The Planet Now Has More Trees Than It Did 35 Years Ago

If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.

I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I remember when you could see a whole row of logging trucks driving by carrying one tree. As in, each section of the tree filled a logging truck. There are trees where that tree was today, but they represent nowhere near the same amount of carbon stored in the form of wood.

The article failed to point this factor out.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shift-northern-fo...

I'll give an example of an unexpected improvement:

I volunteered at Audubon for a group that was trying to save wetlands, and by extension the wild salmon. At the time, we didn't have the science to actually mitigate wetlands. So all of our efforts were on conservation. (That didn't go very well.) Now we have more options. So we could, if we wanted to, increase habitat.

That's kinda cool.

Another example is a guy claiming that he has a way to restore grasslands (reverse desertification) by using ranching to simulate migratory herds. https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

If true, that's also kinda awesome.

Generally, the trends are pretty bleak, and awareness is a curse. So people like me need good news just to get out of bed every day.

In reality, we're replacing trees that you could let 5 people wrap their arms around with 'trees' that you can wrap a size z pants' belt around, replacing biodiversity with monoculture palm trees.

That having been said, I agree with the sentiment. There is actually a lot of great news that we don't report on, like child mortality or severe poverty dropping very sharply. Ourworldindata.org is a great place to start.

But in terms of this story, it's not part of the set of good news stories.

If the article had said that there are less trees now than there were 35 years ago, that would be bad news. So the fact that there are more trees is indisputably good news. It's not the best news. There is undoubtedly better news that could be announced. But it is good news. It is better than the assumption that I think most of us had, that global tree cover is declining.

Can't we just be a little bit happy that it's not all utterly terrible?

I'd also hazard that having more trees in the north/south, where light levels are less is not a good trade deforestation near the equator. If a tree's job is to turn CO2 into O2, we want more of them where there is the most sunshine.

Given what we now know about the global impact of these activities, it makes sense that the world pushes back against their development plans. Part of it is "don't make the same mistakes we did," but most of it is "there's a better way," and part of it is a realization that the world collectively needs less pollution and more trees, and since we've already chopped down our trees, we want Brazil to keep theirs for our (global) benefit.

That latter point is selfish. Yes, it's good for the world as a whole, but the cost to Brazil is foregoing the benefits of exploiting their resources the same way other industrialized nations already have. The same applies to China and pollution. They're doing the same thing the US did for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The selfish part is denying these countries the right to exploit their land the way that we already have. If the rest of the world wants Brazil to stop chopping down forests, they should pay them for it.

Fisheries are being depleted in a totally unsustainable way, and the areas and species that are well managed are in the minority. There have been some successes, e.g. North Atlantic lobster (although I don't think the uptick in lobster populations is necessarily well enough understood to be attributed to harvest limits), but the growing demand for deepwater fish and the increase in trawling is doing terrible damage to offshore ecosystems, and there is no management scheme in place for them.