Tag Archives: golden

Only you (and a bunch of goats) can prevent forest fires

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California has a wildfire problem — and it’s been getting worse and worse thanks to climate change. As communities figure out how best to prepare for future wildfires, some are calling in an unstoppable force of nature: goats.

Nevada City, a town of 3,100 in Northern California, launched a “Goat Fund Me” campaign to rent ruminants to manage city land. The graze is catching on: Prescriptive grazing has been getting more popular throughout the Golden State and elsewhere as the threat of wildfires looms large. (Turns out, chompers are way more effective than rakes.)

A herd of 200 goats can cover an acre a day, munching up accumulated brush so that a fire won’t have as much to feed on, city officials told the LA Times. It’s the same principle behind a controlled burn — but with cute, furry faces. Herds are available for rent in the area for anywhere from $500 to $1,500 per acre, depending on the terrain.

Nevada City is hoping to quickly raise $30,000 to work with local ranchers this winter — the herds are already booked for the rest of the year (#popular). In the future, the city says it will look for grant funding for prescriptive grazing, and will also teach residents about reducing risks on their own property.

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Only you (and a bunch of goats) can prevent forest fires

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California has big dreams — and they’re stuck in traffic.

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When environmentalists want hope, they often turn to California, a state taking strong climate action and promising even more, all while maintaining a robust economy. But the state is also a home of car culture, high-schoolers cruising down mainstreet, lowriders parading, and Angelenos telling each other how to take the 10 to the 405. It’s built on a foundation of squat, sprawling development connected by jam-packed freeways.

And, according to a new report, California is dreaming if it hopes to achieve its climate goals with all that driving. The state is “moving in the wrong direction” when it comes to transportation, its biggest source of emissions, according to the California Air Resources Board, a state agency.

Californians are driving more, burning more gas, and spewing out more pollution from their tailpipes. That’s because the state has failed to take the kind of actions needed to get people out of their cars. By 2030, the state wants to get greenhouse gases 40 percent below 1990 levels. And outgoing Governor Jerry Brown has set a far tougher goal: Making the state carbon neutral by 2045.

But if the Golden State can’t scrap its car culture, California won’t meet its 2030 goals, according to the agency’s report.

“California will not achieve the necessary greenhouse gas emissions reductions to meet mandates for 2030 and beyond without significant changes to how communities and transportation systems are planned, funded and built,” the report said.

The state is still spending the lion’s share of transportation dollars on building and maintaining roads for cars. It’s also been unable to build enough housing near jobs, forcing workers to make long commutes to far flung developments.

California has plans to build more apartments in walkable neighborhoods and improve transit systems, said Ella Wise, a policy advocate for the nonprofit group, ClimatePlan. “We need to translate those plans to action on the ground,” she said. “That’s not what’s happening, yet.”

In 2008, California passed a law requiring communities to upend their land-use and transportation plans to reduce pollution and stem climate change. But nothing much changed. California is just as sprawling and traffic-choked as it was a decade ago.

This isn’t a problem that can be solved by Tesla slashing prices on its Model 3s. The report found that even if the number of people buying zero-emission cars soared 10 fold, Californians would still need to drive less to meet the state’s climate goals.

“We know what we need to do,” Wise said. “This is about healthier communities, safer streets, and more equitable access to jobs. It’s about real people and real lives.”

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California has big dreams — and they’re stuck in traffic.

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California’s carbon emissions are back to ’90s levels. It can be done, people!

California’s carbon emissions are back to where they were when Macaulay Culkin was battling burglars and MC Hammer first told us we couldn’t touch this.

The California Air Resources Board said Wednesday that the state had hit its goal of bringing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels four years ahead of schedule. The drop came thanks to a boom in renewables and improving efficiency.

“California set the toughest emissions targets in the nation, tracked progress and delivered results,” said Governor Jerry Brown in a statement.

The state actually hit the goal in 2016 and is only reporting it now because it takes a while to crunch the numbers. A 2006 law set the target and put the Air Resources Board in charge of charting the state’s progress.

The board’s report shows that carbon emissions dropped 13 percent from their recent peak, while the average Californian’s carbon footprint shrank 23 percent, to 10.8 metric tons per person — about half the national average.

CARB

The results put the lie to the canard that emissions can only fall when an economy shrinks: the Golden State’s economy boomed as it cut its emissions. “California now produces twice as many goods and services for the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the rest of the nation,” according to the Air Resources Board.

CARB

The biggest reductions came from the electric power sector, where an increase in wind and solar energy has been displacing fossil fuels.

