[Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging

[lou gold]

Oh boy Folke, since David Yarrow and I seem to be the tree-huggers who
regularly contribute to this forum I can't help but think that your lecture
is being delivered at least in part to me. So let me take the time to
correct some of your statements that simply seem off-the-mark to me.
*
*
>
> * I know, everybody loves trees and it is a gut feeling for everybody that
> cutting trees is bad. *


I don't know who the "everyone" is that you are refering to but it
definitely does not include me. I am not against cutting trees and I am not
against the logging industry. The problem is that somehow you really don't
seem to see the forest for the trees.

In fact, one can take a long term view of the earth's vegetative cover and
see a ceaseless war between forestland and grassland. . The territory
controlled by these two great vegetative kingdoms has shifted back and for
across the earth many times due mostly to changing climatic conditions.

In general, human beings have been soldiers in the army of the grasslands
using all the weapons of "civilization" and "domestication" to achieve
victory over the forest. In general, BUT NOT ALWAYS. Apparently, one of the
great exceptions is to be found among -- you guessed it -- the Indios de
Terra Preta -- who are thought to have had millions of people living in the
central Amazon basin without ceaseless deforestation.
*
Deforestation sounds like a catastrophic event.

*Well, some times it is and some times it is not*.* It is when it triggers
climate change. Human deforestation created the climate shifts that resulted
in the Sahara desert, making it uninhabitable by most plants and critters. A
shift like that is catastrophic. When deforestation starts to trigger
regional climate change we might prefer to keep a lot of the forest
standing.

*A grown established forest has neutral balance of fixation and loss, if the
forest gets too old the danger of loosing all the stored biomass with a big
scale fire is imminent and very often.*

This is not true for the central Amazon basin where fire has historically
been extremely rare due to heavy rainfall. And where does the rainfall come
from? It comes from the transpiration of the trees in the forest. Without
the forest, the climate shifts to drought as has already been ocurring in
the Eastern Amazon. And drought triggers more fire, etc, etc in a positive
feedback loop that can alter both regional and global climate in
catastrophic ways.

With all due respects for the important work that you are doing in Bolivia
-- and the creative stewardship for both conservation and food production
that it represents -- I've got to say that the lowland basin of the Eastern
Amazon presents a radically different situation. Here is what Dan Nepstad
from Woods Hole says about it:

*Mongabay: **In Bali you also put out some rather dire projections for the
Amazon in 2030. Could you elaborate on this?

**Nepstad:* There are all these models (namely the Hadley model) pointing to
the end of the century when there will be a big forest die-back in the
Amazon. But before global warming is going to kick in there is going to be
all sorts of damage from the droughts we are already seeing as well as
deforestation, logging, and the fires that are part of that regime. To
factor in these effects, we took our deforestation model, our logging model,
and what we know about the effect of drought on tree mortality, and
projected out the year 2030 using current climate patterns — the last 10
years repeated into the future. We found that by the year 2030, 55 percent
of the forest will be either cleared or damaged — I think 31 percent cleared
and 24 percent damaged by either logging or drought, with a large portion of
that damaged forest catching fire. This produces a huge amount of emissions.
We're looking at 16-25 billion tons of carbon going into the atmosphere in a
very short time frame -- the next 22 years. The scary thing is some of these
assumptions are quite conservative.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0124-nepstad.html

*We have to see that this planet is the only one and until we do not have an
alternative to agricultural food production we cannot save all the trees in
this world.*

In what possible scenario do you imagine that anyone seriously involved in
these issues is trying to "save all the trees in the world"?
OK, I'm glad to think about how we can be most creativily involved in earth
changes INCLUDING DEFORESTATION but let's not clutter the discussion with
assertions that simply are not true.

Touch the earth and blessed be.

lou

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