Rain Forests

I simply hate stories like this--and I know that hating is wrong to begin with. It makes it harder to distinguish between those who are thoughtful skeptics and those who are wackos. This is the second such story this week. On Friday this item on "Global Warming" went up on The Lowell Sun's web site. Seems a neighbor in Hudson, NH, the "first director of meteorology for TV's Weather Channel, Hudson resident Joseph D'Aleo," thinks we are heading into a period of Global Cooling.

Now we have The New York Times telling us that the tropical forests are growing back, just not where they have been going away. Next they will be saying that Global Warming Climate Chan...no, they will never say that.

The headline is "New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests," but you can never totally trust the headline writer to have actually read, let alone understood, the article.

The money quote might be this one:

Here, and in other tropical countries around the world, small holdings like Ms. Ortega de Wing’s — and much larger swaths of farmland — are reverting to nature, as people abandon their land and move to the cities in search of better livings.

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

So, it looks like the folks best positioned to fix the rain forest problem are the economists, not the environmentalists--although the environmentalists are the ones who told us about the problem in the first place.

The other thing that seems important to me in understand this issue and the changing interactions is that people are part of nature also, part of the environment. I remember Representative Shirley Chisholm, when she was running for the Democratic Party nomination for President, back in late 1971 or early 1972, telling a group of college students in Denver that while they were worried about the ecology of the whales, she was worried about the ecology of the little children in Appalachia and in Inner Cities.

That year my dream ticket as Senator Scoop Jackson and Representative Shirley Chisholm. Never happened.

Regards  --  Cliff

PS:  Hat tip to the Instapundit.