CARB

To be sure, there are some signs that future progress could be harder. In the first quarter of this year, for instance, California’s electric system was actually slightly more polluting than the same quarter of last year. The state will need to make improvements in other sectors to meet its goals. At this point those miles of vehicles, bumper to bumper on the freeways — not electric power — are the largest problem. And transportation emissions have gone up, not down.

CARB

And so policy makers are turning their attention to cars. Governor Brown has a goal of getting 5 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030, up from about 400,000 today. To help that happen, California is spending nearly a billion dollars on charging stations, electric buses, and electric vehicles for government agencies. Some legislators are also trying to allow developers to build more homes in cities, where people can bike or take transit rather than driving. Both candidates vying to replace Brown as governor have vowed to build more housing.

California’s climate laws set the next milestone at cutting emissions another 40 percent by 2030, what Brown called “a heroic and very ambitious goal.”

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California’s carbon emissions are back to ’90s levels. It can be done, people!

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The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Blow to Voting Rights Advocates

Mother Jones

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Ohio’s Golden Week—a period when voters can register and cast ballots early at the same time—will not be in place for the November election. The US Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed an appeals court panel decision and stonewalled a last-ditch effort by Ohio Democrats to restore the extra week during the state’s early voting period.

The saga began in February 2014, after the state’s Republican-led Legislature passed a series of voting restrictions that included eliminating Golden Week and same-day voter registration. The Ohio branch of the NAACP filed a lawsuit in May 2014, alleging the changes disproportionately affected minority voters. That September, a federal district judge granted an injunction halting the state’s early voting restrictions. The state appealed, and a panel on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court’s decision. But later that month, the Supreme Court put the order on hold, which kept the state’s initial restrictions in place for the midterm election.

After the election, the state’s NAACP reached a settlement with Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted that resulted in additional evening hours and another Sunday added to the early voting period, but the settlement may not have gone far enough. The Ohio Democratic Party, along with two other county Democratic organizations, later joined a lawsuit on behalf of several individuals to challenge the measures, arguing that they were discriminatory and disproportionately affected minority voters. (The Ohio Organizing Collaborative filed the initial suit in May 2015, but later withdrew.)

They claimed the rollbacks violated the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices or procedures on the basis of race, color, or language. In May, a federal district judge ruled that the reductions disproportionately burdened African American voters and resulted “in less opportunity for African Americans to participate in the political process than other voters.” But a federal appeals court panel disagreed and reversed the lower court’s ruling in August. “This case presents yet another appeal…asking the federal courts to become entangled, as overseers and micromanagers, in the minutiae of state election processes,” wrote Judge David McKeague in the majority opinion. “The undisputed factual record shows that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually,” he added later. The Supreme Court today agreed.

Some experts, such as University of California-Irvine professor and election law expert Rick Hasen, still consider the state’s 29-day early voting period “exceedingly generous.” In a blog post after the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision, he wrote, “While I might support Golden Week as good policy, I worry when courts are used in this way to prevent every cutback in voting, especially after voting rights proponents had settled a suit with Ohio on favorable terms.”

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The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Blow to Voting Rights Advocates

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Sided With the Ohio GOP in a Voting Rights Case

Mother Jones

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A divided panel of judges on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a lower court erred by reinstating Ohio’s “Golden Week,” a period when Ohio voters could register to vote and cast absentee ballots at the same time.

“This case presents yet another appeal (there are several pending in the Sixth Circuit alone) asking the federal courts to become entangled, as overseers and micromanagers, in the minutiae of state election processes,” reads the majority opinion written by Judge David McKeague. He added that Ohio is a “leader” compared with other states when it comes to early voting opportunities, and that the “undisputed factual record shows that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually.”

The case, Ohio Democratic Party v. Husted, was filed after Republican state lawmakers introduced a host of voting restrictions in 2013, including the elimination of Golden Week and same-day voter registration. The Ohio Democratic Party, among others, sued in May 2015, arguing that the reductions violated the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices or procedures. A district court judge in Ohio agreed, ruling in May 2016 that the cuts impose “a modest, as well as a disproportionate, burden on African Americans’ right to vote.”

Judge Jane Stranch, the one dissenting vote on the ruling, wrote that the majority opinion overturned a decision that was based on a 10-day bench trial that included more than 20 witnesses (8 of whom were experts) and produced a 120-page opinion that dismissed many of the claims by voting-rights advocates. But this decision acknowledged that the elimination of both Golden Week and same-day voter registration went too far, even as the lower court disagreed with other challenges to voting restrictions originally brought in the case. Judge Stranch noted that the trial included evidence that African Americans in Ohio used early in-person voting and Golden Week at higher rates than whites in 2008 and 2012, and that it demonstrated the importance of early voting for black voters because of factors including more limited overall access to transportation and less flexible work schedules than their white counterparts.

