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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday September 15 2016, @12:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the treet-Mother-Earth-better dept.

Current Biology has an article (open access, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.08.049) about the extent of wilderness areas around the world (except Antarctica). The authors found a decrease of 9.6% in the extent of those areas in the 2010s, as compared to the early 1990s.

For 3 of the 14 biomes (kinds of ecosystems)—"Tropical and Subtropical Coniferous Forests, Mangroves, and Tropical and Subtropical Dry Broadleaf Forests"—there remain no contiguous areas of at least 10,000 km2, say the authors. However, such large contiguous areas do comprise 82.3% of all wild lands.

They note that

the total stock of terrestrial ecosystem carbon (~1,950 petagrams of [c]arbon (Pg C)) is greater than that of oil (∼173 Pg C), gas (∼383 Pg C), coal (∼446 Pg C), or the atmosphere (∼598 Pg C), and a significant proportion of this carbon is found in the globally significant wilderness areas of the tropics and boreal region.

and recommend legal protection for wild lands as part of efforts against emission of carbon dioxide.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2016, @12:39AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 16 2016, @12:39AM (#402552)

    The present land and sea reserves are nowhere near enough to sustain true wild ecosystems. We may be able to keep deer and turkey in wetland preserves, but migratory species are getting hit hard, large mammals, large anything really, are getting hit very hard, and will not recover in the next 50 years even if we stop killing them now. Whale hunting was seriously scaled back in the 70s, and the numbers have recovered, but not to 1900s levels.

    A major problem I see with "nature preserves" as they are done today is that they mostly encompass lands that people don't prefer in the first place: swamps, deserts, remote stretches of ocean. It's better than no preserves at all, but it is treating wildlife like the Native Americans were done 200 years ago - pushed into "reserves" on the worst patches of Earth.

    If nature reserves are going to work long term, they're going to need to scale up significantly: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/half-earth/ [wwnorton.com]

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 16 2016, @01:02AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 16 2016, @01:02AM (#402563) Journal

    The present land and sea reserves are nowhere near enough to sustain true wild ecosystems.

    Depends on the location. There's some big stretches that already sustain true wild ecosystems. But we can always acquire more land for such reserves and that is being done both publicly and privately.

    A major problem I see with "nature preserves" as they are done today is that they mostly encompass lands that people don't prefer in the first place: swamps, deserts, remote stretches of ocean. It's better than no preserves at all, but it is treating wildlife like the Native Americans were done 200 years ago - pushed into "reserves" on the worst patches of Earth.

    And what's the alternative? People aren't going to let go of the desirable land. Not much point to being concerned about "major problems" that can't get better.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2016, @02:38AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 16 2016, @02:38AM (#402594)

      The people who lived in the Florida Everglades considered that land desirable when they were kicked out to expand the national park. The south end of that national park (in Florida Bay) is an excellent example of why strict no-harvest preserves are an excellent thing. In the 1950s, Florida Lobster were abundant - to the point that fishermen would only catch them to eat if they had a bad day fishing and couldn't get anything else, the "bugs" were everywhere and easy to catch. They became popular, were harvested and their numbers tremendously reduced. Now there's a short season where they are allowed to be taken under strictly enforced rules and regulations, and in areas where harvest under these rules is allowed the lobster are relatively rare, hard to find and hard to catch. However, the park does not permit lobster harvest, ever, and as a result the population has rebounded (not to 1950s levels) and the commercial lobster fishermen now mostly line their traps up along the park boundaries to catch the lobsters that wander out of the park protection.

      Point being: "giving up" some land, back to nature, makes the remaining land more desirable, more productive and more valuable.

      Or, we can follow the model of the "Fertile Crescent," a.k.a. the cradle of civilization, which turned from a very human-friendly lands into deserts today after centuries of farming and extracting all possible value from all of the land to support human needs and desires.

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