Preface. I wrote in “Life after fossil fuels” that as energy declined, it would be hard to cut down distant forests with limited oil supplies. I thought this because even in Britain, so denuded of trees people turned to filthy coal, forests still existed. This was because trees needed to be near rivers or waterways to transport their timber to towns and cities. Overland horses could transport wood perhaps 10 miles or less since roads were awful if they existed at all. But today due to the war in Ukraine and Russia cutting off oil, gas, and coal to Europe & Ukraine, people are driving to forests and cutting them down for heat in the winter since oil still exists at reasonable prices.
Forests in Europe and elsewhere are already being decimated by Europe’s need for wood — biomass is over half of the EU “renewable” energy. Though there are forests inaccessible due to lack of roads or too far from towns and cities, such as the boreal regions. But even these forests may disappear as they go up in smoke from global warming wildfires and bark beetles.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Feinberg A et al (2024) Deforestation as an Anthropogenic Driver of Mercury Pollution. Environmental Science & Technology. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c07851
About 10% of human-made mercury emissions into the atmosphere each year are the result of global deforestation, a significant source of mercury that has been overlooked. The world’s vegetation, from the Amazon rainforest to the savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa, acts as a sink that removes the toxic pollutant from the air. However, if the current rate of deforestation remains unchanged or accelerates, net mercury emissions will keep increasing.
The Amazon rainforest plays a particularly important role as a mercury sink, contributing about 30% of the global land sink. Curbing Amazon deforestation could thus have a substantial impact on reducing mercury pollution. Although global reforestation efforts could increase annual mercury uptake by about 5% that isn’t enough, what’s needed are worldwide pollution control efforts.
Cavanagh et al (2022) Fuel exploitation and environmental degradation at the Iron Age copper industry of the Timna Valley, southern Israel, Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18940-z
Researchers from Tel Aviv University collected samples of charcoal used as fuel for metallurgical furnaces in the Timna Valley, located in Israel’s southern desert region, during the and examined them under a microscope.
Charcoal fuels from the 11th to 9th centuries BCE changed over time, at first from local white broom and acacia thorn trees, which made excellent charcoal. As forests disappeared, low quality charcoal from faraway imported timber was used, until thousands of mining sites disappeared. Deforestation prevented copper production for about 1,000 years and far less is produced than in the past since the landscape still hasn’t fully recovered because the removal of trees damaged the soil which eroded without tree roots to stabilize the soil and no longer holds as much water.
The copper was extracted from the ore via smelting in earthenware furnaces at a temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius. The entire process took about eight hours, after which the furnace was smashed, and the copper retrieved from its base. The wood charcoal required to attain the high temperature was manufactured beforehand at special sites, by slow combustion of trees and bushes cut down for this purpose.
The production site called the ‘Slaves’ Hill,’ which was only one of several sites operating simultaneously, burned as many as 400 acacias and 1,800 brooms every year. As these resources dwindled, the industry looked for other solutions, as evidenced by the changing composition of the charcoal. However, transporting woody plants from afar did not prove cost-effective for the long run.
[My note: fossil fuels, especially coke from coal, is far superior to wood charcoal, and is essential for making cement, steel, iron, glass, bricks, microchips and more as explained in Chapter 9 of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy” and why there are no renewable substitutes such as hydrogen, biomass, electricity and so on]
2016-8-16. Smoke Waves’ Will Affect Millions in Coming Decades
Wildfires threaten more than land and homes. The smoke they produce contains fine particles (PM2.5) that can poison the air for hundreds of miles. Air pollution from the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in northern Alberta, Canada sent people in Michigan to the hospital with respiratory illnesses. As wildfires increase in frequency and severity due to climate change, more and more communities are at risk of prolonged exposure to harmful levels of smoke. Harvard University researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at Yale University, have created a watch list of hundreds of counties in the western United States at the highest risk of exposure to dangerous levels of pollution from wildfires in the coming decades. Among those counties, heavily populated counties such as San Francisco County, CA, King County, WA, Alameda County, CA, and Contra Costa County, CA are estimated to face the highest level of risk of wildfire smoke exposure in the coming decades.
