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End Times
There’s No Free Lunch With Climate Change
A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscores the hard choices we face on land use and global warming
Viewed from space, the African island nation of Madagascar appears to bleed. What you’re seeing isn’t blood, though, but the result of massive deforestation — more than 90% of the country’s forests have been destroyed over the past century. Without trees to anchor the land, the red-tinged soil flows into the rivers and oceans during the rainy season. It’s a rare opportunity to see — in a single image — what humanity is doing to the planet on a global scale.
The view from the ground is even worse, though. When I visited Madagascar for a reporting trip in 2008, I witnessed vast stretches of barren, eroded scrubland, punctuated by a handful of remaining forests that have been kept intact as wildlife preserves. And there was so much life to preserve. Kept in island isolation after Madagascar separated from India 80 to 100 million years ago, countless new species arose that can only be found there: leaf-tailed geckos, Parson’s chameleons, and of course, the lemurs, the band of small primates native to the island. Lemurs are considered the most endangered group of vertebrates on Earth, and what…
