TREELESS TREASURE: Brazilian ecologists question whether their country’s historical focus on conserving the Amazon may have contributed to past neglect of the Cerrado, 1.2 million square miles of savanna grassland located in the country’s central high plains and mostly fringed by forest.BERIA L. RODRIGUEZ/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Among people who realize the threat posed by global climate change, you might be hard-pressed to find anyone arguing against planting trees. Unless you happened to be sitting in a conference room last fall listening to grassland ecologists lament a lack of social and political support for the conservation of grassy biomes. Political scientist Forrest Fleischman, a Texas A&M University researcher who studies how government officials devise land-management plans, was among a handful of academics invited to speak at a Stanford University symposium on nonforest ecosystems held in November 2015. He talked about the drivers of tree-planting efforts and, by his own account, was one of the least impassioned scholars in the room.
But the grassland folks were fired up. So were the nongovernmental organization ...