Nakkazi E (2015) Uganda’s forests dwindle as illegal settlers hollow them out. NewScientist.
Uganda’s forest cover fell from 24 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 2009, and it is still falling. Every year the country loses around 88,000 hectares of forest. At this rate none will be left in a few decades. Much of it is due to illegal logging by people setting in the forests. Migrants from other parts of the country as well as neighboring countries started encroaching on Kibaale central forest reserves over 20 years ago. They create extensive farms and build permanent settlements; some take possession of land using fake documents.
From the outside, forest reserves looks intact. This is because the “encroachers”, as they are called locally, start clearing from the centre. “Inside, the forests have all been cleared and permanent structures – churches, schools, brick houses – are all in sight,” says Arian.
The destruction goes as far as the eye can see. In some areas freshly sown beans are sprouting. As we walk through Ruzaire forest reserve, some 12 square kilometres of protected land in Uganda, it is as though the perpetrators have just left. An axe and a coat hang on a tree trunk, near freshly cut firewood tied in bundles. It’s indicative of a larger struggle: the dwindling forests here are being hollowed out despite efforts to preserve them. Roughly a third of the 16 forest reserves in Kibaale district have been seriously damaged and occupied by squatters. About half of those are 50 per cent occupied, says Charles Arian, a manager for Kibaale district at the National Forestry Authority (NFA).
Protecting the forest reserves isn’t easy – or safe. “Most illegal loggers work at night and rest during the day. Even then they are usually armed with traditional tools [like] spears, machetes, hoes, ready to fight back,” says Frederick Kugonza, a district forest supervisor at NFA. “Illegal loggers are armed with traditional tools like spears or machetes and ready to fight back.”
Most of the native hardwood species like African teak have been cut down. The forest animals have moved on as the illegal loggers have moved in. There used to be elephants, wild pigs, apes, baboons, antelopes and duikers here. But little trace of them remains.
McSweeney K (2014) Legalizing drugs in America could help save Central American rainforests and biodiversity. Science. Conservation Drug Policy as Conservation Policy: Narco-Deforestation.
The watershed 2013 report, The Drug Problem in the Americas, reviews failures of the U.S.-led “war on drugs”. In Central America, a key zone of drug transit that is being ripped apart by narco-fueled violence and corruption, the push for reform signals hope that the conditions fueling drug traffickers’ profits and corrosive political influence may eventually be dismantled
Seemingly far from the world of conservation science, drug policy reform could also alleviate pressures on Central America’s rapidly disappearing forests. Mounting evidence suggests that the trafficking of drugs (principally cocaine) has become a crucial—and overlooked—accelerant of forest loss in the isthmus.
Since 2000, deforestation rates in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua have been among the highest in Latin America and the worldr, a globally important region of exceptional biological diversity.
Forest loss has long been driven by multiple interacting forces: weak governance, conflicting property regimes, high poverty, climate change, illegal logging, infrastructure megaprojects, and agribusiness expansion. The trafficking of drugs has intensified these processes and has become a powerful deforestation driver in its own right.
One reason is the close correlation between the timing and location of forest loss and drug transit. Central America has long been a conduit for U.S.-bound cocaine from South America. But the isthmus’ importance as a “bridge” exploded after 2006–07, as Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) moved their smuggling operations southward. Porous borders, corruption, and weak public institutions made Guatemala and Honduras especially attractive, who increasingly routed “primary” cocaine shipments (i.e., boats or planes carrying cocaine directly from South America) into Guatemala’s Petén and eastern Honduras. Thinly populated and with little state presence, these remote forest frontiers offer ideal conditions for traffickers evading interdiction.
“Hot spots” of deforestation often overlap trafficking nodes, especially near primary drug-transfer hubs in eastern Nicaragua and eastern Honduras. For example, in 2011, Honduras’ Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve was listed by UNESCO as “World Heritage in Danger” because of alarming rates of forest loss attributed to the presence of narco-traffickers—as signaled by multiple clandestine landing strips throughout the reserve.
