First the link: Stunning reversal? Why 'big paper' just went green in Indonesia. - CSMonitor.com I mentioned earlier that Indonesian deforestation is now the big thing. Setting aside the wackiness of the Rainforest Action Network (they are at the top of the heap). The forest-clearers have now got enough replanted areas behind them to achieve their pulp goals from second cuttings. And, I think this is about the best we can hope for. Just don't cut any more old growth forests. We may now be at (or approaching) the point where no more tropical old growth needs to be cleared for the industrials to reach their profit goals. So good. So good. So good.
It'd be great if it was true... But the last most rare intact tropical rainforests are being eliminated at an increasingly accelerated pace and paper industry announcements are about marketing and public relations, not about truly changing their practices. For every company that claims they are "going green" there are 20 companies gaining rights to go into once protected forest areas, mainly because there's huge profits in virgin forest clearing compared to hardly any profits in slow growing mono-crop plantation deserts.
The lack of discussion on this subject speak volumes of how desperate a situation our loss of oxygen production and CO2 removal really is... For example: Timeline Photos | Facebook
Sorry, facebook is beyond my reach. I completely get it that we are a strictly oxygen-requiring species. I really don't know how O2 loss is being discussed hither and yon. perhaps dramatically? One can measure how fast O2 is decreasing in the atmosphere but much effort is required. Annual loss is parts per millions (actually it matches the CO2 increase) with a 'background' of ~21%. 210,000 parts per million. See the Scripps CO2 website. it may seem odd (or ironic) that it is easier to measure small changes in small things than small changes in big things. But there you are. Allowing myself another digression ( ), it is hard to measure the C14 isotope because it has the same mass as N14. This confounds mass spectrometers, until you move up to the really big guns. Anyway, back to industrial deforestation. The CSM on top made the interesting point that after you get to some level of removal and replanting, the replanted areas can be adequate to supply industrial requirements. This makes abundant sense (after the fact) but you'd search long to find it in the dramatic deforestation literature. Ecologists (being human) do not always work well with non linearities, discontinuities, and stuff like that. To be fair, Forbesian extrapolations of growing antarctic sea ice to cover the world looks like another example of the same. All-to-human. If we want to do science in a non linear world, we need to up our game.
