60 acres lost a minute - Rain forests fall at 'alarming' rate

ABO EBAM, Nigeria - In the gloomy shade deep in Africa's rain forest, the noontime silence was pierced by the whine of a far-off chain saw. It was the sound of destruction, echoed from wood to wood, continent to continent, in the tropical belt that circles the globe.
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From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia's archipelagos, human encroachment is shrinking the world's rain forests.

The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists — and was little heeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in destructiveness. The numbers have changed: U.N. specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back. And the fears have changed.

Experts still warn of extinction of animal and plant life, of the loss of forest peoples' livelihoods, of soil erosion and other damage. But scientists today worry urgently about something else: the fateful feedback link of trees and climate.

Global warming is expected to dry up and kill off vast tracts of rain forest, and dying forests will feed global warming.

"If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change," declared more than 300 scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others in an appeal for action at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The burning or rotting of trees that comes with deforestation — at the hands of ranchers, farmers, timbermen — sends more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world's planes, trains, trucks and automobiles. Forest destruction accounts for about 20 percent of manmade emissions, second only to burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heat. Conversely, healthy forests absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon.

"The stakes are so dire that if we don't start turning this around in the next 10 years, the extinction crisis and the climate crisis will begin to spiral out of control," said Roman Paul Czebiniak, a forest expert with Greenpeace International. "It's a very big deal."

The December U.N. session in Bali may have been a turning point, endorsing negotiations in which nations may fashion the first global financial plan for compensating developing countries for preserving their forests.

The latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) helped spur delegates to action.

"Deforestation continues at an alarming rate of about 13 million hectares (32 million acres) a year," the U.N. body said in its latest "State of the World's Forests" report.

Because northern forests remain essentially stable, that means 50,000 square miles of tropical forest are being cleared every 12 months — equivalent to one Mississippi or more than half a Britain. The lumber and fuelwood removed in the tropics alone would fill more than 1,000 Empire State Buildings, FAO figures show.

Although South America loses slightly more acreage than Africa, the rate of loss is higher here — almost 1 percent of African forests gone each year. In 2000-2005, the continent lost 10 million acres a year, including big chunks of forest in Sudan, Zambia and Tanzania, up from 9 million a decade earlier, the FAO reports.

Across the tropics the causes can be starkly different.

The Amazon and other South American forests are usually burned for cattle grazing or industrial-scale soybean farming. In Indonesia and elsewhere in southeast Asia, island forests are being cut or burned to make way for giant plantations of palm, whose oil is used in food processing, cosmetics and other products.

In Africa, by contrast, it's individuals hacking out plots for small-scale farming.

Here in Nigeria's southeastern Cross Rivers State, home to one of the largest remaining tropical forests in Africa, people from surrounding villages of huts and cement-block homes go to the forest each day to work their pineapple and cocoa farms. They see no other way of earning money to feed their families.

"The developed countries want us to keep the forests, since the air we breathe is for all of us, rich countries and poor countries," said Ogar Assam Effa, 54, a tree plantation director and member of the state conservation board.

"But we breathe the air, and our bellies are empty. Can air give you protein? Can air give you carbohydrates?" he asked. "It would be easy to convince people to stop clearing the forest if there was an alternative."

The state, which long ago banned industrial logging, is trying to offer alternatives.

Working with communities like Abo Ebam, near Nigeria's border with Cameroon, the Cross Rivers government seeks to help would-be farmers learn other trades, such as beekeeping or raising fist-sized land snails, a regional delicacy.

The state also has imposed a new licensing system. Anyone who wants to cut down one of the forest's massive, valuable mahogany trees or other hardwoods must obtain a license and negotiate which tree to fell with the nearby community, which shares in the income. The logs can't be taken away whole, but must be cut into planks in the forest, by people like David Anfor.

He's a 35-year-old father of one who earns the equivalent of 75 U.S. cents per board he cuts with a whizzing chain saw. "The forest is our natural resource. We're trying to conserve," he said. "But I'm also working for my daily eating."

A community benefiting from such small-scale forestry is likely to keep out those engaged in illegal, uncontrolled logging. But enforcement is difficult in a state with about 3,500 square miles of pristine rain forest — and few forest rangers.

On one recent day deep in the forest, where the luxuriant green canopy allows only rare shards of sunlight to reach the floor, the trilling of a hornbill bird and the distant chain saw were the only sounds heard. As forestry officials rushed to investigate, the saw operator fled deeper into the forest, sign of an illegal operation.

Environmentalists say such a conservation approach may work for rural, agrarian people in Nigeria, which lost an estimated 15 million acres between 1990 and 2005, or about one-third of its entire forest area, and has one of the world's highest deforestation rates — more than 3 percent per year.

But lessons learned in one place aren't necessarily applicable elsewhere, they say. A global strategy is needed, mobilizing all rain-forest governments.

