Forests

"It’s a good summer for the big cats who already have to deal with development, traffic, poisons and wildfires." "California mountain lions are in the middle of a baby boom."

"As the Amazon rainforest’s human-inflicted fire season advances — now counting nearly 700 major fires and half a million hectares  burned over the last three months — the risk to Indigenous territories is growing: 86% of major fires detected in Indigenous Territories this year happened in the last two weeks, according to satellite data analyzed by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP)."

"Insurers, facing huge losses, have been pulling back from fire-prone areas across California. “The marketplace has largely collapsed,” an advocate for counties in the state said."

"Environmental groups fear a new proposal from the Trump administration would greenlight more oil and gas development within national forest land."

"Record setting conflagrations in California and Colorado have smothered residents of the two states with choking, stinging smoke. But the impact of that smoke is also being felt hundreds, even thousands, of miles away, and the health impacts may last for years after the flames subside."

"The number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon has risen dramatically in recent weeks and now achieved a bleak milestone: more than 500 major, largely illegal, fires have been detected in the region since the end of May."

"the extreme weather conditions now testing the country, one disaster overlapping with the next, are exactly what they’ve long warned us to expect in a warming world."

"When a massive wildfire swept through California’s oldest state park last week it was feared many trees in a grove of old-growth redwoods, some of them 2,000 years old and among the tallest living things on Earth, may finally have succumbed. But an Associated Press reporter and photographer hiked the renowned Redwood Trail at Big Basin Redwoods State Park on Monday and confirmed most of the ancient redwoods had withstood the blaze."

"On an early December morning last year in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, half a dozen members of the Indigenous Guajajara people packed their bags with food, maps and drone equipment to get ready for a patrol. They said goodbye to their children, uncertain when, or whether, they would see them again. Then, they hoisted their bags over their shoulders and set out to patrol a section of the 173,000 hectares (428,000 acres) of the primary rainforest they call home."