Summary: http://bit.ly/J1iHNJ Forests around the world are dying from insects, fungus, drought, heat. Drivers are climate change & ozone pollution. New Jersey activist Gail Zawacki on ozone damage to trees, crops & our lungs. University of Illinois scientist Lisa Ainsworth on FACE CO2 impacts study. A startling documentary from the public broadcaster ABC Australia explores dying forests. It is happening around the world, in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and all down the West Coast of North America. Call it bugs, call it fungus, call it drought and record heat. Call it climate change and plain old pollution. Whether it's satellite photos, or walking through the dying woods, it's heart-breaking. Why are forests dying around the world? I'm Alex Smith. I've covered climate change in so many Radio Ecoshock programs. Later in this program we'll talk to a key scientist, Lisa Ainsworth, about misplaced expectations that rising carbon dioxide levels will green the planet and feed billions more people. But first we are going to ground with a citizen activist from New Jersey. Her trees, and all our trees, are weakened and dying from a much simpler cause: plain old pollution. The air looks cleaner, but all that industrial exhaust is still deadly to plants - and our lungs. The trees are talking to us, but we just aren't listening. Gail Zawacki is speaking out on the pollution that is killing trees, shrubs and crops - despite all the government back patting on supposedly cleaner air. First we have to remember there is good and bad ozone. The saying is "Good in the sky, bad nearby." The ozone in the upper stratosphere protects all living things from harmful ultraviolet light from the sun. That was the worry of the ozone hole. Lower down near the ground, we have what is called "tropospheric" ozone. That is part of the smog, but ozone itself is invisible. It's a type of oxygen, but it has three oxygen atoms instead of two. As Gail tells us, there are no factories spewing ozone - that is what makes it so difficult to control. Tropospheric ozone is created in an air-borne reaction with other chemicals called "precursors". The main precursor is nitrogen - and we are the nitrogen civilization. We release it from burning fossil fuels, but laying billions of tons of nitrogen on farm fields as fertilizers, and many other sources. Another precursor is a group of "volatile organic compounds" also known as VOC's. Our industrial society creates plenty of VOC's, especially from the chemical and refinery industries. Some consumer and household products, including paints, also release VOCs. It turns out trees can release VOC's as well. That is how Ronald Regan was infamously able to claim that trees cause pollution. However, natural forests existed for millions of years without producing harmful smog or dangerous ozone levels. We do that. Ozone is a "reactive" substance. It oxidizes everything from plant leaves to granite monuments, all of which begin to deteriorate. Please listen to the Gail Zawacki interview to learn how ozone impacts trees, shrubs and crops. (It also harms our lungs, especially anybody with breathing problems. That's another whole story.) The leaves begin to shut down. You can find black stippling, or sometimes they "bronze" - turning color well before the fall. Then the plant cannot perform the photosynthesis it needs. As a result, trees and shrubs are weakened, and less able to prevent diseases (like a fungus) or insect pests from doing damage. We may see the immediate cause of tree deaths as caused by a fungus or boring beetle, but the tree is weakened by ozone damage. Zawacki, and the Australian documentary, compare the dying tree situation to HIV. The AIDS damaged immune system may die due to pneumonia, but the real driver was HIV. Agricultural agencies, and forest departments, know all about ozone damage. They have pictures on their web sites. But other government agencies hardly ever talk about it. We have been told air pollution in
