When you come to northern Canada such as Red Lake in Northwestern Ontario, you will be immersed in the world's largest ecosystem -- the Boreal Forest.
Viewed from space, the Boreal Forest, named for Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is said to be a green band that goes completely around the world in the northern latitudes.
It is certainly beautiful, as this scene taken at camp last fall by our brother-in-law Ron Wink shows. But it also is vitally important to the health of the world too.
The Boreal Forest covers 58 per cent of Canada which is the second-largest country in the world. (Russia is the largest). It also represents 50 per cent of the entire forest area on Earth.
And while it is vital as the breeding area for hundreds of species of birds and is home to countless species of animals and fish, its greatest importance these days is all the carbon it contains.
It holds 22 per cent of all the carbon on the surface of the Earth in its forests, peatlands and soils.
That's twice as much as the tropical forests.
Carbon that is tied up in the form of trees and peat is carbon that is not in the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect and raising the globe's temperature. In fact, each tree holds about a ton of carbon. It got there, of course, through photosynthesis where a plant uses sunlight and water to convert carbon dioxide (from the atmosphere) into a sugar and releases oxygen back to the atmosphere. For this reason, forests have often been called the "lungs of the Earth."
No wonder the air quality in a forest is always excellent.
2011, incidentally, is the International Year of the Forest.
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