A1A South

As deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest declined over the past three years, the country’s leaders crowed that they had found the recipe for stopping the destruction of the world’s most diverse ecosystem.By expanding the area of protected rain forest by more than 60 percent while allowing controlled logging, Brazil’s government said it had cracked down on the illegal clearing that’s consumed a fifth of the rain forest.

The celebration ended cold last month, however, when satellite images revealed that deforestation had exploded late last year in areas that regulators thought were under control.

As much as 2,700 square miles of the forest were cleared over the last five months of 2007, an area bigger than the state of Delaware and equal to more than 60 percent of the total deforestation registered over the previous 12 months.

Even more worrisome, the deforestation intensified in November and December, a period usually marked by heavy rains and a drop in forest clearing.

Now, Brazilian officials are going back to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong and how to tackle monumental problems like endemic lawlessness and land disputes, which have long stymied governments.

After releasing the numbers, the federal government launched emergency measures that have included banning logging and possibly cutting government farm credits in 36 cities whose boundaries stretch far into the jungle. The cities accounted for more than half of the total area confirmed lost during the last five months of last year.

The country’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has blamed agriculture for the spike in deforestation and challenged farmers to halt all jungle clearing.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the federal government needed to enlist the help of cities, governors and civil society to reverse the trend.

”Ending deforestation is a very complicated goal,” said Jose Heder Benatti, president of the land management agency of the northern Brazilian state of Para, where much of the deforestation has taken place. “I would say reducing deforestation to zero is impossible. So we have to look at what we can do.”

Whether Brazil succeeds will have global consequences.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cleared and burned tropical forest worldwide are a quarter of all such emissions.

Brazil is the world’s fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, almost solely on the strength of emissions from deforestation, according to the World Resources Institute of Washington.

”This demonstrates that the government has less control than they realized,” said Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington. “They underestimated the market forces and overestimated the effectiveness of enforcement.”

Critics ranging from environmentalists to ranchers said regulators couldn’t monitor a wilderness the size of the entire western United States.

Other economic factors, including a slump in commodity prices, explain why deforestation dropped in previous years, said Paulo Barreto, senior researcher for the Brazilian environmental group Imazon.

”The government took some good actions, but the economics have more power,” Barreto said.

Source:  Miami Herald

What?  People will completely ignore the government in order to maximize their income?  Who would have ever guessed?

A press release from the Unwanted Horse Coalition says economic factors, including high hay costs, are among the reasons cited in news reports for a growing number of unwanted and abandoned horses in the U.S. Over the last month, articles in newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have reported on an apparent increase in the numbers of unwanted horses. A recent headline in The Wall Street Journal read,”Leaner Pastures: As Horses Multiply, Neglect Cases Rise.”Regional newspapers and television stations have also reported that state agencies and horse rescue groups are seeing a growing number of horses that can no longer be cared for by owners. Some of the reports suggest that rescue groups are about to be overwhelmed and may have to start turning horses away. The articles blame the problem on factors such as sharply rising hay costs, the drought in many parts of the U.S., over-breeding, the downturn in the economy, the costs of euthanasia and carcass disposal and the closing of the nation’s three slaughter facilities, which removed the floor on the value of horses.

Source:  Hay and Forage Grower

I could have a pasture FULL of horses, good ones, if I had the forage for them.  People are giving away horses because they simply cannot afford to feed them and even then they may not be able to find a home.  I have a friend that is divorced with 7 horses and nowhere to put them and no one will take them.

There used to be a value to horses when there were slaughter facilities.  Now horses are valueless, and I don’t see the people that were so concerned about the “inhumanity” of slaughtering unwanted horses stepping forward to assume the feed bill to keep them from starving.

I always thought slaughter was more humane than slowly starving an animal to death.

Maureen Raymo puts what looks like a pinch of sand on a glass slide and powers up her microscope. Under magnification, the grains are revealed to be fossilized shells of tiny ocean creatures that existed millions of years ago. Raymo, a College of Arts and Sciences earth sciences research professor, is a paleoclimatologist, and these remains are to her what dinosaur bones are to paleontologists: keys to the past.

Read the rest at BU Today.

Good grief. People are finding microscopic fossils to confirm the existence of ice ages millions of years ago. In the meantime, I can’t find car keys, glasses, watches, or books that I had the previous evening. I feel so inadequate now. Thanks a lot.

WAYCROSS, GA — As rescuers pulled survivors from the wreckage of the Imperial Sugar refinery, crews from our area raced to the scene, ready to help.“Oh… the scene was unreal!” Ware County paramedic David Kirton said, remembering the armada of ambulances he joined up with outside Savannah on Thursday night.

Source:  First Coast News

With an unknown number of injured after a big explosion like that, it was better to have far too many emergency responders than far too few.