In the contested rural landscapes of the Petén (7), newer sites of primary drug transfer combine with established secondary transshipment routes into Mexico. In Laguna del Tigre National Park and protected areas in the municipality of Sayaxché, the intensification of drug trafficking has been concurrent with annual forest loss rates there of 5% and 10%, respectively. Cadastral analyses confirm that narco-traffickers own large ranches within Laguna del Tigre and other protected areas.
What explains the spatial and temporal overlap of drug trafficking and deforestation?
First, forests are cut for clandestine roads and landing strips. Second, drug trafficking intensifies preexisting pressures on forests by infusing already weakly governed frontiers with unprecedented amounts of cash and weapons. When resident ranchers, oil-palm growers, land speculators, and timber traffickers become involved in drug trafficking, they are narco-capitalized and emboldened and so greatly expand their activities—typically at the expense of the (indigenous) smallholders who are often key forest defenders.
Indigenous and peasant groups report being powerless against the bribes, property fraud, and brutality dispossessing them of their lands. Forest governance at higher levels is also eroded by violence and corruption: Conservation groups have been threatened and fear entering “narco-zones”, while state prosecutors are bribed to look away.
Third, the vast profits that traffickers earn from moving drugs appear to create powerful new incentives for DTOs themselves to convert forest to agriculture (usually pasture or oil-palm plantation). Profits must be laundered. Buying and “improving” remote land (by clearing it) allows dollars to be untraceably converted into private assets, while simultaneously legitimizing a DTO’s presence at the frontier (e.g., as a ranching operation). Large “narco-estates” also serve to monopolize territory against rival DTOs and to maximize traffickers’ range of activity.
In most cases, the purchase and conversion of forests within protected areas and indigenous territories is illegal. But traffickers have enough political influence to ensure their impunity and, where necessary, to falsify land titles. They can then profit from land speculation when they sell to criminal organizations—domestic and foreign—who are increasingly diversifying into rural enterprise. These actors may in turn sell to legitimate corporate interests looking to invest in Central American agribusiness. The result is permanent conversion of forests to agriculture.
Drug Policies Are Conservation Policies
In contexts of drug crop cultivation—particularly in the Andes—analysts have long noted that eradication policies often push coca (and opium poppy and marijuana) growers into ever more ecologically sensitive zones, with substantial environmental impacts. Relatively little attention, however, has focused on how the same “balloon effect” is operating further up the drug commodity chain, in the countries through which drugs are being moved: Interdiction programs push traffickers into remote spaces where they exacerbate existing pressures on forests and find new opportunities for money laundering and illegal enrichment through forest conversion. For example, “successful” interdiction efforts in Honduras in 2012 appear to be encouraging traffickers to shift operations and ecological impacts to new areas in eastern Nicaragua.
Ultimately, intensified ecological devastation across trafficking zones should be added to the long list of negative unintended consequences borne by poor countries as a result of the overwhelming emphasis on supply-side drug reduction policies.
For the international conservation community, this is an important reminder that drug policy is conservation policy.
Of course, drug policy innovations alone will never end deforestation in Central America. But drug policy reforms could mitigate a compounding pressure on these biodiverse forests and buy time for states, conservationists, and rural communities to renew protected area governance and enforcement. Rethinking the war on drugs could yield important ecological benefits.
Kryt J (2013) Jeremy Kryt. Battle in the Clouds In the Colombian Andes, ecosystems are disappearing faster than scientists can study them. Earth Island Journal.
As much as 1,864 square miles of Colombia’s forests are lost every year to legal and illegal logging. Scientists say a third of the country’s forest cover has been cut down. Much of the deforestation in Colombia is driven by commercial logging and local settlers’ need for pasture and cropland. But leftist guerrillas and right-wing militias are also responsible for cutting down vast swaths of jungle to plant illicit drug crops like coca, opium poppy, and cannabis to fund their agendas. Studies have shown that as much as 25% of annual deforestation in Colombia is caused by illegal coca production alone. The insurgencies – especially the largest and best-equipped rebellion by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – pose grave risks for rangers, biologists, and conservation workers in the region.
