"The Great Bear Rainforest is nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Mountain Range on the west coast of British Columbia. The ancient Great Bear Rainforest is one of the largest tracts of temperate rainforest left in the world (2 million hectares), and is home to thousands of species of plants, birds and animals. In this lush rainforest stand 1,000-year-old cedar trees and 90-metre tall Sitka spruce trees. Rich salmon streams weave through valley bottoms that provide food for magnificent creatures such as orcas (killer whales), eagles, wolves, black bears, grizzlies, and the rare and mysterious white Kermode (Spirit) bear." Help Save The Great Bear Rainforest!

Date:   4/23/2012 11:35:03 PM ( 12 y ago)

Photo Credit: Greenpeace Canada
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef01156eae1caa970c-800wi


"Close to sixty percent of the world's original coastal temperate rainforests have been destroyed as a result of logging and development. North America's ancient temperate rainforest once stretched the Pacific coast from southeast Alaska to northern California. Today, more than half of this rainforest is gone and not a single undeveloped, unlogged coastal watershed 5,000 hectares or larger remains south of the Canadian border. One of the largest contiguous tracts of temperate rainforest left in the world is on British Columbia's mainland coast in the Great Bear Rainforest."

Read more: http://www.britishcolumbia.com/regions/towns/?townID=4120


10,000 years of deforestation and degradation in 10 minutes:

“Imagine a time-lapse film of the Earth taken from space. Play back the last 10,000 years sped up so that a millennium passes by every minute. For more than seven of the ten minutes, the screen displays what looks like a still photograph: the blue planet Earth, its land swathed in a mantle of trees. Forests cover 34 percent of the land. Aside from the occasional flash of a wildfire, none of the natural changes in the forest coat are perceptible. The Agricultural Revolution that transforms human existence in the film's first minute is invisible.

After seven and-a-half minutes, the lands around Athens and the tiny islands of the Aegean Sea lose their forest. This is the flowering of classical Greece. Little else changes.

At nine minutes (1,000 years ago) the mantle grows threadbare in scattered parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. Then 12 seconds from the end, two centuries ago, the thinning spreads, leaving parts of Europe and China bare. Six seconds from the end, one century ago, eastern North America is deforested. This is the Industrial Revolution. Little else appears to have changed.  Forests cover 32 percent of the land.

In the last three seconds - after 1950 - the change accelerates explosively. Vast tracts of forest vanish from Japan, the Philippines, and the mainland of Southeast Asia, from most of Central America and the horn of Africa, from western North America and eastern South America, from the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. Fires rage in the Amazon basin where they never did before, set by ranchers and peasants. Central Europe's forests die, poisoned by the air and the rain. Southeast Asia resembles a dog with the mange. Malaysian Borneo is shaved. In the final fractions of a second, the clearing spreads to Siberia and the Canadian north. Forests disappear so suddenly from so many places that it looks like a plague of locusts has descended on the planet.” ---Alan Durning, from “How much is enough”

Help us to save the Great Bear Rainforest, sign up at http://www.takeittaller.ca

Save the Great Bear Rainforest http://www.facebook.com/Medira.chelna?newfriend#!/pages/Save-the-Great-Bear-Rainforest/255186914546114  Public Facebook page; you don't have to be a member of Facebook to access the webpage

Rainforest Alliance: http://rainforest-alliance.org/


RELATED BLOGS:

Spirit Bears Threatened   http://curezone.com/blogs/fm.asp?i=1900129

Protect the Spirit Bear http://curezone.com/blogs/fm.asp?i=1880039

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