Perpetual Innovation

Category: environmental study

  • Finding Where U.S. Forests Have Been Undisturbed for a Quarter Century « Landsat Science

    Finding Where U.S. Forests Have Been Undisturbed for a Quarter Century « Landsat Science:

    This is a very cool study of the “old forests” that are undisturbed in the USA. The Northeast and the pacific maintained some undisturbed forests; the south was really bad. There are many plants, animals and entire ecosystems that rely on old forests. This study demonstrates how bad it is and how much worse it could get over the next few generations (of humans).

    This is a 25 year study using landsat technology (through 2010), so it doesn’t address the prior 200 years since the pilgrims came to visit north america.

    One of the things that we harp on endlessly at this cite is the compounding effects of human actions. In this case. The study uses exponential decay to show the compounding effects of old forest degradation. In 100 years there would be only about 20% of the old forest left in a business as usual (BAS) scenario. But that number would drop to only about 4% in another 100 years. That means that in 200 to 300 years we could expect virtually no old forests to exist.

    It would be interesting if the last 10 years are significantly different. The Great Recession caused commodity prices to plummet. Wood and paper were especially hard hit. The demise of coal — mining and burning — in the US would help as well. Urban sprawl, slowed to a crawl.

    Haung points out that the big opportunities to mitigate (old) forest loss is in the south and by minimizing fires in the west. Of course, if we let the old forest go to near zero, we could have an easy opportunity for exponential regrowth. (I’m being facetious, of course, once forest — especially old forest — has be used for other purposes, it is nearly impossible to move it back to nature and keep it there for 100 years or more.)

    Doctor Haung, what do you think the current trend might be? Are we starting to “bend the curve” (as the old addage in finance and climate change goes)?

    Visit Dr. haung’s Page at U of Maryland and see a link to the study here: http://geog.umd.edu/facultyprofile/Huang/Chengquan

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Sustainability becomes a business law: Organic is more productive

    Sustainability becomes a business law:

    Two things resurfaced over the last couple days. One is very local to Florida related to Sustainability is the Business Law. It looks at the focus of sustainability from the business view, or from the environmental view; which is the right view. And the answer, of course, is “Yes”.  Aiming for a win, win in the business vs. environment tug of war. The old approach of win-lose turns out to be a lose-lose in the long run.

    But a separate study by the Rodale Institute, with a 30-year long (and ongoing) study of farming showed organic farming to be a hands-down winner over the mass production methods used in the USA. Actual link to the study is here: http://rodaleinstitute.org/our-work/farming-systems-trial/

    That study knocked my socks off!
    Now I gotta go socks shopping for new organically grown socks (bamboo-based
    maybe?).
    A 30+ year field study on Organic farming vs. non-organic (now including GMOs).
    Yields up, resources down (water us and drought tolerance), soil quality, profits up…
    WoW!.
    And, of course, there is a major move in consumer preferences toward healthier foods and more local grown foods as measured by massive moves by such players as Chipotle’s (CMG) and Whole Foods (WFM)… and against the highly processed foods like McDonalds (McD).
    I’m curious what other people think of this study. I wonder how they did several things.
    Also, I
    could not find the exact publication date. The stats were a year or two behind.
    Do you all think that the field study is fully accurate?

    ‘via Blog this’

  • EPA is finally going to conduct a big Environmental Study on Gas Fracking

    There has been a painfully slow move to NatGas in the US, even though we appear to have centuries worth of it using new fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques.
    The one holdup, kinda, is being blamed on the possible environmental impact from gas drilling. (As if it could be worse than oil with its BP Gulf and Exxon Yellowstone spills in the last two years.)
    With NatGas at a price of $1 (to $2) for the equivalent of a gallon of diesel in vehicle fuel ($4/gal), many people argue that it’s a “no brainer” decision for the US to switch to NatGas. But inertia and the massive interests in the current oil & coal economy seem to have us doing the “no brain” part of a far better decision than imported oil or much dirtier/deadly coal.
    Check out the Utica Shale and Marcellus Shale information… The Utica Shale formation that is below the Marcellus is just now becoming commercially available using new drilling techniques that have really been worked out since about 2005.