Smokestacks and tailpipes aren’t the only major source of emissions.
Credit: Wikimedia user: Dori
Although most people envision smokestacks and tailpipe exhaust when thinking about greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation is an often underreported component of our human contribution to climate change. Most estimates place carbon emissions from deforestation at somewhere between 12-25% of all human emissions at [...]

One of the Congo River’s famous barges.
Credit: Julien Harneis (via Wikimedia Commons)
This incredible audio series recently aired on National Public Radio about a river journey through the Congo Basin, one of the Family of Five—the Earth’s last five large blocks of unfragmented forest, of which Canada’s Boreal is one of the largest. Although river transportation [...]

Clearcutting in Ontario’s Boreal Forest
Credit: Jeff Wells
Some troubling news came up today: a new report published in the Annals of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that the world’s total forest cover shrank by 3.1 percent between 2000 and 2005–the report used satellite images and data to track forest loss.
The world’s great boreal forests, which make up [...]

What do Bolivia and Afghanistan have in common?
Rather than asking you to make a list of the obvious options (like people, borders, a government), I’ll just tell you: both enjoyed positive steps this past week in the field of bird protection.

Birds in decline like these Red-fronted Macaws will be aided by the new protected areas [...]

Yaigojé Apaporis Park
Credit: Asociación de Capitanes Indígenas Yaigojé Apaporis
There was more good news from the Boreal’s sister, the Amazon, recently. In late October, the government of Colombia announced the creation of Yaigojé Apaporis Park, a 2.6-million-acre park that enables local indigenous groups to carefully manage the land and keep it intact. This park comes less [...]

 
Common Nighthawk
Credit: Tom Vezo
Every year as the hot and humid days of summer ease into the dry warm days of early fall, the nighthawks appear.   In the eastern U.S. at that point in the evening when the setting sun lights up the landscape, there appears in the sky dozens sometimes even hundreds of large silent, [...]

Map of WWF projects in the Congo Basin
Credit: WWF (full interactive map)
This week leaders from Congo Basin countries teamed up with conservation groups to press for more international effort and funding to help protect the Congo Basin, which, like the Canadian Boreal, is one of the last intact forests of the world. You might recall [...]