What plants do for us and the environment.

1. What plants do for us and the environment. Get out a piece of paper and answer the questions in this powerpoint on it. This will be your homework for tomorrow’s class.

2. Take a minute with the person next to you and brainstorm about every way you can think of that you use plants. • Plants grow our food, produce our oxygen, remove waste from the air. It holds soil in place so that we can build our homes, provides building material, produces medicines, and has hundreds of other uses. What process do plants use to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and produce O2????

3. Plants for food and fibre. • It’s easy to think about all of the plants that we eat, pretty much anything that isn’t a meat or dairy is a plant product. Everything from spices, to vegetables. • Think about all of the things that plants provide that are more easily missed. Look around your classroom right now and list the things that are made from plants. • Every thing from your pencil, to your shirt are likely made from a plant. Even the paper that you’re writing on. What kind of plant is paper made from?

4. Managing our Living Resources. • Paper is made from pulp which is ground up wood from soft wood trees like, spruce and pine. These softwood trees are also the major source of building supplies like the ones used to make your house. • This has created a major problem here in North America, and throughout the world. • Forests are being cut down at an alarming rate, and for many different reasons.

5. Deforestation information in North America • Softwood lumber is Canada’s number 1 export. • Canada and Russia have the two largest supplies of softwood in the world. • Canada’s forests cover 417.6 million hectares, almost half of the countries landmass, and about 10% of the worlds total forests. • Each year about 0.8% of this is harvested. • Forest research is doing its best to maintain a sustainable harvest in Canada. This means that we should be able to continue to harvest at this rate forever, but that doesn’t mean that there are no effects. Discuss quietly with the person beside you what kind of effects this harvest might have???

6. The Rain Forests. • Rainforests once covered 14% Of the earths land surface, they now cover only 6%. • 1.5 acres of rainforest are cleared every second. That’s about a football field. • Experts estimate that we are loosing 137 plant species per day. Reasons for habitat destruction: Most of the rainforest are being cleared so that people can use the land as farm land. The problem is that the soil in the rainforest is very thin and not very good for growing. This means that the farmers can only use the land for a few years, then they have to clear new land for farming and grazing.

7. Here in Alberta Forests here in Alberta are being cleared for a number of different reasons. Think about as many as you can. -reason include Logging, Clearing land for agricultural use, clearing land for expanding cities, oil drilling, ect. DID YOU KNOW: Less than 10% of Alberta is more that 10km away from a road or man made clearing. What do you think Alberta would have been like 100 years ago???? Get together with the person beside you and write down what you think Alberta would have been like 100 years ago.

8. Alberta 100 years ago. A drop of water drips down off of the Columbia ice field and begins its decent downward. Forming into a small creek and then a river the droplet passes first over solid bedrock, and then slowing and forming into a freestone stream, where each flood changes the rivers dynamics and cutthroat, and bulltrout are the dominant species in the river. The water slows as it heads northeast towards the Hudson’s Bay. The river becomes quite large as the land flattens and the stream bottom becomes more and more riparian. Some four hundred kilometers from where it started the scenery has become vastly different. The mountains are no longer visible the water of the river runs slow and deep. A grizzly bear fishes for bulltrout in the river but there are no longer any cutthroat. There is a mixture of deciduous and coniferous trees lining the bank and muledeer, elk, and moose are abundant in the river valley. A golden eagle nests high atop one of the oldest trees. The place that was just described is the Edmonton river valley as it could be described in 1807 when fur traders first visited the area. Today in the Edmonton river valley the scenery has changed drastically. The chances of you seeing a bear, golden eagle, or even a mule deer are nearly zero, and hundreds of non-native species have been introduced.

9. Let’s brainstorm • Let’s talk about some of the things we thought would be different, and some ways that we can help preserve Alberta’s natural resources.