Tree Huggers

Trees > Parking Spots

Good to see cities in America putting in the work to fix the poor decisions of the past! Yes, this is a small step but I think it will have big impacts. Especially because my city never wants to do anything that no American city has done before, even if it's common practice in other parts of the world. Now that Portland has led the way, we might see other cities following suit.

This indirect use of palm oil is often overlooked in the zero-deforestation accounting process, despite its growing use, according to a report by U.S.-based advocacy group Rainforest Action Network (RAN). The report found that palm oil-based animal feed is now the single largest palm oil product category imported by the U.S., accounting for 36% of all palm oil imports into the country by weight.

archived article (Wayback Machine)

archived report from RAN (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20614826

archived (Wayback Machine)

Between 2001 and 2023, Honduras lost almost a fifth of its forest cover, according to Global Forest Watch. The biggest driver of deforestation was shifting agriculture (accounting for 74% of tree cover loss), followed by commodity-driven deforestation (25%), wildfires, forestry and urbanization (less than 1%), according to Global Forest Watch data from 2023.

"shifting agriculture" = almost entirely cattle grazing

Editor’s note: Heifer International helped with travel logistics for this reporting but did not have any editorial influence over the story.

The Truth About Regenerative Animal Grazing

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/41960022

Plectranthus barbatus grows to its full height in 1-2 months from a cutting and the cutting itself costs around 50 Kenyan shillings ($0.37).

"The leaves are similar in size to an industrial toilet paper square, making them suitable for use in modern flush toilets or for composting in latrines," says Odhiambo.

They emit a minty, lemony fragrance. Covered in tiny hairs, the leaves have a soft texture.

• The involvement of Munduruku people in illegal mining inside the Munduruku Indigenous Territory made Brazil’s efforts to stop it more complicated, federal officials said.
• Munduruku sources told Mongabay that deception, abandonment by the state and a lack of alternative income sources are what push some Munduruku people to mine.
• The recruitment of Indigenous peoples is an important mechanism used by miners to secure access to lands and gain support against government crackdowns, researchers said.
• Sources said the government should invest in public policies and alternative income projects to strengthen food security, improve health and the sustainable development of communities.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20588292

• As REDD projects around the world face setbacks, restoration projects in the Amazon are flourishing as a means of reviving market confidence in forest-based carbon credits.
• In Brazil, the golden goose for restoration, this business model has attracted companies from the mining and beef industries, banks, startups, and big tech.
• Federal and state governments are granting public lands to restoration companies to recover degraded areas.
• Restoration projects require substantial investments and long-term commitment, face challenges such as increasingly severe fire seasons, and deal with uncertainty over the future of the carbon market.

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20554167

archived (Wayback Machine)

...one thousand trucks poured into the national park, offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot. The site was left untouched and largely unexamined for over a decade. A sign was placed to ensure future researchers could locate and study it.

16 years later, Janzen dispatched graduate student Timothy Treuer to look for the site where the food waste was dumped.

Treuer initially set out to locate the large placard that marked the plot — and failed.

Compost your fruit scraps! (Or just throw them on the neighbour's pasture land.)

Thorn forest once blanketed the Rio Grande Valley. Restoring even a little of it could help the region cope with the impacts of climate change

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20552909

The fruit is edible, but there's not much food on it, so probably not worth planting outside of its native range.

Wayback Machine

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20488683

BR-319: Paving the way for Indigenous displacement and environmental catastrophe.

more about peatlands:

• Only 17% of peatlands, vital to curbing climate change, are protected, study finds
• Protecting peatlands and mangroves could halve Southeast Asia’s land-use emissions
• Peru’s rare peatland swamps at risk as gold mining expands
• Congo Peatlands - the largest and most intact across the world's tropics

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35583702

Whether the move will boost lumber supplies as Trump envisioned in an executive order last month remains to be seen. Former President Joe Biden’s administration also sought more logging in public forests to combat fires, which are worsening as the world gets hotter, yet U.S. Forest Service timber sales stayed relatively flat under his tenure.

It exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level before they are finalized. It also narrows the number of alternatives federal officials can consider when weighing logging projects.