That's the goal of the post-Bali talks, looking for ways to integrate forest preservation into the world's emerging "carbon trading" system. A government earning carbon credits for "avoided deforestation" could then sell them to a European power plant, for example, to meet its emission-reduction quota.

"These forests are the greatest global public utility," Britain's conservationist Prince Charles said in the lead-up to Bali. "As a matter of urgency we have to find ways to make them more valuable alive than dead."

Observed the World Wildlife Fund's Duncan Pollard, "Suddenly you have the whole world looking at deforestation."

But in many ways rain forests are still a world of unknowns, a place with more scientific questions than answers.

How much carbon dioxide are forests absorbing? How much carbon is stored there? How might the death of the Amazon forest affect the climate in, say, the American Midwest? Hundreds of researchers are putting in thousands of hours of work to try to answer such questions before it is too late.

___ courtesy Yahoo! News:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080202/ap_on_re_af/60_acres_a_minute_i

What did I see? My interaction withe everything and truth and existence... I am stupid...

I keep having these visions( hallucinations?) all the while... some of them are termed dreams, but I treat the 'dreams' and the visualizations during meditation or during sudden loss of consciousness or during a casual close of the eye.. all of them as visions.
And today I had the baap (hindi for the father) of all visions...
Let me describe it very very briefly:
It is just the combination of White and Black.
I call White as the Color of Everything and Black the Color of 'Nothing that I know'. I am not sure if 'Nothing that I know' is actually absence of anything or absence of something or presence of something that I am not capable of detecting...

Back to the Vision...

I think I experienced a singularity, as the physicists would call it. A single point... One Dimensional... or is it Zero Dimensional? or one with Infinite dimensions that are beyond my cognition? Whatever it is, it embodies everything that can be expected to exist... it holds all my and our universe - I dont want to talk about the Humongous and odd-sounding numbers of galaxies and stars, though being a great fan of Astronomy and Physics, I somehow feel that all the numbers and calculations are a trick; a trap to fool the observers into things more and more complicate and inherently confusing; same with the atoms, sub atomic particles, they say they have found out 200+ particles that compose atoms; I would say they would keep finding hundreds of thousands of such varieties, there is no limit because there are infinite possibilities... to make the observers confused, to make the observers not focus on what it actually is all made of - I talk of the bigger picture, the Cognitive Universe or Mental Universe or however it can be called by what I explain it as here - It is everything we know of, we might come to know, we think of, we imagine, we expect... all of that... all we can possibly perceive.

The Singularity is one such point that has all that we (CAN) perceive.
I like MIB for what they say Size doesnt matter - true! size is what we perceive in 3 Dimensions. A being can exist in many different dimensions but still possess the energy (or whatever can be perceived) for the observers who operate or can perceive different dimensions.

Again, my vision has an infinite space with a Singularity in the middle... that undeniable White Glow (the glow of everything, termed White for the lack of better word or the lack of ability to describe it). And when I look at the Singularity everything around seems to be perfectly Black... may be that was meant to describe the relative nature of the whole process of perception, because when I turn away from my White-point (I m going to call it by this stupid-sounding name, coz I consider myself the most stupid of all living organisms... infact each organism should consider the same about itself and strive to improve), the Black area suddenly turns white... again that perfect white... would be blinding if seen with eyes, but when perceived outside of the physical or metaphysical existence... when perceived with that sense which symbolizes the non-existence... when I am neither attached nor detached... when I am nowhere... when perceived from that sense, the bright light seems to be the best place to be in... there is everything you want in that light... infinite happiness and sorrow together... its the ABSOLUTE being...

Wherever I see I only find the Bright Light of EVERYTHING, yet when I look back at my white-point, everything fades to Black. Thats what prompts me to say that it is a singularity and whatever I see when looking elsewhere is the projection of the Singularity in one of its infinite ways and is actually not the complete picture.

This indicates:
1. The relative nature of the existence or perception... specially Truth and otherwise. I know now that truth is one such all-inclusive being, the 'otherwise' only exists when you find the absolute truth. Otherwise the Truth manifests itself on the 'Otherwise' and you have something that is neither true nor false...
2. The future of lives and time... or the Past Present and Future of it... because this is a stagnant and never-changing view of the existence... the absolute can never change, but its projection can...
3. This also tells me that the Future is bright... if I look the right way I have infinite opportunities, but even if I look at the options that are not the best, I still have more White than Black... more perceived good than Bad... more brightness than darkness...

This vision of today, has totally confused me, yet told me everything I wanted to know about truth... everything that can be... may be what I saw was not the True TRUTH, but I am sure this is one manifestation of what the truth is and is the Best thing that I have ever known...

Thanks for reading through this, if you actually Managed to...

Yours TRULY
Venkat