Though I am sometimes mistaken for an environmentalist many of my posts castigate them for their stunningly obtuse behaviors and beliefs which actually harm the environment. I've tried to make that distinction, calling them paleo-environmentalists and folks like me real environmentalists, but it's stretching the word and concept too far out of shape.

So, no, I'm not an environmentalist as the word is generally used since my focus is on the actual environment rather than a grab bag of loopy, pseudo-religious baloney, what Lovelock calls "urban-based superstition about nature". Besides, environmentalists are primarily political activists aligned with various confederacies of dunces, and many of their positions are instrumental, designed to advance some other agenda that is sometimes, even usually, inimical to the environment.

One of the craziest positions these loons have taken is opposition to grazing. I'm a grazier, I have interest, but it's not the reason I criticize environmentalists so strongly on this issue. I wasn't always a grazier, I became one because it is so environmentally friendly. All of the theories predict this and all of the data shows this. It simply isn't possible for anyone who investigates this issue to reach another conclusion. Opposition is based on substitution of "urban-based superstition about nature" for evidence and reason.

Not surprisingly a good deal of information was whispered off camera to avoid drawing the wrath of politically powerful environmentalists and politicians, mainly Democrats, who were in thrall to them. That has changed.

Scientists using NASA satellite data have found that clearing for mechanized cropland has recently become a significant force in Brazilian Amazon deforestation. This change in land use may alter the region's climate and the land's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. . .

The high resolution and daily frequency of MODIS images allows researchers to distinguish vegetation types in greater detail than other satellites. This capability has helped the scientists to see for the first time that the size of the clearings used for crops has averaged twice the size of clearings used for pasture. Land conversion has also occurred rapidly, with about 90 percent of new crops planted within a year of deforestation.

"Deforestation for cropland usually involves clearing several square kilometers of land and results in greater separation of remnant patches of forest than other types of land use . . .

Converting forests to cropland also has a more pronounced ecological and climate impact than other land conversions because it involves the complete removal of land biomass, including tree trunks, stumps and woody roots. "The carbon once contained in the living material and soil is released into the air from multiple fires during the clearing process, causing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, a primary greenhouse gas, to increase," said co-author Ruth DeFries, University of Maryland. Of all land uses and types, croplands are also one of the least efficient at absorbing carbon from the air.

In a related study, to be published in Earth Interactions, researchers found that the region's climate is impacted not only by the overall extent of clearing, but also by the type of subsequent land use. Changes in land cover and use directly influence climate by affecting the amount of solar energy absorbed at the surface, the transfer and flow of heat, and the transport of water from the land and plants through evaporation, a cooling process.

Using a computer climate model driven by MODIS data, the researchers examined the sensitivities of climate to recent changes in Mato Grosso. Model results indicate that areas converted from tropical forest to cropland, including soybean, result in warmer, drier conditions. But the conversion of forest into pasture -- land with grasses -- results in a cooling effect.

It would be better if the forest remained a forest, but the worst thing you can do is crop the land. If the wonderful grasslands of S. America had not been plowed up for crops there would be no reason to turn forest into pasture either. One of the more beneficial land use changes we can make is to restore grasslands, to convert cropland back to grassland.

* from World Wide Words

We use come a cropper now to mean that a person has been struck by some serious misfortune, but it derives from hunting, where it originally meant a heavy fall from a horse. Its first appearance was in 1858, in a late and undistinguished work called Ask Mamma, by that well-known Victorian writer on hunting, R S Surtees, who’s perhaps best known for Jorrock’s Jaunts and Jollities.

The earliest easily traceable source of cropper is the Old Norse word kropp for a swelling or lump on the body. This is closely related to the Old English word for the rounded head or seed body of a plant, from which we get our modern word crop for the produce of a cultivated plant. In the sense of a bodily lump, it was applied first to the crop of a bird but then extended to other bodily protuberances.