Forests

"An illegal gold rush has cleared 140,000 hectares of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon and is accelerating as foreign, armed groups move into the region to profit from record gold prices, according to a report."

"Critics say move to axe Bill Clinton’s ‘roadless rule’ that protected key old-growth forests will be devastating to environment"

"For most of her life, Thea Maria Carlson did not like fire. Even though she had studied earth systems at Stanford University and knew, intellectually, that burning had an environmental purpose in her home of California, she still wanted nothing to do with it."

"Earth’s nastiest and costliest wildfires are blazing four times more often now than they did in the 1980s because of human-caused climate change and people moving closer to wildlands, a new study found."

"Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a $1 billion investment in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) to support forest conservation this week at a United Nations event in New York."

"An Indonesian archipelago that’s home to three-fourths of Earth’s coral species, a stretch of Icelandic coast with 70% of the country’s plant life and an area along Angola’s Atlantic coast featuring savannahs, forests and estuaries are among 26 new UNESCO-designated biosphere reserves. The United Nations cultural agency says the reserves — 785 sites in 142 countries, designated since 1971 — are home to some of the planet’s richest and most fragile ecosystems."

"The Interior Department says it’s on track to meet a federal goal to increase logging on federal lands, even as timber industry analysts warn low prices, scarce sawmills, and litigation will likely threaten progress."

"It's officially fall in the Northern Hemisphere, which means bright, beautiful foliage isn't far behind."

"The Trump administration is poised to approve a deal that would allow a contentious road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, a vast wild area in southwestern Alaska, according to internal Interior Department documents reviewed by The New York Times."