Posts Tagged ‘deforestation’

People vs the Planet

By Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier | The Walrus Forests are indispensable to life on this planet. Nearly 1.6 billion people rely on them as sources of food, income, or shelter. Humans have altered over 75 percent of ice-free land on the planet with agriculture, mining, urbanization, and industrialization. And around half of the…

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How Thousand-Year-Old Trees Became the New Ivory

By Lyndsie Bourgon | Smithsonian.com It was a local hiker who noticed, during a backwoods stroll in May 2012, the remains of the body. The victim in question: an 800-year-old cedar tree. Fifty meters tall and with a trunk three meters in circumference, the cedar was one of the crown jewels in Canada’s Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park.…

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The Anthropocene is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct From the Holocene

Science Magazine Vol. 351, Issue 6269 | January 8, 2016 Humans are altering the planet, including long-term global geologic processes, at an increasing rate. Any formal recognition of an Anthropocene epoch in the geological time scale hinges on whether humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice that…

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