Tree Huggers

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.)

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.

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

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.

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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).

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

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.)

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

cross-posted from: https://peculiar.florist/notes/9mvjejg1u8q1tqnr

What was once pasture is now a forest.

www.boredpanda.com/brazilian-couple-recreated-forest-sebastiao-leila-salgado-reforestation/
institutoterra.org/o-instituto/

Instituto Terra is a non-profit civil organization founded in April 1998. It is focused on the environmental restoration and sustainable rural development of the Doce River Valley. The region was originally covered by the Atlantic Forest and covers municipalities of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo bathed by the Doce River Basin.

The Rio Doce Basin is one of the most important in the Brazilian Southeast. In its domain live more than four million people, who face the consequences of deforestation and the disordered use of natural resources, such as soil erosion and water scarcity.

The Terra Institute is the result of the initiative of the couple Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado, who faced the scenario of environmental degradation in which the old cattle farm acquired from the family of Sebastião Salgado – like the many other rural units located in the mining city of Aimorés – made a decision: to return to nature that decades of environmental degradation destroyed.

The first step was to transform the area into a Private Reserve of Natural Heritage – RPPN Fazenda Bulcão. The title was obtained in an unprecedented way in October 1998, being the first environmental recognition granted in Brazil to a completely degraded property, given the commitment to be reforested.

The first planting was carried out in November 1999 and was attended by students from schools in the municipality of Aimorés, in Minas Gerais. Thus was born the largest proposal of the Earth Institute: to share with the community of its surroundings all the knowledge acquired in the environmental restoration of the 608.69 hectares of the RPPN Fazenda Bulcão.

To achieve this goal develops projects ranging from forest restoration and nascent protection to applied scientific research and environmental education. The financial support comes from different partners, both from the governmental and private enterprise, as well as from Foundations and individual donors from various countries and other institutions of the Third Sector.

Due to the action of the Earth Institute, thousands of hectares of degraded areas of the Atlantic Forest in the middle Doce River and close to 2,000 springs are in the process of recovery. The former cattle ranch, once completely degraded, today houses a forest with diversity of species of the flora of Atlantic Forest.

The experience proves that with the recovery of green, springs flow again and species of the Brazilian fauna, at risk of extinction, return to have a safe refuge.

avant : institutoterra.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/antes-1.jpg

après : institutoterra.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Instituto-Terra-2022-%C2%A9Sebastiao-Salgado-221213-00-00393-scaled.jpg

#ecologie #Bresil #InstitutoTerra

@environnement