A study in North Carolina of dying trees

I learned all about salinity and it&#x27;s effects on our land in school in the 90s, it was a very big issue to us even then. The cause for us at the time was deforestation over the decades.<p>I welcome anyone to jump on to Google Maps and take a wander across the Australian coastal areas, then wander inland. Marvel at just how much land was cleared for agriculture. It&#x27;s a patchwork quilt of farmland.<p>We only have 25 million people, so to have cleared so much land is truly saddening. We cleared land we couldn&#x27;t even farm. Clearing the land was our first order of business when settlers arrived.<p>The good news is there are numerous national parks, growing every year, and revegetation is something we are doing a lot of. Let&#x27;s hope it&#x27;s not too little too late.

Plant trees. Never thought of becoming a &quot;tree hugger&quot; but I&#x27;ve recently setup a recurring donation to a few charities - Ecologi, EdenProjects.org, OneTreePlanted, TreeNation, NationalForests.org. Spreading it across several orgs as I don&#x27;t know yet which ones are more efficient than others.<p>It&#x27;s nice to think that somewhere in Amazonia my small forest will be offsetting tons of CO2 produced by driving around and consuming products, and it will live long after I&#x27;m gone.<p>I wish that $100M &quot;Carbon Capture&quot; prize by Musk would go to planting a billion trees, the perfect carbon capture machines.

I honestly wonder if creating dikes to protect these areas might someday make sense. Humans created this mess, and perhaps humans can help repair and&#x2F;or save some of it.<p>If the Dutch can reclaim land from the sea, perhaps we must as well.

A related article on the challenges of decommissioning coastal towns:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2019&#x2F;may&#x2F;18&#x2F;this-is-a-wake-up-call-the-villagers-who-could-be-britains-first-climate-refugees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2019&#x2F;may&#x2F;18&#x2F;this-is-...</a>

I wonder if there&#x27;s potentially in trying to seed some of these coastal wetlands with potentially non-native Mangroves which thrive on brackish water. It&#x27;s not a native species, but at a point, surely unnatural but living trees are better than dead swamps.

Sea levels have been rising since the end of the ice age. Nothing on the Earth is permanent. If you&#x27;ve ever been to eastern NC or VA, it&#x27;s all sand near the coast. The ocean is reclaiming what was once hers.

Oddly enough this made me think of the Great Wall of China. A Great Ocean Wall of some sort sounds like it would be effective. Finance it with waterproof apartments in some areas.

In other news: 11 March: A review finds that the Amazon basin currently emits more greenhouse gases than it absorbs overall.[204]