Deforestation is the permanent destruction of forests in order to make the land available for other uses. An estimated 18 million acres (7.3 million hectares) of forest, which is roughly the size of the country of Panama, are lost each year, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
SOME STATISTICS
About half of the world’s tropical forests have been cleared (FAO)
Forests currently cover about 30 percent of the world’s land mass (National Geographic)
Forest loss contributes between 6 percent and 12 percent of annual global
carbon dioxide emissions (Nature Geoscience)
About 36 football fields worth of trees lost every minute (World Wildlife Fund (WWF))
CAUSES
There are many causes of deforestation. The WWF reports that half of the trees illegally removed from forests are used as fuel.
Some other common reasons are
To make more land available for housing and urbanization
To harvest timber to create commercial items such as paper, furniture and homes
To create ingredients that are highly prized consumer items, such as the oil from palm trees
To create room for cattle ranching
“Stand for Trees can be a game-changer by harnessing the power of crowd-funding to protect forests, the air we breathe, and the climate that sustains us.”
Actor Edward Norton, a U.N. goodwill ambassador for biodiversity
THE QUESTION IS WHETHER WE HAVE THE WIT (AND THE WILL) TO SAVE THEM
Forests are the lungs of the earth and our greatest ally in fighting climate change. They absorb carbon and turn atmospheric CO2, water and sunlight into wood while producing the oxygen we breathe. But instead of returning the favor, we cut them down. It’s estimated that roughly 15% of global annual greenhouse gas emissions today are the result of deforestation and forest degradation. That’s comparable to the total annual CO2 emissions of China, or the emissions of the entire global transportation sector — all the world’s planes, ships, trucks, and automobiles combined.
Protecting forests and restoring those that have been degraded are among the easiest options we have for slowing climate change. It doesn’t require any new technological breakthrough — it simply requires each of us to join in. We all impact climate change, but now we can each be part of a broader solution. Companies can stand with employees. Sports teams can stand with fans. And we can all stand with our friends and loved ones. We can each purchase Stand for Trees Certificates to help offset our own emissions, and share the news of our purchase on our favorite social media platforms.
In short, Stand For Trees represents nothing less than a global and grassroots intervention. Trees stand for us.
For more than 40 years, NASA (and, since 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey) has enlisted Landsat satellites to continuously document our home planet — kind of like an extreme, orbital version of the selfie stick. This unbroken record, consisting of millions of images of the earth’s surface, helps scientists track environmental changes over time.
The video by Vox strings together pictures taken from 1972 to 2014 to show how deforestation, water use, urban sprawl, electricity, and climate change have dramatically altered certain landscapes.
DEFORESTATION
WATER USE
URBAN SPRAWL
ENERGY
CLIMATE CHANGE
Though the footage focuses on just five areas on this big planet, human activity has had a visible impact on countless others — and the stories that emerge from the Landsat program’s data often aren’t pretty.
I think we can all agree that the earth deserves a better set of before-and-after shots.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
~~Carl Sagan~~
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
~Five human activities you can see from space~~
~~Published on May 1, 2015~~
Satellites have been watching us for 40 years. Here’s what their images reveal.
It Is What It Is 