Folks need to quit thinking stuff is better just because it’s exotic (or “exclusive,” in this article’s slightly unusual verbiage that I’m chalking up to the author being Swedish). Find the local equivalent – and there almost always is a local equivalent – and use that instead.
For example, this article suggests Hard Maple, Cherrybark Oak, Mockernut Hickory or Snakewood for North America, and Olive for Europe.
I agree. As a hobbyist woodworker and boat builder, I do everything with ordinary untreated construction lumber and plywood, reclaimed untreated lumber and plywood, and what I can get from people taking out trees.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the look of tropical hardwoods, but I don’t see how to justify their use at scale. And with however many billion people we have today, there is no such thing as small scale.
A lot depends on the boat, what it’s used for, it’s expected lifetime, and how long it stays in the water at any one time. For my purposes, future builds will use marine grade plywood (fir; nothing exotic) only for boats that I just leave in the water, and then only below the waterline. And maybe not even then. Depending on the boat, the price difference between marine and exterior grade might pay for a boat lift or rail system so that the boat never has extended periods in the water.
A global statistic blends greening slowly in some areas, browning faster in others. A fire can in a few hours devastate a forest in an area that became too arid, while it may take a century for a forest to grow in an area where climate improved. So while climate warming accelerates this’ll get worse, but if the same climate stabilised the global vegetation cover at equilibrium might be not so bad (even if very bad in some regions). Regarding air moisture, both H2O and and CO2 pass through the same stomata in leaves, so there was some hope that plants could open these less at higher CO2 and thus resist drought, but as with all such effects the benefit tapers off.
Anyway all policy scenarios with any hope of staying below 2ºC, let alone 1.5ºC, include a lot of net reforestation. So we’ll have to turn this around, somewhere.
Bro, please, trust me bro, we just need a little more carbon and it’ll start getting more green. C’mon, bro, just burn a few more gallons of gas, and I swear we’ll green the Sahara, bro. Listen, bro, we’ve never had such dangerously low carbon levels, bro, c’mon you’re actually helping the environment with my profits, please, bro.
We’re all fucked, enjoy what’s left of natural beauty because it’s all going to be gone in the blink of an eye.
Humanity gets so fucking horny over the idea of alien life, meanwhile we have absolutely amazing, surreal, awe inspiring life forms ALL OVER THE PLANET. We’re living with fascinating, alien lifeforms, and we’re just watching them all go extinct while we furiously masturbate the dick of late-stage capitalism.
For all we know these creatures are the only companions we will ever know in the universe, and we’re just crossing species off the list by the thousands each year (and rapidly accelerating).
I feel like I’m drowning in despair—it’s enough to sometimes wish I was one of the fucking countless people who are just too small-minded/ignorant/selfish to care. Just blissfully reciting talking points created by rich old men, bumping and bumbling my way through life completely oblivious to the hell we’re collectively approaching.
it’s curious that they posture the reasoning is to make them appear brighter at night. Feels like the opposite of what you would want in a predator/prey environment.
They didn’t think that the animal was extinct for over 100 years though. There are threatened populations in QLD, NSW, tassie etc.; they just hadn’t been seen in the state of SA in 100+ years.
It’s a bit weird because it’s “in a region”, which begs the question if I capture a creature from a different region and move it to a region where it was extinct, is it extinct anymore? (There being only one also means it will quickly become 0 again.)
Local extinction (extirpation) is a legitimate concept that is heavily studied in ecology. Just because an animal is still alive somewhere it doesn’t mean that its absence from a region it has historically lived is irrelevant.
The audience for Newsweek is lay people not ecologists. It’s completely predictable that this usage of the word would create misunderstanding. Seems like misleading clickbait to me with a cover of plausible deniability.
Obviously, but that doesn’t mean they don’t interview ecologists or biologists. “Extirpation” is way less layman friendly than “locally extinct,” and the article makes it extremely clear that this is an animal that hadn’t been seen in a specific region for years. Skimming the headline and deciding it means “they thought it was completely extinct” is a problem with the reader, not the headline or the term “locally extinct.”
You know I guess you have a point, if they’re writing for people who are too dim to realize “locally extinct” and “extinct in region” are the same concept.
When the soot falls from the first couple Antarctic wildfires sea level rise will happen so quickly even people who've been paying attention will be wondering what happened.
Fifty thousand years from now, when humanity clings to existence near the poles on an otherwise inhospitable world, those living in Antarctica will thank their ancestors for making it a lush sanctuary.
Very bold of you to assume humanity still exists in 50,000 years. It’s been 100 since industrialization and everything has already gone to shit and is only getting worse more and more rapidly.
We’ll still be around. Humans are uniquely capable of surviving in a wide variety of climates, on a wide variety of diets. We may decimate the wildlife population, and billions of us may die, but humans are super good at survival.
Humanity will survive. It will be rough, trillions of people will die unnecessarily, billions more will suffer their entire lives in torment, but we’ll find a way. The only thing that strives to survive even more than an animal is an intelligence with an idea of a future. Even if that’s the belief in a perfect future that can never exist, even if in our ignorance we destroy the utopia we try to create, ideas and plans will never cease driving us to continue. Even if we replace ourselves as a species with something no longer human, we as an intelligence, or at least a kind of collective hive-mind of our creation, will continue to exist. The human will to stay alive will exert itself upon the depths of the universe, even if in doing so it becomes unrecognizable…
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