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Quotes about Forest Fires from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"For three months in the first quarter of 1998, forest fires raged out of control in the Amazonian state of Roraima, 1,500 miles northwest of Brasilia, devastating the rain forest. It had not rained for months—an effect blamed on El Nino—and the ordinarily humid rain forest was bone-dry, perfect kindling for the fire that had by that time scorched 15 percent of the state. The rains, usually so copious in this part of Brazil, remained elusive. The UN termed the fire a disaster without precedent on the planet." - Lynne McTaggart, The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World (Get the book.)

"El Nifio-caused droughts wreaked havoc in trop- ical Africa and Southeast Asia, where huge forest fires raged out of control in 1982-1983 and 1997-1998. Prophets of ecological doom are now out in force, while scientists passionately debate the extent of global warming and its effects on long-term climate. At a major conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, 154 nations agreed on an important convention that called for a stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to prevent human inference with global climate." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "The great forest fires have stripped millions of hectares of their natural protective covering, raising the specter of widespread soil erosion and destruction of once-fertile land. At least half of the 900 million hectares of rice farmland in the Philippines are subject to flooding—and floods destroy not only crops but human lives as well. These disasters unfolded even though the 1997-1998 El Nino was tracked from the moment it first appeared as a growing mass of warm water in the tropical Pacific." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "The same drought found Indonesia wrestling with uncontrollable forest fires. Like the Borneo fires of fifteen years earlier, these began when farmers and plantation owners set fire to uncleared land on the assumption that monsoon rains would soon extinguish the flames. The rains never came. The flames roared out of control through the dry forest, killing millions of trees and their root systems. Thick clouds of smoke, ash, and haze blanketed Southeast Asia, disrupted air travel, and caused at least one airline crash that killed 234 people." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Between August 1982 and May 1983, oven-hot winds fanned huge forest fires ignited by farmers burning off their land. Rising population densities caused by accelerated settlement programs and migration had created insatiable demand for new farming tracts. Inevitably, the farmers' fires burned out of control and moved into virgin forest. The dry conditions had lowered the water table, killing shallow-rooted trees and turning freshwater swamps into tracts of tinder-dry peat. Three and a half million hectares of surface and underground fires raged unabated for almost three months in early 1983." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"In 1997, we saw the devastating effect of forest fires in Indonesia, exacerbated by the Pacific's El Nino warming effect. According to the World Wildlife Fund, more forests were burned around the world in 1997 than in any other year in recorded history. At least 12 million acres of forest and scrub ?an area nearly the size of England —burned in Indonesia and Brazil, along with vast areas of Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Peru, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and the Congo." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.)

"Voon tells me that this haze sticks around for months at a time, the result of forest fires in Indonesia. The devastation of these ancient forests has tragic consequences. Nomadic tribes, like the Penan, who used to survive on wild tree fruits can no longer maintain their traditional lifestyles. As their feeding spots have vanished, Malaysian officials have focused on assimilating them. Abdul Raham Yakub, a former chief minister of Sarawak, has said, "I would rather see them eating McDonald's hamburgers than the unmentionables they eat in thejungle." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"Eighteen months later, work would be published directly linking fatal blood clots with exposure to the airborne particulate matter in forest fires. And in 2006, a shocking study based on hospital data from thirty-four cities over a fourteen-year span would show that people with autoimmune inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and lupus are at a substantially increased risk of death when they are exposed to particulate air pollution, or soot, for a substantial period of time." - Donna Jackson Nakazawa, The Autoimmune Epidemic (Get the book.) "As one doctor explained, "You've had several forest fires, and each time it's harder and harder to get healthy regrowth." It was the second time in four years that my work as a journalist came to a sudden halt. Deadline after deadline passed. I was simply too weak to sit in front of a computer, let alone tap out words on the keyboard. I tried to get to the bathroom one night on my own, using my walker, without waking my husband to help steady me, but misjudged my stamina. On the way back I crashed into a window and fell in a heap on the floor, unable to get up on so much as one elbow." - Donna Jackson Nakazawa, The Autoimmune Epidemic (Get the book.) "At numbers four, five, and six, we cannot go back in time and travel with Jan's cells to say definitively what prompted Jan's sudden and rapid onset of antiphospholipid antibody syndrome or prove whether those forest fires had a thing to do with it. It is all supposition, yes, but it is a very good guess. THE STORY INTHE NUMBERS If you were to look today at a chart detailing incidence rates of autoimmune disease versus heart disease and cancer, you would see that while cancer and heart disease rates are, more or less, flatlin-ing, autoimmune diseases are continuing in a steady upward climb." - Donna Jackson Nakazawa, The Autoimmune Epidemic (Get the book.) "David felt that Jan's asthma must be acting up, too; recent forest fires had plagued Montana's wooded areas and some neighborhoods, and the noxious smoke clouds had grown closer and more visible as the couple had neared the Idaho-Montana border. Still, severe chest pain was not usually indicative of asthma. Could asthma coupled with esophageal spasms produce so much pain? That was their best educated guess at one o'clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere." - Donna Jackson Nakazawa, The Autoimmune Epidemic (Get the book.)

