Is there no way to win? Despite having more forests and trees, we are still in a worse state than before.
If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.
If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.
We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. There was never a promise that planting trees would make carbon emissions irrelevant (or plastic in the oceans or...)
My understanding is that it's like taking a cancer treatment, and the cancer is unaffected, but at least we got free t-shirts from the cancer clinic.
>We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors.
The article says the new trees and forests are not equivalent to the used trees and previous forests:
>Tree cover is not necessarily forest cover. Industrial timber plantations, mature oil palm estates, and other non-natural "planted forests" qualify as tree cover. For example, cutting down a 100-hectare tract of primary forest and replacing it with a 100-hectare palm plantation will show up in the data as no net change in forest cover: the 100-hectare loss is perfectly offset by the 100-hectare gain in tree cover. That activity would be counted as "deforestation" by the FAO. Therefore, tree cover loss does not directly translate to deforestation in all cases.
To date, this may be true.
But human cultivaiton _can_ result in an increase in biodiversity and ecological productivity vs non-intervention.
This generally looks like gardening instead of monoculture agriculture.
It may be the case that the biodiversity and ecological productivity of the amazon rainforest was greatly aided by human cultivation. See:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-...
??? "I'm going to die someday, so I might as well subsist on nothing but sugar and alcohol 'til then?"
Anyway, characterizing our efforts as "greatest" is far too generous. They were the efforts we gave. Not the greatest possible efforts that could be given. If biodiversity were the priority, we would have solved this problem.
There isn't. Once evolutionary processes churn out a species capable of pullulating, at the cost of other species, essentially without limit, the die is cast. The notion that 'we' can 'decide' to escape this biological heritage is just another case of the old superstition: that humans magically transcend the physical world. Just as some tree species may be stripped and killed by a beetle new to the region, our planet's current ecosystems will be destroyed by Homo sapiens. New ecosystems will develop over millennia. Human history will cease. There will be no lamentations.