New York Times: rain forest growing, not shrinking

While there are still grounds for concern about the destruction of areas of mature rain forest, especially in Asia and South America, this article from The New York Times gives the full picture of what is going on and thereby provides some needed context.

On one estimate, for every acre of forest lost there are 50 acres of regrowth or, as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation puts it in its "State of the World’s Forests Report," while 38 million acres of original forest was cut down in 2005, there was 2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing, an area almost as large as the United States.

This actually gells with the available satellite data which over the last 30 years has shown the Earth getting greener.

All rather good news you would have thought, but then maybe you've never run into a greenie. Once you have you realise that there is no such thing as a happy greenie. There's always a dark lining to every silver cloud!

Somehow trees growing in different places are not as good as the ones from mature forests, or some such nonsense, even if the place was originally forest. I suspect that deep down there is a belief that such places have been "contaminated" by the presence of people.

But this story does undercut one of their most oft repeated tropes, that is, about how "fragile" nature is.

Fragile be buggered.

Life has had to fight tooth and tail to survive on this planet for at least three billion years, surviving calamities that we can only imagine (such as the Permian-Triassic mega-extinction event over 200 million years ago), and is anything but fragile.

It is resilient, tenacious and adaptive. It's had to be.

Give it an inch and it will take a mile.

So the next time you hear some dewy-eyed young thing look wistfully out on some pretty natural scene and rhapsodise about "this fragile environment," and let's face it, it's the knee-jerk cliche de jour for affluent white people from trendy inner-city environs, punch them in the face.

They're stupid and they deserve it. Plus, they haven't got a clue about nature and how it actually works. So punch them again. You'll find out who's fragile.