Colombia is one of the most biologically diverse nations on Earth, boasting 10 percent of the world’s plant and animal species. But if deforestation continues at current rates, scientists estimate the nation’s woodlands will be depleted within 40 years. Loss of forest cover is bad enough at low-lying elevations, but it’s especially devastating on the slopes of the Andes, where scores of narrow-range, endemic species have evolved to take advantage of the habitat niches created by sudden changes in altitude.
“Colombia’s montane [ecosystems] are much reduced and very fragmented.… Its species are in serious trouble,” Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation at Duke University. According to Pimm’s research staff, as much as 70% of all Andean ecosystems have already been compromised by deforestation, mining, and overgrazing.
“The political elite have decided that we should become a global mining superpower – no matter what the cost,” he says. Colombia is rich in gold, coal, and precious gems. Mining currently makes up about a quarter of Colombia’s total exports (about $7.3 billion). Nationwide, transnational mining and oil companies have received, or have sought, concessions to develop a staggering 40 percent of Colombia’s territory. “If all of the [mining] concessions were fulfilled, there would be no place left for Colombians to live,” Martinez says. He adds that the official statistics don’t include the many illegal mines owned and operated by the FARC and other insurgent groups.
2016-10-12. Significant deforestation in Brazilian Amazon goes undetected, study finds. Kevin Stacey. phys.org
These maps show where the Earth’s forests are vanishing Washington Post.
As we return to wood as our major fuel source as we did before the 14th century, we are likely to cut most of the forests down to heat, cook, build homes, furniture, and so on with what little forest remains.
Deforestation and Its Extreme Effect on Global Warming
Scientific American. Nov 2012.
From logging, agricultural production and other economic activities, deforestation adds more atmospheric CO2 than the sum total of cars and trucks on the world’s roads. Scientific American.
May 6, 2014. Jack Hannah, CNN. Poachers take chunks from California redwoods, put majestic trees at risk
America’s magnificent redwood forests face a piecemeal but steady assault by poachers too. Thieves are cutting massive chunks from the base of the champion trees, the tallest on Earth and up to 2,000 years old. Under the cloak of darkness, bandits are poaching the burl from the old-growth redwoods in Redwood National and State Parks in California, and selling them for thousands of dollars to make furniture, bowls and souvenirs. Burls are crucial to the survival of the redwoods. When a burl cutting occurs, a lot of the bark is damaged or removed, and that bark is critical to protecting the redwoods from insect infestation and fire.
2003 Trees in Haiti Fall Victim to Poverty of the People. New York Times
Once blanketed by lush forests, Haiti is now nearly 90% deforested. Competing against a demand that has far exceeded supply, the Caribbean nation loses more than 30 million trees a year to provide wood, fuel and work to a desperate population. Haiti’s president, Mr. Aristide said “We face a total ecological disaster.”Misery and the lack of education are making people cut more trees.” Political instability has also accentuated the despair, pushing hundreds to the forests for a source of income. “When there are political problems in Port-au-Prince, more people come up here with chain saws,” Mr. Joseph said. The scarcity also affects farmers. With no tree roots to hold the soil, topsoil has disappeared and fewer vegetables can grow. Some farmers also report a change in weather. “Because there are fewer trees, there’s also less rain,” said a 40-year-old farmer, Cedner Jean. “Dew allows us to grow cabbage, potatoes and beans but we can’t grow anything else anymore.”
Bardi, Ugo. 2014. Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Ancient Irish forests were destroyed by the late 18th century, when less than 1% of the island’s surface had trees (Bardi “A distant mirror: ireland’s great famine” Dec 12, 2008, oildrum). Deforestation there had especially tragic consequences: trees take a long time to regrow in the cold irish climate, and bare soil is washed away by rain. This loss of fertile soil was an important factor in generating the famines that started in 1848 and killed over a million people.