Let’s start with the basics. According to NASA, carbon emissions have increased by 30% since the industrial revolution This effectively upset the preexisting natural balance where various factors, primarily carbon-to-oxygen photosynthesis (from that green chlorophyll in plants), removed enough of those carbon-based emissions to stabilize the planet. The planet used to generate those emissions mainly from natural wildfires, animal-generated gasses and natural decomposition and decay from dead plants and animals. Until the industrial revolution, even man’s nascent use of using fossil fuels to cook, keep warm and provide lighting did not add enough carbon-based emissions to create the greenhouse effect: basically, trapping carbon-based emissions in such a substantial presence in the atmosphere (in the ozone layer) to serve as a barrier to escaping heat.
The industrial revolution changed that balance. Factories arose, no longer based on power generated from rivers and streams turning mechanical wheels to operate machinery. With the industrial revolution, factories no longer had to be based next to rivers and streams. They could power their factories by burning coal, used to create steam which powered the wheels of manufacturing. With modern science increasingly concentrated in Europe and the Americas, these nations generated massive economic power through the resulting fossil fuel-powered processing and manufacturing. The less developed world remained simply a source of natural resources required for manufacturing.
Electricity further untethered factories so that the coal power did not have to reside at the factory itself. Cities could grow, light their streets, power their offices and ultimately their homes. And then fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks generated carried their fuel with them, rapidly becoming the major method of transportation on earth. Planes, trains, and automobiles. While the initial climate change remained too low to be detected, the initial concerns about emissions were more focused on particulate matter and toxic fumes – pollution. But by the 1950s and most certainly by the 1970s, scientists (especially at coal and petroleum producing companies), supported by nascent academic studies (which these companies did their best to suppress), began to note a measurable shift in average global temperatures. Clean air and clean water legislation, which began in the 1960s, began to address climate change decades later.
It is very inconvenient, and expensive to consumers and companies driven by fossil fuel, to reconfigure the global economy to contain the use of fossil fuels, replacing it with alternative power sources. In a world where momentum is very hard to reverse, marginalization and denial became accepted practices, very much in step with the political desire to kick unpleasantries down the road for others to deal with it later. That momentum is bad enough, but what makes this pressure so much worse is mankind’s proclivity to expand its economic reach in a way that effectively and massively reduces nature’s established ability to absorb carbon emissions through natural processes.
The oceans provide the greatest carbon removal on the planet, and as we pollute this resource, killing off most significant plant and animal life in the seas, the oceans simply lose increasing amounts of undersea plants and their photosynthesis values. We are equally guilty in removing vast acreages of forests every year, imposing a negative impact on decarbonization that is exacerbated by expanding wildfires (by reason of climate change) and clearing-by-burning agricultural practices. Losing trees not only removes carbon from the environment while releasing oxygen, this reality also increases the toxicity from many diseases and the cooling comfort they provide to us.
Writing for the January 5th, Los Angeles Times, physician and writer Arjun V.K. Sharma, gives us his take on the loss we take from these vanishing forests: “Our forests are disappearing. According to a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund, 6.6 million hectares of forest were lost in 2022. It’s a mind-boggling statistic, especially since it represents 21% more forest cover than should have been lost that year to keep pace to end deforestation by 2030 — a pledge from the 2021 United Nations climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland. At last year’s COP28 in Dubai, world leaders renewed their pledge to reverse deforestation… Yet forests are still being cleared at a dizzying pace. In 2022, the world lost more than 11 soccer fields of tropical forest per minute.
“Environmental crises are for many people an abstraction, and so can seem their repercussions. But I am a physician in infectious diseases, and my first instinct when looking at a forest is to see it through the lens of a microbe. Microbes can bring diseases to humans, and for that reason the World Health Organization has applied a philosophy to them called One Health. Simply, it’s a belief that the fitness of humans, animals and the environment are one and the same — inextricably linked.
“Trees play a seminal role: Removing a forest can push forest-dwelling animals into human environs, sometimes bringing with them a pathogen… That chain of events has been tied to Ebola flare-ups in Central and West Africa and the upswing of Lyme disease in the northeastern United States. And it harms animals too: In subtropical parts of Australia where forests are blithely cleared, bats experience profound stress from human-induced land change… Access to the diet of their native habitats is taken away, and in a nutritionally deprived state, they are known to shed greater amounts of the Hendra virus — which can pass on to horses and then humans, with high fatality rates.
“After the loss of a forest, it’s not just what is added to our lives that can pose a problem. It’s also what’s taken away. Forests have traditionally functioned as ‘carbon sinks.’ The Earth’s trees absorb more than 7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — about a fifth of what the world lets out into its atmosphere — and release it back as oxygen or bind it into sugars that form their roots, branches and leaves… Felling a forest unlocks this carbon vault. Some parts of the Amazon are so razed that they’ve become carbon sources — leeching more carbon than they soak up. About 12% of the global greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet are estimated to derive from deforestation.
“Then there’s evidence showing the extent to which forests influence our mental health. Poorer air quality, a byproduct of deforestation, is linked to higher rates of depression and anxiety. By contrast, research has found that the more a country’s landmass is covered by forests, the lower its prevalence of mental health disorders.” The joy, beauty and tranquility of forests is also lost.
75% of deforestation is directly attributable to resource extraction (especially logging) and agriculture. Where indigenous peoples rely on resource extraction and agricultural practices that generate deforestation, governments must find and offer parallel revenue-generating attractive economic substitutes. For nations that export products resulting from deforestation, trade barriers are a viable solution to take the money-earning incentive out of the equation.
I’m Peter Dekom, but without financial incentives to reduce deforestation and penalties for those who refuse to change, pledges by leaders to preserve those forests are close to meaningless.
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