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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

Clearly someone (with deep pockets) needs to do a forest-as-infrastructure "startup".

I'm not kidding. If there are people who can make something like asteroid mining (Planetary Resources), this can totally be a thing...

...that's already sort of a thing (forestry), when you consider that's how tree farms work - only those are "optimized" for wood production.

Call it... "massively hetero-culture volumetric emergent agriculture", or something.

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Agroforestry, permaculture, food forests... There are communities of folks already thinking in this vein. It's an increasingly urgent area of study, as we are increasingly aware of mainstream industrial agriculture's dramatic toll on ecosystems through topsoil degradation, habitat loss, threats to biodiversity, and so on.

But I don't believe a startup mentality fits an ecological approach to agriculture. Successfully shifting from the dominant model of agriculture is dependent on envisioning and creating alternative economic systems.

EDIT: Changed wording in last sentence for clarity.

What I'd really like to see is autonomous drones that can harvest small berries, seeds, peas, leaves and root vegetables. You could develop permaculture gardens with extremely high yields and virtually no labour. The drones could even work to cultivate predatory insects such as ladybugs and wasps to keep pests under control.

That would be cool as hell. There's something oddly fascinating about autonomous drones flying around the wilderness harvesting/gathering resources, like some strange futuristic caricature of nature.

I think the wilderness should be primarily left completely alone with light-impact human leisure allowed in certain contexts.

I prefer the US public land approach where different lands are graded for different public uses, and certain areas are off-limits/prohibited to the general public because of practical concerns.

There is a 4300m mountain right by my hometown and while one can hike over much of the mountain and the range that surrounds it, certain areas are off-limits during seasons of the year because the mountain sheep drop and raise their lambs there.

Why not use your drones to turn your cities into gardens?

The article is almost about how the rainforests - long considered natural wonders of the world - are actually pretty heavily "engineered".

There is no doubt in my mind that, if we actually tried, we could make "batter" forests than "nature". More diversity, more vibrancy, more overall life.

A more local excellent example is the evidence that native north americans would do periodic burns, with many varied benefits for the different ecosystems that underwent such engineering.

We already have the technology. Many cultures have traditions of collecting nut caches from squirrels. They can harvest as much as 5kg per cache this way.

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