"And some of what's happening is inevitably bad: forest fires, shootings, war. But when journalists and other media-shapers bring together all these riveting stories, the picture that emerges is unbalanced. In fact, surveys show that the more people watch television, the more violent they judge the world to be. You Assess Your Media Diet might think that those who watch a lot of TV are simply better informed about the evils of the world. They're not. They grossly overestimate rates of violence." - Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life (Get the book.)

"Levels of arsenic in the environment can increase with natural events such as volcanic activity, rock erosion, and forest fires; but human actions can also release arsenic, often in extremely hazardous amounts. Every year, industrial pollution accounts for the release of thousands of pounds of the deadly chemical. Wood preservatives account for 90 percent of the arsenic used in American industry, but it can also be found in paints, metals, prescription and recreational drugs, soaps, and fertilizers, and occurs as a byproduct of mining, copper smelting, and coal burning. < X Fig." - Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN, Health Begins in the Colon (Get the book.)

"Even the Federal Reserve, which long ago acquired the seemingly unrelenting habit of putting out economic and financial forest fires by turning on the monetary liquidity spigot full blast, will likely fail to come to grips with the disaster. And if it does realize what is occurring, its response will be uncharacteristic, to say the least. After a long span enabling credit and various other bubbles, odds are high that the Fed will suddenly get what might be referred to as central bank "religion" and adopt a substantial measure of restraint, ironically perhaps, at just the wrong time." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.)

"The heatwave and drought also devastated the agricultural sector: crop losses totalled around $12 billion, whilst forest fires in Portugal caused another $1.5 billion of damage. Major rivers such as the Po in Italy, the Rhine in Germany and the Loire in France ran at record low levels, grounding barge traffic and causing water shortages for irrigation and hydroelectric production. Toxic algal blooms proliferated in the denuded rivers and lakes." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.) "Mediterranean sunburn Perhaps the most striking images from 2003's hot summer came from Portugal, where gigantic forest fires swept through the tinder-dry landscape, destroying orchards, torching houses and killing eighteen people. In total an area almost the size of Luxembourg was devastated. The conflagrations were so huge that they cast palls of smoke right over the North Atlantic, with both fires and smoke easily visible from space." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.) "In 1998 a strong El Nino helped generate severe droughts in Amazonia and East Asia, leading to gigantic forest fires which blanketed whole continents in smog. In the Amazon basin alone, 400 million tonnes of carbon were released, equivalent to 5 per cent of human emissions from fossil fuel burning for that whole year. Surprisingly, the Amazon forest ecosystem turns out to have been remarkably resilient to past climate changes. Even during the chilly depths of the last ice age, the forest persisted relatively undisturbed, despite cooler temperatures and lower rainfall." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.) "As the entire Amazon basin gradually dried out in the worst drought for forty years, massive forest fires began to lay waste to this formerly pristine tropical wilderness. Yet this was not a natural disaster. 'The Amazon is a canary in a coal mine for the earth,' the ecologist Dan Nepstad told a reporter from Reuters. 'As we enter a warming trend we are in uncertain territory' Nepstad should know. An acknowledged world expert on the Amazon, he has spent years investigating the impact of drought on the rainforest ecosystem." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.)

