Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Save the Trees, We’ll Save Your Life

September 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Kinari and Campbell Webb

IN JULY 2011, about a week before I landed in Western Borneo, a local man sent an ominous text message to his boss from deep within the jungle. For more than 10 years, this man had worked as a research assistant at the Cabang Panti Research Station, in the core of Gunung Palung National Park, a mountainous wilderness that contains some of Indonesia’s last lowland rain forest and remains a stronghold for orangutans, gibbons, and other primates. Like many protected areas in the developing world, Gunung Palung’s boundaries were poorly enforced, and the people from the hardscrabble communities ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Health, September-October 2012
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The History and Frightening Future of Forests

January 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The United Nations has declared 2011 the International Year of Forests, an interestingly ambiguous title that can be read as either celebratory or cautionary. Our review of recent forest-related research is similarly mixed: It seems that for every paper that warns forests are at risk from climate change, another suggests that, if well-managed, they could help mitigate its impact. Playing the role of victim and savior simultaneously is a lot to ask, but then forests have always played a dual role in the lives of man. In literature and folklore, they represent both the terror of the wild ... Read More

More like this: Environment, January-February 2011, Research in Summary, Science & Environment
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Saving Forests with a Sense of Place

December 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

I was in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca during one of Mexico's best-known traditions, the Day of the Dead. The somber Panteon General, Oaxaca City's largest cemetery, had been transformed into a carnival. A mariachi band played next to walls covered in candles reflecting the dead; yellow marigold flowers called cempasúchil decorated grave sites and adorned the altars that sprung up around the city. Offerings of food and drink for ancestors, who appeared in fading black-and-white photographs, were everywhere. Although part of the Catholic All Saints and All Souls days, the ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science & Environment, Voyage of Kiri
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The Tree That Changed the World

March 29, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

The author of A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization, begins a series of articles on the world’s first energy crisis: peak wood. Part I: The Tree That Changed the World Part II: Wood and Civilization Part III: Peak Wood and the Bronze Age Part IV: Peak Wood Brings on the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Fossil Fuels Astronomers for the longest time have regarded Venus as the planet most resembling Earth. Having almost the exact size as Earth and being almost as close to the sun has led many to call it Earth’s twin. The clouds always covering the Venusian ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science & Environment
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‘Deforest Fires’ Fan Global Warming

April 23, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Fire looks to be one big contributor to global warming — not directly through its heat, although in some barely discernable way that certainly adds to warmth, but by what it does to the planet's landscape. A new study that appeared in the April 24 edition of the magazine Science suggests that as much a fifth of mankind's carbon dioxide emissions in the industrial era can be traced to intentionally burning down forests. That doesn't include burning firewood to heat your hut, and it doesn't count wildfires (even those from arson or controlled burns gone awry). And those intentional fires ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science & Environment
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Hot Idea Wins Innovation Award after Two Centuries

April 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Consider these data points: • Deforestation causes greater carbon-dioxide emissions annually than all the vehicles driven in the U.S. and China. • Almost 3 million people in the developing world die each year from smoke-related injuries due to cooking with wood-fueled fire. • Two million children die each year from water-borne diseases. Now, a solar device developed more than two centuries ago may help eliminate these three terrible modern plagues. In the middle of the 18th century, the Swiss polymath Horace de Saussure observed, "It is a known fact, and a fact that has ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Findings, Science
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Seeing the Rainforest for the Trees

January 30, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

Dr. Alan Grainger, a senior lecturer in geography at the University of Leeds, is an internationally renowned expert on tropical deforestation. He earned his doctorate from Oxford in 1987 for producing the world's first global computer simulation model of the tropical forests, and wrote a seminal book on the subject in 1993 called Controlling Tropical Deforestation. But his most recent publication, in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, challenges everything we thought we knew about the subject. Grainger spent more than three years combing ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science & Environment
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