I’ll never forget a conversation I had 15 years ago with paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
He told me and several colleagues that he was basically tired of environmentalists talking about "saving the planet."
He flung his arms wide and told us that "if the history of the Earth is my wingspan, all of human history would represent a sliver of my fingernail."
His point? "The planet will be fine … it will just turn into something not so good for people.”
So, we should stop talking about saving the planet and start talking about saving ourselves.
In Nepal, tiger tourism accounts for 50 percent of the revenue some local communities bring in each year.
The tiger also features prominently in the stories and teachings of Buddhism. But the tiger’s habitat may be where the greatest value lies.
Protecting the forest is good for tigers, but is also a plus for protecting water quality and quantity. During my last trip, I visited a community where recently restored forests brought a long-dead freshwater spring back to life.
A healthy forest also purifies air and provides products such as timber and medicines.
Forests also sequester carbon.
The destruction of forests ranks as the second-leading cause of climate change — after the burning of fossil fuels — accounting for up to 20 percent of global carbon pollution. Recognizing this connection last December in Cancun, the countries of the world established the ground rules for a mechanism known as REDD — reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
REDD works by recognizing and quantifying one of the great values of standing forests: removing and storing harmful carbon pollution.
If a country can show that it has reduced its level of deforestation (and the related carbon pollution), then it will receive payments.
These payments could come from other governments or from corporations looking to reach climate goals.
Great idea, but only if you can accurately draw up a balance sheet of carbon-in, carbon-out.
No one in their right mind would put money into a market with a broken ticker. Until recently, measuring carbon has been too complicated, too costly and altogether inaccurate.
An unlikely solution: lasers being shot from planes at 200,000 photons per second.
In a nutshell, that’s LiDAR — Light Detection and Ranging.
With LiDAR, we can calibrate aerial images with a smattering of ground plots administered by scientists.
The results are calculated to create an algorithm that enables you to use satellite imagery not just to count the trees, but also the carbon they contain. A year and a half ago, we flew with the Stanford University Carnegie Airborne Observatory’s Greg Asner over those very impossible-to-measure forests of the Peruvian Amazon and mapped the structure of 11 million acres in 3 weeks. That’s a structural analysis of a forest down to one meter for an area the size of Switzerland — and completed for just a few cents an acre.
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