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The first, a four-year international study led by researchers at the University of Newcastle, in Britain, and the Free University of Amsterdam, identifies several myths about the link between forests and water. For example, in arid and semi-arid areas, trees consume far more water than they trap. And it is not the trees that catch sediment and nutrients, and steady the flow of the rivers, but the fact that the soil has not been compressed.
The World Commission on Water estimates that the demand for water will increase by around 50% in the next 30 years. Moreover, around 4 billion people—one half of the world's population—will live in conditions of severe water stress, meaning they will not have enough water for drinking and washing to stay healthy, by 2025.
The government of South Africa has been taking a tough approach to trees since it became the first to treat water as a basic human right in 1998. In a scheme praised by the hydrologists, the state penalizes forestry companies for preventing this water reaching rivers and underground aquifers. In India, large tree-planting schemes not only lose valuable water but dim the true problem identified by the hydrologists: the unregulated removal of water from aquifers to irrigate crops. Farmers need no permit to drill a borehole and, as most farmers receive free electricity, there is little economic control on the volume of water pumped. So a report of Britain's Department for International Development concludes that there is no scientific evidence that forests increase or stabilize water flow in arid or semi-arid areas. It recommends that, if water shortages are a problem, governments should impose limits on forest plantation.
The second piece of research looked at how long the forests of the Amazon basin cling on to carbon. Growing trees consume carbon dioxide and it was thought that only when the tree died, perhaps hundreds of years later, would the carbon be returned to the atmosphere. No such luck. In a paper published in Nature this week, a team of American and Brazilian scientists found that trees were silently returning the carbon after just five years. Before taking an axe to trees, however, consider the merits of the tropical rainforests.
It is thought traditionally that trees
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To solve our industrial problems, the author thinks we need
Inequality at work and in work still is one of the cruelest and most glaring forms of inequality in our society. We can not hope to solve the more obvious problems of industrial life, many of which arise directly or indirectly from the inequality at work. Still less can we hope to create a decent and humane society.
The most glaring inequality is that between managers and the rest. For most managers, work is an opportunity and a challenge. Their jobs engage their interest and allow them to develop their abilities. They are able to exercise responsibility; they have a considerable degree of control over their own and the others' working lives. Most important of all, they have the opportunity to initiate. By contrast, for most manual workers, work is a boring, monotonous, even painful experience. They spend all their working lives in conditions which would be regarded as intolerable for themselves by those who take the decisions which let such conditions continue. The majority have little control over their work; it provides them with no opportunity for personal development. Often production is so designed that workers are simple part of the technology. In offices, many jobs are so routine that workers justifiably feel themselves to be mere cogs in the bureaucratic machine. As a direct consequence of their work experience, many workers feel alienated from their work and their firm, whether it is in public or in private ownership.
It's true about work that
The second research proved that
What result has the first research found？
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