Word: forests
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...regulations infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners, who wish to transport and carry firearms on or across these lands," the letter said, pointing out that the laws discriminate even against citizens with valid concealed weapons permits. It asked that the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service allow transporting and carrying of firearms on their lands in accordance with the laws of the host state. "These inconsistencies in firearms regulations for public lands are confusing, burdensome and unnecessary," the letter said. It added that such a change of rules for parks and nature refuges "would respect...
...made money," says Russ Taylor, president of forestry consultancy International Wood Markets Group. Nova Scotia's biggest Christmas-tree grower shipped a quarter of a million balsam firs this year, mostly to U.S. stores. Next year they're shutting up shop in Canada altogether, says Mac Kirk at Kirk Forest Products. The strong loonie eroded all their profits. "It is loony," Kirk says...
That works by putting a market value on standing forests. A tropical forest stores carbon, recycles moisture, provides a haven for biodiversity - but its only monetary value lies in being cut down. "The main trigger behind deforestation is that there's little or no value for standing forests," says Paulo Moutinho, who studies Brazilian forests for the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC). Put a value on forests in the carbon market, and suddenly it makes sense to leave a tree be, rather than clear it for cheap pastureland. The value doesn't even have to be that high...
...vast as the Amazon - where 17 square miles are cut down each day - has long been considered all but impossible. There are also concerns about "leakage," the possibility that if one paid for a project to save trees in one area, logging would simply move to another, unprotected forest - and the saved CO2 would leak. But new space imaging, much of it done by the Japanese Land Observing Satellite (ALOS), can collect precise data on the rate and type of deforestation, even through clouds - pretty important, given that the Amazon alone recycles trillions of tons of moisture every year...
...valuable as tropical forests may be to the world as a carbon sink, however, they matter even more to the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on them. Some environmentalists fear that a rush to cash in on forest conservation could end up hurting the indigenous people - whether the rubber tappers of Brazil or the forest dwellers of Aceh - that it should benefit most. After all, history has not been good to native people in the developing world who dwell on suddenly valuable land. The key will be to manage avoided deforestation projects properly, to make sure they are truly...