. As founder and CEO of Christie Communications, a communications and public relations firm, Christie works
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