What does lungs of the earth mean

Pick your price. Pick your package. Prices online are cheaper than at the gate. Supporting healthy ocean habitats is vital for humans and all wildlife. Published June 8, Take a deep breath. Our Shared Ocean The ocean gives us so much, but its generosity has limits. Celebrate To celebrate World Ocean Day, visit the official website. Finally, remember to thank the ocean for every other breath you take. More than 3 billion people depend on seafood as a protein source. By , an estimated 40 million people are expected to work in ocean-based industries.

Recommended for you. Read More. Not-So-Spooky Species. Nov Trees release oxygen when they use energy from the sunshine to make glucose from carbon dioxide and water. It takes six molecules of CO2 to produce one molecule of glucose by photosynthesis, and six molecules of oxygen are released as a byproduct.

Forests are essential to life on earth. Yet, we take them for granted. We usually think of a forest as a vast area filled with individual trees. Nothing could be further from the truth. Under the forest floor is a vast network of soil fungi that, through the tree roots, connects all the trees together. A forest can be thought of as a super-organism with electrical pathways connecting it.

To harvest trees without understanding this is to damage the living pathways of the forest. Trees are social beings and they care for each other. Through the thin fungal threads mycelium , they share sugars and nutrients with each other. In exchange, the trees provide the fungi with carbohydrates. Our spirit is the spirit of the forest. Making use of what little means they have at their disposal, Basuki and his small team from the Friends of the National Parks Foundation work to defend the Tanjung Puting reserve from the flames that periodically affect it.

The park, which is located in Central Kalimantan, in the southern part of the island of Borneo, has been at the centre of the fires that struck Indonesia throughout Burning unabated for weeks, it turned about two million hectares of forest to cinder, mainly on the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan.

A small dock leads to a path that crosses the forest, where beams of sunlight cut through the humidity and the water in the streams resembles the colour of tea. It takes a few hours of walking to reach the Beguruh reforestation area where Basuki and his men are trying to help the forest come back to life. There are some hammocks, a gas burner for making coffee and an open air shower.

A few metres away, pots are lined up. They hold the seedlings of trees. This is where we look after the trees that will repopulate the forest that burned down. At night, we take turns sleeping a few metres away from the flames; sometimes someone can lose their life, suffocated by the smoke. In times of respite we plant the trees back into the burnt areas instead, and prepare for our next battle.

His salary allows him to fly twice a year to see his wife and two children, who live in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. Source: Global Fire Data. From September to October , Indonesia was the scene of one of the most disastrous fires in recent years. Burning unabated for weeks, the flames affected more than 2. Enormous clouds of smoke made it to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, with toxic gases inhaled by at least 43 million people.

The Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics called the fires a "crime against humanity of extraordinary proportions". The most authoritative theories blame the fires on individuals interested in the acquisition of new lands — including some companies that produce palm oil — and on farmers who use the fire to prepare lands for cultivation.

The dry season and the prolonged combustion within the vast peat stretches make extinguishing operations even more complicated. Almost all fires detected in Indonesia are caused by mankind to prepare the lands for farming. A fire is the cheapest way to empty out the land for agriculture.

Fires can be ignited by individuals who control vast plantations, or small farmers working in their own parcels of land with traditional methods," explains Peter Holmgren, the director of the Centre for International Forest Research CIFOR , which is based in Bogor, near Jakarta, and researches tropical forests.

That is more than the total produced by Germany or Japan in a year.