The World Is Greening

choi

Latest first.

(1) Matt Ridley, How Fossil Fuels Have Greened the Planet; Satellites show that the amount of green vegetation has been increasing for three decades straight. Wall Street Journal, Jan 5, 2013 .
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 17621593679506.html

My comment: Ignore the title (whose conclusion that fuels consumption is the cause of the greening, may or may not be true, But the subtitle is a fact: "This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction"--as well as global warming, I may add.
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(2) Jim Sterba, America Gone Wild.  The good news: Wildlife populations in the US have experienced an astonishing resurgence. The bad news: All those animals are now our neighbors. WAll Street Journal, Nov 2, 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 09075316856728.html
(an excerpt of his book Nature's War; The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds. Crown, 2012)

Quote:

(a) "Reforestation began in 19th-century New England, when farmers started abandoning marginal pastures and buying cheap feed grain from the rich, relatively flat lands on the other end of the newly opened Erie Canal. Later, petroleum-based fertilizers and gasoline-powered machinery made Midwestern farming more productive and draft animals obsolete, freeing up 70 million acres that were being used to feed them. Many farmers, meanwhile, opted for jobs in town. Trees took back much of their land and, after World War II, nonfarmers began moving onto it.

"Today, the eastern third of the country has the largest forest in the contiguous U.S., as well as two-thirds of its people. Since the 19th century, forests have grown back to cover 60% of the land within this area. In New England, an astonishing 86.7% of the land that was forested in 1630 had been reforested by 2007, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Not since the collapse of Mayan civilization 1,200 years ago has reforestation on this scale happened in the Americas, says David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, an ecology research unit of Harvard University. In 2007, forests covered 63.2% of Massachusetts and 58% of Connecticut, the third and fourth most densely populated states in the country, not counting forested suburban and exurban sprawl (though a lot of sprawl has enough trees to be called a real forest if people and their infrastructure weren't there).

(b) "Some towns are becoming more tolerant of hunters than of deer, noting that while guns kill 31,000 Americans a year, hunters kill only about 100, mostly each other. Deer, on the other hand, [in car collisions] kill upward of 250 people a year—drivers and passengers—and hospitalize 30,000 more.

(c) table:

"White-tailed deer
* Pre-Columbian period: 30 million
* 1900: 350,000
* Today: 25 million to 40 million
Source: 'Nature Wars'