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POPSWildlife in the DMZ: Vanishing rainforest of the Congo basin 1, The demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating South and North Korea is home to over 1,000 plant species and rare animals. The DMZ Forum is a lobby group promoting the idea of turning the area into a nature reserve. 2. The forest is the world's biggest after the Amazon. Now Britain and Norway have created a £108m fund to help protect it from logging and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Congo basin forest is home to around 50 million people in six countries including Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Congo-Brazzaville. The Congo basin forest is twice the size of France and exceeded in size only by the Amazon. It is estimated that logging - much of it illegal - destroys an area the size of 25,000 football pitches every week. The UN estimates that at present rates two-thirds of the forest will have vanished by the year 2040.
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POPSAmerica Buying Big Slices of South America I like the idea of private conservation (better than no conservation at all), but I can also see a scenario in which the rich lay claim to the increasingly scarce resources of the future, such as water (and oil of course i.e Iraq.) I guess only the future will tell, if the rich intend to 'share'.
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POPSMy cousin, killed in plane crash, read remarks This clip is extra special to me due to the fact that it pertains to my cousin, Theodore Parker III and his career in helping to save traces of rainforest in Bolivia and Peru. Ted was killed in a small airplane crash while conducting field research in South America. Ted's work is yet valued today to science and he is missed greatly.
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POPSThe Loneliest man on Earth? Among the few to have clapped eyes on him is Brazilian film-maker Vincent Carelli. It's unclear what happened to the rest of the man's people, but FUNAI reckons "he is the sole survivor of at least two successive massacres", although these massacres have never been proved. The last time FUNAI tried to contact him in 2005, the man shot its field worker in the chest with an arrow, fortunately not fatally. Since then FUNAI has decided to leave him be. The Man of the Hole is not alone in his plight: he's one of an estimated 40,000 isolated people worldwide, about whom we know very little. Sadly, one thing we do know is that many of them are constantly threatened by loggers and oil companies, who want to commercialise the land they live on, or harassed by paramilitary groups, missionaries, drug traffickers and foreign tourists who want to make contact.
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POPSGood environmental news from America! Some good environmental news from America! It takes an act of Congress to add publicly owned land to the National Wilderness Preservation System, and the 109th Congress has acted to preserve over 1 million acres of wilderness.
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POPSThe World's Largest Butterfly: Queen Alexandra's Birdwing is the largest butterfly in the world, with a wingspan up to 1 foot (30 cm). This tropical butterfly is from the rainforest in northern Papua New Guinea. The caterpillars eat the pipevine plant, which contains poison; this makes the butterfly toxic to predators, which will get sick if they eat it. So they quickly learn to leave these huge butterflies alone.
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POPSNew study predicts long-term worsening weather
New study finds an ongoing recent trend towards increasing numbers of "extreme weather events" (droughts, storms, heat waves), accompanied by high levels of human suffering and economic damage, and predicts this trend will accelerate in the coming decades. From the source (p. 2): While global warming studies always have their critics, it’s not easy to dismiss these findings. They’re based on nine different climate-change models developed by leading scientists in four countries: France, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Each one is processed by supercomputers, crunching millions of data points on variables like surface temperatures, ocean currents, winds, solar radiation, volcanic eruptions and rainforest destruction. Each one takes months to perform. “The fact that all nine produced remarkably consistent agreement gives us a lot of confidence in the results,” says Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, another of the study’s authors.
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