Geoscience Reference
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forestry practices—primarily deforestation—causes just over 17 per-
cent of all our greenhouse gas emissions. 54 Deforestation damages the
Earth twice over: it directly releases carbon dioxide and damages a for-
est's long-term role as a carbon sink. Since forests around the world are
already under severe stress from climate change, as I discussed in chapter
one, slashing and burning forests, clear-cuting them, or replacing them
with farms or ranches only contributes to an already acute problem.
Deforestation will have to end if we are to have the slightest chance of
avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. But it is much easier
to envision this change than to carry it out. Even if we added the ending
of deforestation to the proposed international climate treaties, there is no
guarantee that the signatories would actually carry out their obligations.
This is a tough one: somehow, we need to create new strategies that will
truly stop deforestation.
Most of us intuitively know how we could meet this challenge. We
in the developed nations should protect our own forests, of course, but
should also pay less wealthy nations for protecting theirs, help them cre-
ate effective environmental agencies to monitor those ecosystems, and
start buying out local farmers and ranchers on the periphery of forests
to return recently cleared land to its prior use. In short, we need seri-
ous international initiative, political and financial, to make this happen
in a way that will mater. he problem, of course, is that funding these
measures will require the adoption of an international treaty on climate
change, a goal that continues to be elusive, as well as the consent of a
majority of voters in developed countries. In some nations, especially the
United States, there may not yet be a majority in favor of sending real
money overseas to address climate change. It will take many years of
hard work to put the necessary agreements in place and to pass the key
legislation.
Our use of soils, while the focus of much less public atention, is also
crucial. Since the soil contains three or four times as much carbon as
plants and trees, tilling the soil—all by itself—can contribute substan-
tially to global warming, for it releases that carbon through erosion and
dust. Over most of human history, plowing the land has contributed
more carbon to the atmosphere than the burning of fossil fuels; by one
estimate, the later surpassed plowing as a source only in the 1970s. 55 he
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