The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
In 1990, my wife and I were married in her village in southwestern Uganda. The festivities went on for three days, and all the while a couple of dozen gray-crowned cranes, with regal bonnets of sun-shot yellow feathers, were pecking and padding around in the adjacent savanna. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
Nature got it right with the cranes. They have been around since the Eocene, which ended 34 million years ago. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
Even as global warming increases the frequency of El Nino and the Atlantic event, their effects are being amplified by the annual loss of an area of rain forest the size of New Jersey. Less rain falls, and the water runs into the rivers instead of being sucked up by the fungus filaments and tree roots. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
Most of the Amazon basin is as flat as a pancake and laced with extravagantly meandering waterways. One school of thought holds that more than 145 million years ago, when Africa and South America were joined, the Amazon’s main stem was connected to the Niger River and actually flowed in the opposite direction, toward the Pacific Ocean. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
The plumbing and pluvial dynamics of the Amazon, the largest freshwater system on Earth, are still far from understood. This is partly because it is a semi-open system. Moisture flows in and out unpredictably. A lot of nonlinear feedback loops and ‘remote influences’ – continental, transcontinental, oceanic, meteorological – come into play. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
The day we dispose of the idea of disposability will be a great one for the planet. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
The usual way of growing cotton is highly petrochemical-intensive, requiring 110 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. Some of the fertilizer is broken down by soil bacteria into nitrate, a toxic and highly soluble chemical that can leach into groundwater or get washed into lakes, creating oxygenless dead zones. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
As technology keeps improving, the price of oil keeps rising, and the ice keeps melting, Arctic energy is bound to be an increasingly bigger part of the global mix. Alex Shoumatoff Read Quote
