forests

Green Infrastructure in Action: Urban Forests

By Karen Firehock / On November 8th, 2015
Over the past 75 years, American engineers have become very adept at managing water – collecting it, holding it and moving it away as fast as possible. Yet there is a better way to manage our water that costs far less.Rather than trying to push  away water, we are finding ways to adaptively manage our water using natural features and functions. If we start to think of our urban forests as ‘green infrastructure’ then we can include them as solutions to urban stormwater runoff and flooding. American Forests has estimated the value of forests for flood mitigation and air qu

President Obama Should Include the Tongass In Alaska’s First Line of Global Warming Defense

By Dominick A. DellaSala / On October 6th, 2015
I began my career as forest ecologist in the 1990s, cataloging the remarkable web-of-life in the old-growth rainforests of Prince of Wales Island. Since then, I have worked with rainforest ecologists around the world to document exceptional places like the Tongass and how they can contribute to a global climate change solution. Last April, hundreds of scientists, including myself, sent President Obama a letter asking him to include the Tongass as Alaska’s first line of climate defense.
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Magical Thinking is Not Conservation

By Meghan Bartels / On March 10th, 2015
Post by David Johns, contributor to Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth. When humans started to farm 12,000 years ago, they began to change the earth in basic ways, pushing aside other species to make room for themselves and those they favored, killing creatures they didn’t want and domesticating others, altering soils and water courses to suit themselves, and generally replacing ecological complexity with simplified landscapes. In seeking to dominate and control patches of the world—and today, th

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