This opinion piece was written by Bill McKibben for the New Yorker magazine, talking about his perspective of how sometimes Boards, like the Nature Conservancy, can have a conflict of interest that could lead to biased perspectives on climate actions.

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This opinion piece from the Sacramento Bee highlights the case where University of California is offsetting their emissions with little bang for the buck.

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The Grades are in: A report card on Canada’s progress in protecting its land and ocean — is the first of its kind. It tracked the conservation record of all provinces, territories and the federal government and measured how close each one has come to targets set in 2010 to protect 17 per cent of Canada’s terrestrial territory and 10 per cent of its oceans.

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One roll of tree paper requires 37 gallons of water and a gallon of chemicals to produce. These chemicals, including bleach, formaldehyde, and other carcinogens, enter the body through micro-cuts, causing hemorrhoids, yeast infections, and UTIs. The fluffier and whiter the tree-paper, the more bleach and formaldehyde it contains.

Most tree-paper contains pulp harvested from the Boreal Forest, the world’s most important carbon sink and an essential bulwark against climate change.

The chemicals used to make white, fluffy toilet paper poison our waterways and our bloodstreams.

text taken from:

https://www.plantpaper.ca/

Instead of taking the big trees that turn a profit at lumber mills, workers restoring Ashland’s forests felled the smaller trees that provide a ladder for fire to climb from the ground to the canopy. That’s increased the average trunk diameter in the watershed from 14 inches to somewhere between 16 and 19 inches.

While a few fires have come near Ashland in recent years, none have gotten close enough to truly test the work in the watershed. There are, however, lots of examples of big burns raging along the edges of areas under similar management, and then settling to the ground, as if tamed by the preparations. This year, scientists watched as that exact sequence of events happened with eastern Oregon’s Bootleg Fire. One study suggests that the thinning and burning in the Ashland watershed has reduced the potential for a fire to rise into the tree canopy by 70 percent.

Ultimately, the project worked because the Forest Service was willing to give up its idea that each project should pay for itself, and allow the Ashland watershed restoration to lose millions. “It’s proof that you can get productive work done in a very challenging environment,” Chambers, the wildfire chief, said. “But it’s not a great example in as far as money goes: It is a really expensive project.”

While this undertaking was originally envisioned as a water management plan, our First Nations partners championed a more holistic approach, incorporating aspects of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK) and an awareness of the River’s spirit, in addition to western science and management objectives. This intent is reflected in the title of this document: The Thames River (Deshkan Ziibi) Shared Waters Approach to Water Quality and Quantity. This document is one component of an over-arching watershed initiative called the “Thames River Clear Water Revival.”

www.thamesrevival.ca

Project Manager, Thames River Clear Water Revival

Upper Thames River Conservation Authority