"Indeed, because of the multiplicity of risks, markets, and counterparties involved, the situation might be akin to the disastrous forest fires that swept across the West Coast of the United States in recent decades. Often, there were simply too many hot spots to tackle at once, and wide swaths were left ablaze until they eventually burned themselves out. Few areas of the financial system will be unaffected when the meltdown rages. In the insurance sector, for example, debt downgrades and defaults will occur at a quickening pace." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.)

"Malaysia sought crisis talks with its bigger neighbor as much of peninsular Malaysia, including the capital, had been shrouded in thick smog for a week, presenting the country with its worst pollution crisis since 1997, when smoke mainly from Indonesian forest fires blocked out skies across Southeast Asia. Asthma attacks soared, and tourists were holing up in their hotels or seeking refuge in air-conditioned shopping malls at one of the busiest times for the country's tourism industry. Talk about the right climate for world terrorism." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.)

"There are many contributing factors to cancer and many control mechanisms, as in my analogy of forest fires. These factors include countless known pollutants and toxins that are directly carcinogenic, nutritionally deficient modern diets, and other modern lifestyle habits. Yet, once cancer gets started, all cancers share common characteristics no matter where they are found in the body. These common characteristics of all cancer cells, which conventional medicine has disregarded, provide the main keys to how alternative non-toxic treatments work." - Tanya Harter Pierce, Outsmart Your Cancer: Alternative Non-Toxic Treatments That Work (Get the book.)

"Throughout France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and the Balkans, the intense heat and dry conditions sparked devastating forest fires. The heat wave was accompanied by an unprecedented drought that devastated crops. France's wheat loss was 20 percent, England's 12 percent, and Ukraine's a staggering 80 percent. In the previous year, 2002, Central Europe had been afflicted with unprecedented floods, called the worst in five hundred years and resulting in more than $15 billion in damage." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

"But there are also many natural control mechanisms within our bodies to keep these sparks from turning into raging forest fires of cancer. Most medical practitioners and researchers agree that, in fact, we all probably have cancer cells developing in each of us all the time, but our bodies are able to dispose of them before they rage out of control. In other words, a healthy body can normally defend itself quite well against the development of cancer because it knows how to deal with these natural occurrences." - Tanya Harter Pierce, Outsmart Your Cancer: Alternative Non-Toxic Treatments That Work (Get the book.)

"In western Europe and elsewhere in Amazonia, archaeologists have radiocarbon-dated the actual pigments used in cave paintings, but that was not done at Pedra Furada. forest fires occur frequently in the vicinity and produce charcoal that is regularly swept into caves by wind and streams. No evidence links the 35,000-year-old charcoal to the undoubted cave paintings at Pedra Furada. Although the original excavators remain convinced, a team of archaeologists who were not involved in the excavation but receptive to pre-Clovis claims recently visited the site and came away unconvinced." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.)

"I cooked, changed diapers, dug latrines, chopped wood, and put out forest fires. All this often without electricity or automobiles, and in the company of thousands of others. I am not describing an alternate universe, although such gatherings are certainly an alternate reality to the common everyday world we call life in these Common sense is the United States. radar that helps us nav- I have attended many such events. Along with '9ate without getting the exhilaration of gathering together - the awe of sunk ^ hidden dan9ers u .. ,. ??c under the surface." - APC Books, Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves: The Power of change Within to Change the World (Get the book.)

"So free radicals cannot be eliminated in the human body, but must be confroUed or they turn into "forest fires" that devastate the cells. A sfrategic blend of antioxidants can provide broad spectrum protection against damage from chemotherapy, radiation therapy, protecting the immime cells from their own poisons, and improving vigor in the cancer patient undergoing treatment. Vitamins C, E, beta-carotene, selenium, lipoic acid, lycopene, glutathione, tocotrienols, quercetin. Coenzyme Q, oligomeric proanthocyanidins from grape seed, curcumin." - Patrick Quillin, Beating Cancer with Nutrition (Get the book.)

"Triggers and Deficient Control Mechanisms To understand how triggers and deficient control mechanisms contribute to the development of cancer, I'd like to use the analogy of a forest fire: What if someone were to ask the question: "What causes forest fires?" Looking for just one answer would be silly." - Tanya Harter Pierce, Outsmart Your Cancer: Alternative Non-Toxic Treatments That Work (Get the book.)

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