Archived (Wayback Machine)

Update 2025: https://slrpnk.net/post/20382724

As Mongabay reported, researchers have found 3.5 million km (2.2 million mi) of roads in the nine Brazilian states encompassing the Legal Amazon. They estimated that at least 86% of these roads are used by loggers, gold miners and unauthorized settlers — branching off from official roads. Studies have also found that 95% of deforestation happens within 5.5 km (3.4 mi) of a road and 85% of fires each year occur within 5 km (3.1 mi).

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20381983

Archived (Wayback Machine)

“Let’s not do the old plant-and-pray” method, said Hurteau. “Let’s plant where we know that their chance of survival is quite high.”

Forest Service rules generally require planting the same species at the same elevations as before a fire, but the agency will “need to be flexible moving forward,” said Jason Sieg, acting supervisor of the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests & Pawnee National Grassland.

This is important. Finding suitable places to plant the trees can make a big difference in the survival rate. Trying to force plants to grow in a pre-determined location, regardless of current environmental conditions, is basically what industrial agriculture is doing (and using huge quantities of water and fertiliser in order to sustain).

For now, that might mean replanting at different elevations or collecting seeds from another location. Eventually, researchers say it could require planting species not found in an area originally — an option many have resisted.

“I’ve seen people go from saying, ‘Absolutely, we cannot move trees around’ to, ‘Well, maybe let’s try it at least, and do a few experiments to see if this will work,’” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, interim director at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.

“We need to start being creative if we want trees on our landscapes,” she said. “We’re in a place of such drastic climate change that we are not talking about whether or not some of these places will be a different kind of forest, but whether or not they will be forests at all.”

In desperate situations, when the goal is simply to get some type of forest growing back in a particular location, then it's important to choose "the best trees for the job" regardless of where they come from. Usually those will be native species, but not necessarily, especially in very disturbed ecosystems and those severely affected by climate change. If foreign trees aren't likely to pose a threat, then we mustn't discriminate against them; that would be the plant equivalent of speciesism and xenophobia. (If farmers discriminated in such a way, then there would be no peaches in North America, no tomatoes in Europe, no watermelons in Asia, and so on.)

Archived (Wayback Machine)

To be clear, exports of "Brazilian soy and corn" = "feed crops for animal agriculture" in China and Europe.

If it's worth doing, then it's worth doing right.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.vg/post/1404626

• Brazilian Amazon states are leading an offensive against environmental regulations in the Amazon and beyond. 
• The movement gained momentum in October when Brazil’s granary, Mato Grosso state, approved a bill undermining a voluntary agreement to protect the Amazon from soy expansion. 
• Before Mato Grosso, other Amazon states like Acre and Rondônia had already approved bills reducing protected areas and weakening the fight against illegal mining. 
• With its economy highly reliant on agribusiness, Mato Grosso is considered a successful model for other parts of the Amazon.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19464501

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — A judge in the Brazilian state of Rondonia has found two beef slaughterhouses guilty of buying cattle from a protected area of former rainforest in the Amazon and ordered them, along with three cattle ranchers, to pay a total of $764,000 for causing environmental damage, according to the decision issued Wednesday. Cattle raising drives Amazon deforestation. The companies Distriboi and Frigon and the ranchers may appeal.

It is the first decision in several dozen lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in environmental damages from the slaughterhouses for allegedly trading in cattle raised illegally in a protected area known as Jaci-Parana, which was rainforest but is now mostly converted to pasture. 

Four slaughterhouses are among the many parties charged, including JBS SA, which bills itself as the world’s largest protein producer. The court has not decided on the cases involving JBS.

Brazilian law forbids commercial cattle inside a protected area, yet some 210,000 head are being grazed inside Jaci-Parana, according to the state animal division. With almost 80% of its forest destroyed, it ranks as the most ravaged conservation unit in the Brazilian Amazon. A court filing pegs damages in the reserve at some $1 billion.

fruiterrarism (noun); the act of blatantly planting as much fruit as possible, regardless of what non-fruitarians may think, with the aim of creating an alternative to Babylon