World Wide Tree News

Imagine for a moment standing under the canopy of your favorite
forest,
whether it's in the eastern United States, the Amazon, somewhere in
the
Sierra Nevadas, Costa Rica, Russia, or China. ******Visualize the
diversity
of life that it holds √ the birds, flowers, insects, mammals √ and try
to
imagine seeing the trees and plants "breathing" in the carbon dioxide
and
storing it in their leaves and massive trunks, then "breathing" it out
again
by dropping their leaves and branches and letting the fungi and other
microorganisms take over their part of the process (decomposition),
then
returning that carbon to the air or ground again for the trees to take
up
over the next season, under their canopy of leaves. The forest and all
its
players are just doing their jobs, and willingly. Now imagine that
same
forest being cut to the ground or burned within the span of a few
hours or
days √ as compared to how much time it took to grow and how many
iterations
of the carbon cycle it's been through. As a result, the forest (or
what's
left of it) no longer acts effectively as a carbon sink. It may be an
open
wasteland of tree stumps, organic debris and stirred up soil, exposed
to the
wind and sun. That once forested land has now become a carbon source,
a
source of carbon that once was a container or sink for carbon, now
released
liberally into the atmosphere. That whole amazing carbon cycle has
been
broken and opened up to release all that stored carbon into the
atmosphere
as CO2. And "Voila!" As with each readers' imagination, so too are
many
thousands of acres of forest now being burned or destroyed at alarming
rates
in ways that release tons of carbon, contributing to the positive
feedback
mechanism √ at an exponential rate √ of increasing GHGs and thus
increasing
our global temperature through human actions .

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