Bear Down!
Vanishing Forests: New Map Details Global Deforestation
The work that went into this research is pretty phenomenal. I think that it is interesting when we hear those factoids like, "You know, there are more trees in America now then when the pilgrims arrived." And that may be true (note that America in this case refers to the United States and not the original and correct meaning of both North and South America). But when you hear this kind of fact you have to question what it really means. Yeah, there might be more trees in the U.S, but is it because we are importing so much lumber from other countries?
The research in this article would suggest that that would be the case. The researchers used over a decade of Landsat data to look at the world as a whole. They processed the data and were able to find the net gain and loss of many regions across the world. In order to do this though, they had to use cloud processing from Google. Cloud processing is a part of the future of cloud technology. It is a sort of thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typewriters thing.
I think the overall message is that maybe we should consider consuming less.