The Wordsmith's Forge

 ... were 2-4 degrees colder than now.  We're headed for changes 2-4 degrees warmer again.

Let me tell you how much it sucked explaining that the ice was gone and never coming back, the mammoths was gone, everything changed.  A whole way of life, gone.  Nobody had refrigeration for thousands of years. >_< 

That's what 2-4 degrees means: everything you ever knew, gone.  A totally different world.  

Healthy soil stores more carbon than depleted soil. 

Hell, anyone can make soil.  Learn how to make healthy soil.  There are many ways to make compost.  This requires the right mix of brown/carbon and green/nitrogen ingredients.  Happily for our carbon sequestration goals, you need a lot more browns than greens.  In particular, once your compost is ready to use, you can fork in some wood chips to lock more carbon underground where they will decompose slower, absorb moisture, and release nutrients over time.  Just put another layer of fine compost on top if you plan to plant things in it.

Regarding manure, the basic advice is not to use any from carnivores or omnivores, for various reasons; but if it's shit, it can be composted.  If you're willing to get more technical, it is challenging but not impossible to run a very hot compost pile at home that can kill any potential problems.  Another option is pit composting, where you dump everything into a deep hole, cap it with a layer of soil, and then plant (preferably inedible) things in the clean top layer.  See The Humanure Handbook for ideas.

 ... by the numbers.  So one way to reduce this problem would be to reduce inequality, which is a good goal unto itself.

But yeah, this is one reason I wrote A Conflagration of Dragons -- I based the number of dragons on the uberrich here.

In addition to illegal loggers and a pro-deforestation president, whom we can't reach easily, there are other targets. These big banks funnel money into deforestation: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and BlackRock. 

Kick them in the wallet if you can, which is the only thing they care about.  Boycott the big banks that are cutting the lungs out of the biosphere. Find a credit union near you or a green bank.

Here are some general tips to stop Amazon deforestation.

... is faring poorly in the face of climate change. 

What we could do to address water quality and habitat issues:

* Protect all the waterways where manoomin still grows.

* Restore as many as possible of the former ones by creating protected zones around them so the water will be clean and behave as needed for the wild rice to grow.

What we could do to address growing season issues:

* Start throwing seeds into lakes at the northern edge of its habitat, to see it will creep north with the shifting temperatures.  New territory may become suitable as old territory becomes unsuitable.  This will not help the tribes who relied on it, as they are now stuck with a tiny fraction of their old homeland, but it might just save the rice.

And one more that no white person is going to mention:

* Pray over it.  Track down all the old rituals and customs and restore as many of them as possible.  Because spirit plants and animals can be damn finicky -- if they don't feel appreciated, some of them will pack up and leave everyone to starve.  You had instructions for making it happy, you got them when you moved in there, use them. 

White people can help mostly by staying out of the way and letting this happen.  Stop fucking over the tribal people who are trying to fix the problem white people created.

Here are some traditional and modern recipes for wild rice.  It is better if you have manoomin, but in most places all you can get is cultivated "wild rice" which is nowhere near as good.  (The strains and processing are different, with different results.)

 ... doesn't always work as well as we'd like.

But this reminded me of cases where nature rebounded spectacularly beyond all expectation: Chernobyl and Fukushima.  So why are they recovering so well, and some other areas not?  What's different?  Maybe the radiation.  Maybe the size.  Maybe the the very serious ban on humans, that's a good bet.  It would be worth comparing.

Meanwhile, I think the best thing we could do for rewilding is to apply copious amounts of organic matter -- manure, compost, humus, even just tilling under cover crops -- to restore nutrients and build soil before attempting to reintroduce native species.  Hell, sow it with alfalfa and let a herd of bison shit on it for a few years. You're not going to hack up old farmland any worse than it already is, and you might manage enough repair to give the restoration a better chance.

This article proposes raising national park fees to protect wildlife outside of parks.  At first, it seems reasonable; the people using the parks pay for the animals in and around the parks.

Here's the problem: national parks are supposed to belong to everyone, for all Americans to enjoy.  Require a fee, and suddenly it's not "everyone's" park anymore.  The higher that fee goes, the fewer people can afford it.  Doesn't take long before a "national" park becomes nothing but a rich people's playground.  It ceases to have meaning or relevance to anyone else, so they don't love it, so they don't protect it.  How well do rich people typically protect nature?  *looks at broiling planet*  Not well at all.  Having a few "free" days doesn't help, because then the park is monstrously overcrowded and not fun.  What's the point of going if you can't see the bison over the crush of people?  You'd get a better view from your television, but again, that's not likely to make people fall in love with nature.  We need to get out in it, and not when there are 50,000 other people crammed in with us.

That means, if we want to support the national parks, and keep them available to everyone, we need to do it with taxpayer money.  No fee to enter or use the facilities, because you ALREADY PAID FOR IT.  If the parks are overcrowded, clearly we don't have enough of them and should designate more. The government already owns vast tracts of land it could designate.  Sometimes it forecloses on big ranches or other private tracts that could also be turned over for public recreation and/or wildlife restoration.  We need more room to plant trees to suck the carbon back out of the air anyhow.  Why not kill two birds with one stone?  Get people out in nature, invite them to plant furnished tree seedlings, fall in love with nature, save the world.  \o/

I like  this metaphor.  People understand war a lot better than they understand "you are cooking the planet to death, dumbass." 

To their excellent suggestions I will add:

* Stop cutting down the trees we already have.  If we lose the Amazon, we're really screwed.

* Stop extracting and burning fossil fuels.  They do us more good in the ground.

* Work on electing leaders who will take effective action instead of faking it like a whore's orgasm.

 ... were made much more likely by climate change.  Duh.

This article considers the possibility of climate change causing an economic crash.

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