We all know smoking is bad for our health but not a lot of people are aware of the hidden environmental costs of the tobacco industry.
Hard-pressed by humans, rainforests lost their ability to act as carbon sinks
Instead, they now release around 8% of global emissions.
Pakistan just planted one billion trees to tackle deforestation and climate change
Talk about pulling your weight!
Bad beef: Despite pledge, Burger King continues to cause massive deforestation
It’s up to us, the consumers, to make a difference.
Half of Amazon rainforest tree species threatened by deforestation
The Amazon basin is home to the world’s great biodiversity. You’ll find more plant and animal species per square foot than anywhere else in the world. It’s truly one of the wildest and life teeming places in the universe, which given humans’ habit of meddling makes it one of the most vulnerable as well. The huge 6-million-square-kilometer rainforest area remains mostly unstudied, due to the roughness and inaccessibility of the land. But making their way through the outskirts are the chainsaws and sawmills; and they’re moving fast. Since 2000 an area equal to 50 football pitches has been destroyed every minute in the Amazon rainforest, satellite imagery revealed.
An Amazonian tribe is defending their forests from illegal loggers with bow and arrow
Motivated by the love for their native lands and armed with bows, arrows, GPS trackers and camera traps, an indigenous community in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what officials couldn’t – stop illegal logging in their part of the Amazon.
Devastating photos of the world’s deforestation
Recently, we wrote an article about the biggest tree census ever conducted, and the results were pretty grim. Sure, there are some 3 trillion trees on Earth, but the bad news is that there used to be almost twice as many – before humans chipped in. Humanity has cut down 46% of the planet’s trees, and we’re continuing to do
The Number of Trees has Halved Since Human Civilization Emerged
Today, the Earth has approximately 3 trillion trees left standing – about 422 per person – but we’ve already cut 46% of them.
Drugs and Environmental Damage: An Often Undiscussed Truth
When drugs are imported into the United States, the people responsible aren’t just damaging human lives; they may also be wreaking havoc on the environment. The illegal drug industry is harmful to nature in ways the average person may have never realized; let’s take a look at how this happens.
Norway to pay Liberia to stop cutting its woods
Norway will pay impoverished African country Liberia $150m (£91.4m) to entirely stop deforestation by 2020. Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and its economy is extremely underdeveloped. Mix this current situation with the recent Ebola outbreak, and you get a recipe for disaster. Logging is a simple source of revenue in such situations, and Norway wants to
Amazon trees will withstand even the most pessimistic of global warming scenarios
Researchers from the University of Michigan and University College London have found that trees in the Amazon forest will be able to withstand even the most dreaded of forecasted global warming scenarios from a century from now, after they showed they’ve withstood the test of time. The researchers found that most tree species had been around for millions of years, going through climates in
Loggers burned Amazon 8 year old tribe girl alive, as part of a campaign to force indigenous population out of the land
This is truly one of the days when you could feel ashamed to be human. According to reports, loggers in Brazil captured an 8 year old girl from one of the Amazon’s last tribes and burned her alive, in an attempt to force tribes out of the territory. Indigenous people from the Amazonian basin have always been mistreated and even
Forests, or how we destroy one of our biggest climate protectors
Humanity seems determined to continue on a suicidal path and destroy much of the planet that surrounds us; so far we’ve been lucky, but if we continue in this line, we have a good chance of breaking the very fragile equilibrium our world has. In almost every forest, carbon is constantly being absorbed as trees and other organisms grow, then
Vietnam War bio-weapon used today for Amazon deforestation
Of all the despicable things I thought possible going on around the Amazonian Rainforrest, using an extremely powerful chemical agent on the forest would’ve never crossed not even the darkest region of my conscious. It’s indeed petrifying what the human mind can conjure up for profit. Agent Orange is the chemical in question, and is one of the herbicides and
Brazil’s government approves of rainforest destruction. Next day, two environmental activists get shot
It’s a black period for Brazil’s environment, and things will get even worse in days to follow; the government just applied a reform of the forestry code which will make it extremely easy to cut down massively on the rainforests in Brazil. Money money money After several delays and a desperate, but outnumbered resistance, the revised forest code was adopted
Ethiopia’s forest area triples
Ethiopian authorities announced that thanks to large-scale reforestation campaigns the forest cover of their country has tripled since 2000. The African country has suffered from severe droughts in the past, and their solution to this problem turned out to be just great. “Ethiopia was able to increase its forest coverage to nine percent now from only three percent previously,” the
In sickness and in … green
The city administration of Balikpapan (in East Kalimantan) has issued a new rule which will definitely please those interested in our planet’s “health”. Each couple has to plant a tree before they can marry. Basically, if don’t plant a tree, you don’t get the marriage license. “We have made it mandatory for those wanting to get married to submit one