“A great deal of work underlies the district court’s conclusion on this important subject,” Stranch wrote. “Both that work and the substantial support found in the record stand in opposition to the majority opinion’s blithe assertion ‘that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually.'”

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, celebrated Tuesday’s ruling:

Marc Elias, one of the main Democratic lawyers working the case (and the attorney for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which was not a party to this case), tweeted:

The Constitutional Accountability Center, a judiciary advocacy group, which had filed an amicus brief in support of keeping Golden Week on the books, slammed Tuesday’s decision. David Gans, the center’s director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program, wrote in a statement, “Today’s 2-1 decision…rubber-stamps Ohio’s decision to cut back on early voting and same-day registration, failing to ensure that the state respected the voting rights of all Ohioans. The court’s decision will make it harder for racial minorities and others to cast a ballot this coming Election day.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote on Tuesday that Ohio’s 29-day early voting period was already “exceedingly generous.” He acknowledged that while he “might support Golden Week as good policy, I worry when courts are used in this way to prevent every cutback in voting, especially after voting rights proponents had settled a suit with Ohio on favorable terms.”

Unless the Ohio Democratic Party appeals to the full 6th Circuit or the US Supreme Court, Golden Week and same-day registration will not be in place for the election in November.

Source – 

A Federal Appeals Court Just Sided With the Ohio GOP in a Voting Rights Case

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Why California Needs to Legalize Recreational Marijuana

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world with 1 in every 111 adults in prison or jail as of 2014. And of the 2,224,400 Americans who were behind bars that year, 700,993 were arrested on marijuana law violations. With California spending nearly $50,000 per year on each inmate annually, increasing the California Wall of Debt even further, the legalization of recreational marijuana becomes not just a social issue, but a fiscal one in the Golden State.

The War on Drugs was started in 1971 by President Richard Nixon and its estimated that the United States is now spending approximately $51,000,000,000 on it annually. Its largely considered to be a failing program, but one way Americans can start to get a handle on this situation is by continuing to decriminalize, and even legalize, marijuana.

As of 2016, 25 states have some form of marijuana legalization. Four states as well as Washington D.C. have legalized recreational use of marijuana, and eight more states have marijuana legislation on the November ballot, including California. Voters in California will decide whether or not to legalize marijuana for recreational use and potentially collect over $1 billion in state and local taxes on its sales.

The combined savings of enforcing marijuana laws along with increased tax revenue could be a big step in the right direction for the California budget. In 2010, Proposition 19 was rejected by California voters, but the 2016 measure is said to have a better chance at passing with more regulation at the state level and multiple states that have already passed recreational use.

California legalized medical marijuana in 2003 with State Bill 420 which made it possible for people suffering from certain conditions to have legal access to medical marijuana. A few of the qualifying conditions include:

AIDS
Arthritis
Cachexia
Cancer
Chronic Pain
Glaucoma
Migraine
Seizures

According to Santa Rosa criminal lawyers Li & Lozada, who regularly represent individuals charged with marijuana related crimes in California, the confusion about the legality of medical marijuana use, sale, and cultivation is still a major issue across the country and until the federal law is changed, there will continue to be controversy regarding the legality of marijuana.

As President Obama stated to Vice News in March 2015, if enough states end up decriminalizing, then congress may then reschedule marijuana. California is widely considered an influencing state when it comes to marijuana legalization as it was the first state to legalize medical marijuana 20 years ago. There is no doubt that if the Golden State legalizes recreational marijuana this November, other states will follow suit.

Readers interested in supporting recreational marijuana legalization in California can sign the Care2 petition Support Marijuana Legalization in California!

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Why California Needs to Legalize Recreational Marijuana

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Here’s Why the NBA’s Top Team Stopped Letting Its Players Eat PB&J

Mother Jones

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After the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry scored 51 points during his game last night, he might have been craving a soft peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But the day before, the favorite snack would’ve been out of reach: As a part of overhauling the reigning NBA champions’ diet, the team recently asked players to cut back on sugar while traveling to games, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The champs aren’t alone in their quest to eliminate the sweet stuff. Americans are cutting back on sugar more than any other substance these days, according to a January Reuters poll. Fifty-eight percent of people polled said they had attempted to limit their sugar intake over the last 30 days, compared to 48 percent who had attempted to cut back on sodium and 50 percent who had tried to cut calories. Nearly half said that labels stating “no sugar added” helped inform their shopping decisions.

