LINKS CONTACT:  podcast@worldorganicnews.com   More Trees Less Assholes http://moretreeslessassholes.org   The Harappa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harappa Deforestation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation **** This is the World Organic News for the week ending 11th of September 2017. Jon Moore reporting! We begin this week with a quote from a Facebook post I saw. Quote: The forests are screaming and few are the people who listen to their cries. End quote. That's from the Facebook page More Trees Less Assholes. A link is in the show notes. It could be, of course, be that many are unaware that they can even listen. As a species we are rapidly approaching the point where more people will be living in urban agglomerations than in rural settings. For a species with an arboreal heritage, that relied upon wood as the primary fuel source and who obtained a large proportion of its food from trees, this is a major change in living arrangements. Trees are, as we all know, the lungs of the world. Especially so when in contiguous forests. The synergy of a forest is remarkable. From the edges where the number of eco-niches is exponentially larger than deeper within the forest to the communities of animals living amongst the trees to the biota within the soil, forests have a balancing effect. Sinks for carbon dioxide, they return oxygen as part of the ecosystem. In massed formations they mitigate the speed of water run off in high rainfall events. This is a thing we humans have failed to see, basically, since we started living in sedentary communities. This is an oft repeated story. After the arrival of agriculture, (and how that started is whole other podcast) a culture establishes itself in a fertile river valley. The annual crops provide abundance. Usually during a prolonged period of good rainfall. The population grows, slowly at first and then exponentially. As the population grows, the pressure on the tree cover of the valley sides grows too. More trees are cut down to provide fuel for heating and cooking, the food supply extends into more marginal land as the tree cover is removed. You can see where this might be headed. Eventually there are no trees left for fuel within the valley. The neighbouring areas are accessed for fuel. With the removal of the tree cover from the hill sides, the incidence of mudslides, soil erosion and flooding increases. A point is reached where the soil loss is so great food production suffers, flooding increases and Nature then throws into the mix a prolonged drought. The drought is probably linked, in some way to the removal of tree cover and the huge amounts of water vapour a forest produces being lost to the local microclimate. There are any number of civilisations which have come and gone through this pattern. The Harappa culture is a good example. Link in the show notes. Another example from the nineteenth century occurred along the Mississippi River. And I quote for the Wikipedia page Deforestation: Quote: In the 19th century, introduction of steamboats in the United States was the cause of deforestation of banks of major rivers, such as the Mississippi River, with increased and more severe flooding one of the environmental results. The steamboat crews cut wood every day from the riverbanks to fuel the steam engines. Between St. Louis and the confluence with the Ohio River to the south, the Mississippi became more wide and shallow, and changed its channel laterally. Attempts to improve navigation by the use of snag pullers often resulted in crews' clearing large trees 100 to 200 feet (61 m) back from the banks. Several French colonial towns of the Illinois Country, such as Kaskaskia, Cahokia and St. Philippe, Illinois were flooded and abandoned in the late 19th century, with a loss to the cultural record of their archeology.[97] End Quote Nowadays we can overcome the effect of soil loss in one area by shipping food, primarily grains, around the world. But, and this is a big but, eventually