Feeding the Flames
Tag Archives: wildfire
The Amazon is Still Burning: Why Did We Forget It?
Image Credit: Vinícius Mendonça/Ibama, Image Cropped, CC BY-SA 2.0
If you missed the furore about the fate of the Amazon rainforest earlier this year then you clearly do not have social media or a newspaper subscription. For a few weeks it became the call-to-arms for environmentalists everywhere (unless they were busy doing that whole “what about this other catastrophe” thing). And then the posts dried up, and public attention waned. But whilst the fires aren’t as bad now, they’re still burning, and still threatening both the vast numbers of different species and the indigenous groups that call the Amazon their home. So why has it disappeared from the public consciousness?
The Shifting of Ecological Baselines
Bushfires like the ones that have ravaged Australia and California this year, could become the new norm for the generation that has been born in the last decade, an example of how our perception of ecological change is defined by what has happened in our lifetime (Image Credit: dm4244, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)
It’s no secret that our world has undergone rapid changes in the last few decades. Extreme weather events are becoming almost the norm and species seem to be going extinct every minute. But as depressing as this may seem, the general doom and gloom we hear about the world on a daily basis still only represents a small percentage of the ills we’ve inflicted on our planet since we’ve been here.
An Abridged History of the California Wildfires
California is ablaze, again. So why is this part of the world so notorious for catching fire? (Image Credit: Forest Service, USDA, Public Domain Mark 1.0, Image Cropped)
Ecology for the Masses 