Though we may be foaming at the mouth for an Odwalla green juice (50 grams of sugar) or a Nature’s Valley granola bar (11 grams of sugar), the United States Department of Agriculture says we’re on the right track in trying to avoid too many sweets. New dietary guidelines released earlier this year recommend we drastically decrease our added-sugar intake—particularly of sweet drinks and processed snack foods. Sugar-laden diets translate to increased calorie consumption and a higher risk for heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. The feds recommend a daily maximum dose of 12 teaspoons—less than half our current average of 30. (Here’s what that recommendation might look like).

So just how much sugar is in one of the Warriors’ favorite sandwiches? Let’s assume you use the same ingredients reportedly stocked in the locker room in Oakland: creamy Skippy peanut butter, Smucker’s strawberry jam, and 12-grain whole wheat bread.

mikemphoto/ThinkStock PB&J with Smucker’s Jam and Skippy peanut butter is reportedly the team’s favorite snack.

A whole sandwich, with just one serving of the peanut butter and one serving of the jam, amounts to about 21 grams of sugar—a little more than 5 teaspoons, and still well within the USDA’s daily recommended dose of added sugar.

For the Warriors players, who were reportedly on board with giving up Gatorade and sodas, the absence of those homemade PB&Js just couldn’t be justified. With help from their assistant coach, the players successfully persuaded their management to lift the ban on the beloved sandwich this week. Of course, basketball stars burn on average of anywhere from 600-800 calories in a game—surely they can afford to celebrate with a sandwich on the long flight home.

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Here’s Why the NBA’s Top Team Stopped Letting Its Players Eat PB&J

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Friday Cat Blogging – 19 June 2015

Mother Jones

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This is our latest horror story. For reasons unknown (and they’re always unknown, aren’t they?) Hopper has decided that it’s great fun to jump up on the second-story bannister and walk around. We can’t think of any way to stop her from doing this, but one of these days she’s going to set a paw wrong and go flying off the wrong side. Being a cat, maybe it won’t hurt her. But it’s a twelve-foot drop, and some of it is onto a hardwood floor. We have visions of splat going through our heads.

What do we do? Put up a net, like those ones they have on the Golden Gate Bridge to catch jumpers? Get rid of the quilts and install razor wire? Put cat-size exercise weights on Hopper’s feet so she can’t jump so high? There’s got to be an answer.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 19 June 2015

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The Saddest Reason We Keep Having These Awful Ferry Disasters

Mother Jones

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Much is still unknown about Monday’s deadly passenger ship accident on China’s Yangtze River that has left over 400 people missing, likely trapped in the hull of the capsized boat. The Eastern Star cruiser, carrying 456 people, was sailing in treacherous conditions, according to the ship’s captain and engineer, who were both rescued hours after the boat sank. China’s official weather service has since confirmed that there were heavy storms in the area.

While global statistics on boat disasters are hard to come by, the Eastern Star incident could end up being among of the deadliest passenger ship accidents in recent years, anywhere in the world. Just 26 fatalities have been confirmed so far, with 14 people rescued, according to CCTV. But once all the passengers are accounted for, the death toll could surpass the number of victims from last year’s ferry disaster in South Korea, which killed 304 people.

It’s been a tragic two years on the world’s waterways. Roughly 700 migrants from the Middle East and Africa drowned off the Libyan coast in April. A Bangladeshi ferry carrying up to 140 people capsized and sank in February, killing an estimated 70 people. And in May of last year, rescuers found just 40 bodies, after another boat sank in Bangladesh. Police there estimated that roughly 100 passengers were never found.

Monday’s accident in China raises questions about whether or not the ship should have been sailing in such extreme weather, and how quickly search and rescue teams were able to locate the boat and mount and effective operation. Those two factors are common contributors to maritime disasters around the world, according to Abigail Golden, a research associate with the Worldwide Ferry Safety Association.

While details about the latest incident are still sketchy, generally speaking “there are trends around the world that you can see, if you look at the data,” Golden said.

Golden maintains what is perhaps the most comprehensive database of ferry accidents that have occurred around the world in recent years (it’s open source, and available here). Golden conservatively estimates that, as of September 2014, roughly 16,880 fatalities had occurred in 160 deadly ferry accidents since 2000. Ninety-five percent of those accidents occurred in the developing world. A quarter were in Bangladesh, and nearly 6 percent were in China. Other countries where its particularly dangerous to take a ferry ride include Senegal, Tanzania, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

It’s unclear from this data whether or not boat trips like this week’s journey down the Yangtze are necessarily more dangerous than other forms of transportation, such a driving or taking a plane—a definitive, apples-to-apples comparison is hard to come by. But with boats, “a lot of issues are the same around the world,” said Golden. “It’s weak regulation, it’s overcrowding of vessels, lack of things like weather information, and a lack of training of the crew.”

