CA Redwoods to Be First National Park Co-Managed with a Native American Tribe That Used to Own it https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ca-redwoods-to-be-the-first-national-park-co-managed-with-a-native-american-tribe-that-used-to-own-it/
questionable headline aside this is good news
The Yurok will be the first Tribal nation to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed on Tuesday by the tribe, Redwood national and state parks, and the non-profit Save the Redwoods League, according to news reports.
The Yurok tribe has seen a wave of successes in recent years, successfully campaigning for the removal of a series of dams on the Klamath River, where salmon once ran up to their territory, and with the signing of a new memorandum of understanding, the Yurok are set to reclaim more of what was theirs.
Over two three-month periods, researchers sampled air quality at five sites along metro Atlanta interstates and highways. When compared to similar sites without vegetation, the researchers found a 37% reduction in soot and a 7% reduction in ultrafine particles at sites with natural or ornamental vegetation.
The findings appear in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Trees and bushes near roadways don’t solve the problem of air pollution caused by motor vehicles, but they can help reduce the severity of the problem,” says lead author Roby Greenwald, associate professor in the Georgia State University School of Public Health.
In order to reach 350 ppm—the level we were at in 1988—we’d need to remove 500 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. To hit the pre-industrial mark of 280 ppm, 900 billion tons. If we were to use plants to accomplish this, we would need them to add 138 billion tons and 249 billion tons of biomass, respectively. This is roughly the equivalent to 1.3 and 2.5 Amazon rainforests, respectively, if we count both above and below ground biomass.
So, what can we do with all that carbon? As the Amazon analogy implies, growing more forests would do the trick. In the last 10,000 years, the Earth has lost 7.7 million square miles of forest, equal to 2.85 Amazons. So we can exceed our target for atmospheric CO2 removal by returning to the 57% forest coverage of Earth’s habitable surface that we had at the end of the last Ice Age. That was the climate that allowed for the vast expansion of humanity, so that approach holds a lot of appeal.
Additionally, the Amazon analogy demonstrates that vast reforested areas can support human civilization beyond simply sucking down CO2. The Amazon itself is a vast food forest filled with edible species that were planted 4,500 years ago by its human occupants, who built a thriving civilization based on the readily available food surrounding them. A contemporary global reforestation initiative should also focus on edible species, thus serving the dual purpose of creating an abundant perennial food source and sequestering CO2. A mature food forest can yield at least 2,100,000 calories per acre with minimal inputs, enough to feed two adults. A stable climate PLUS more free food than all of humanity could possibly eat sounds pretty good.
It goes without saying that climate change is not the only ecological catastrophe facing humanity. We have crossed six of nine planetary boundaries, any one of which could spell our doom. A globe-spanning food forest would help address those looming disasters, such as biodiversity loss and biogeochemical flows, as well.
But there are challenges to the forestry approach. Environmental conditions have degraded immensely in the last 100 years, and it's possible that not all previously forested areas would now support trees. Some estimates put the possibility of reforestation at half of the 7.7 million square miles lost and argue it would take thousands of years to accomplish. I have doubts about these estimates, but it's important to be cautious. Additionally, the principle of redundancy is crucial in permaculture, and it's not hard to see how it applies here: we would not want to put all our eggs in one basket with the future of life on Earth at stake.
So how can we move faster while diversifying our risk?