“Human error is immensely prevalent,” Golden added. She estimates that 54 percent of total accidents and 67 percent of total fatalities are caused by human error. That includes over-crowding, misjudgment of weather conditions, and improper storage of cargo, which can result in unexpected shifts in the ship’s balance if cargo moves suddenly or is too heavy for the boat. (South Korean authorities pointed to this as a factor in last year’s accident).

Weather incidents, such as high waves and typhoons, were present in half of all the accidents Golden compiled, and while not fatal in and of itself, overcrowding played a role in roughly half of ferry accidents in the dataset.

Passengers reacting to a disaster, without proper safety advice or direction from the crew, might “rush to a single side of the ferry which of course can then capsize it, or they might climb to higher points of the ferry like the roof, which would then of course raise the center of gravity,” causing the ship to sink, she said. Once the ship has sunk, the disaster can quite easily overwhelm the search and rescue capabilities of the country involved. The final death tolls tend to be a result of “very multi-faceted” causes, Golden said.

Golden stressed that until more is known about Monday’s accident, it’s unclear whether the Eastern Star could qualify as a “ferry” for purposes of her study, since Golden’s dataset only includes boats that are part of regular commuter fleets that make scheduled stops, rather than chartered cruises.

The Worldwide Ferry Safety Association database is imperfect, Golden admits. Without a central agency to report statistics to, most of the information is gleaned from local news reports, which can be spotty and contradictory. “Obviously these reporters are not naval engineers or weather experts, so a lot of that information is quite vague,” she said. “Finding incident and accident reports that we can actually use for our purposes is quite difficult.”

But one thing is certain about ferry deaths, says Golden: “There is definitely more out there. If anything, what we have is an underestimate rather than an overestimate.”

Why is it so hard to find an authoritative dataset of passenger boat accidents and their causes?

“Honestly, safety is not a sexy or exciting concept to many people,” Golden said. “It’s not a quick fix. It’s not like going in with UNICEF after an earthquake and handing out bottles of water and seeing people’s beaming faces. It’s a long, slow, arduous process.”

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The Saddest Reason We Keep Having These Awful Ferry Disasters

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Future forests to be smaller, less majestic

Fe Fi Fo Bummer

Future forests to be smaller, less majestic

By on 21 Jan 2015commentsShare

To the list of ways climate change is slowly but surely rewriting the world as we know it, add “making forests less awesome.” A new study suggests that since the 1930s California has lost half of its biggest trees — those with a trunk over two feet in diameter — even in forests protected from logging and development. The study corroborates earlier findings that Yosemite’s pines are growing to smaller average sizes.

The researchers believe climate change is a major factor. Dwindling snowpack and rising temperatures mean plants have unreliable water supplies during the dry season, and they also lose water at a higher rate. Less water means trees aren’t growing as big.

The study, which surveyed 46,000 square miles of Golden State woodlands, found especially steep losses in Southern California’s forests, where the water deficit was most serious. But even tracts along the state’s foggy northern coast and northern Sierra high country suffered: The latter saw more than half of its largest trees vanish. From National Geographic:

Large trees in general appear to be more vulnerable to a water shortfall, [lead author Patrick McIntyre] said. Though it’s not clear why, one reason may be that in large, tall trees the internal hydraulic system that pumps water from roots to leaves is more susceptible to failing when water is short. Another factor could be that many of those trees sprouted centuries ago, when California’s climate was colder, said Jim Lutz, a Utah State University forest ecologist and lead author of the Yosemite study.

Since the study relied on surveys taken before the ongoing four-year California drought began, it’s hard to say how bad things now look for the state’s famous postcard giants, the sequoias and redwoods. But it’s almost certainly worse — and that means more than just a loss of wow factor:

Beyond their romantic grandeur, big trees play an outsized ecological role. They produce more seeds, resist wildfire damage, and store more carbon than their smaller brethren; rare animals such as spotted owls and flying squirrels live in their cavities.

Climate change isn’t even necessarily the most immediate danger. Add the pressures of a growing population, ongoing development, and overzealous fire suppression that leaves many small trees all vying for resources that would sustain a few large ones, and you have a future with far fewer giants in it.

Source:
California’s Forests: Where Have All the Big Trees Gone?

, National Geographic.

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Future forests to be smaller, less majestic

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