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Comment by thewhitetulip | Hacker News Reader

By this logic, we should "forget" all the go green initiatives because China (and Africa) are building a "Green Wall" to stop their respective deserts from widening.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/china-great-gree...

I say this is mainly about China because Africa has modified their green wall project and instead of planting billion trees from East coast to West coast, they are helping communities to thrive by planting trees and reviving land.

China is crazy in this sense, there is a thick patch of shrubs that now border the Gobi desert and mainland China. By 2030 it'll be the largest manmade plantation on Earth.

edit: 66 billion trees planted so far!

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The trees planted in the Gobi in 2008 are already mostly dead because they couldn’t commit enough water resources to maintain the ones they carelessly selected. As a result, the Beijing dust storms that were gone since 2009 started coming back in 2015.

Whenever the Chinese government does something, don’t assume it will be sustainable by default.

Source?

It's mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Pro..., but the cited reference to it is in "The Epoch Times", which from what I've seen has quite an ideological bent against china, so I'd take it with a grain of salt

https://e360.yale.edu/features/chinas_reforestation_programs...

Not only that, there are concerns around lack of biodiversity in the trees being planted: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160907125303.h...

I've often wondered if those programs would eventually lead to widespread allergies developing among the population due to the rapid increase in a single kind of pollen, like Japanese hay fever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay_fever_in_Japan

It is a common concern with reforestation, it seems: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/this-is-load-of-...

It is a problem with reforestation since its very beginning, not sure why China is singled out here for repeating the West’s mistakes.

Is China getting singled out?

The West tried it, not knowing because it had never been done before, and found it had issues.

I would expect the West to be criticised as much, if not more so for doing the same thing today.

It looked like a surprise for some posters here, yeah, they seem to didn’t know that the same has been happening in the West since as early as the late 1700s-early 1800s and I’d say it’s still happening. The West is not being criticized as much as it should today for repeating the same mistake it has been doing again and again for almost two centuries now.

Later edit: This forest which got knocked out during a recent wind-storm in the Italian Dolomites [1] looks like being an "artificial" one, at least judging by how the remaining trees all look the same and are almost geometrically positioned. The article does indeed say that the forest was "centuries-old" but I think that only better underlines what I was saying, that the West has been repeating the same and same mistake (i.e. "dumb", non-thought out reforestation) for centuries now. It's too bad that with the recent climate-related changes our tampering with the ecosystem is really shown for what it is: a really, really dumb and non-thought out action.

[1] https://www.italymagazine.com/news/storms-italys-dolomites-r...

The Irish Times article is highly critical of the West doing the same today. What's the difference between that and the Yale 360 article linked further above?

Edit: In response to your edit. Are you sure that isn't native woodland? I would expect the higher reaches of a mountain to be pine trees. The article mentions Stradivarius, violins are made of spruce amongst other woods.

Plus those forests are obviously somewhat sustainable, the Chinese plantings are dying within a few years.

> Are you sure that isn't native woodland?

Hard to tell 100% without being present on site but that's my guess, yeah. I've very rarely seen "natural" forests being completely wiped out like this as a result of strong winds, the worst that can happen is some older trees being knocked down here and there, but, as I said, I've not yet seen "natural" forests being completely knocked down as a result of one wind-storm.

I also suspect those were planted forests because you cannot use that wood as raw material for Venice's Arsenal for centuries past without planting something in return. I suspect the planting continued even after the Arsenal itself and wood-shipping in general were no longer a thing.

What would you class as "natural" forests?

I doubt theres a forest in Europe that hasn't been touched by man.

Venice would have been very selective about the wood it would have cut for ships etc, you can't just cut any old wood. It needs to be knot free, be straight, or have just the right curvature. They weren't clear felling vast swathes, then replanting. I'm not even sure the was conscious planting at all.

The UN has a definition for "Intact Forest Landscapes". Little of those are left in Europe, the majority in Russia and Scandinavia. Western/Central Europe has only tiny slivers of any.

I'm confused by your point.

"Intact Forest Landscapes" seems to exclude any human made forest. So are you against all human planting of forests?

I was providing data for your

> I doubt theres a forest in Europe that hasn't been touched by man.

Sorry, I thought you were providing your definition of natural forest

There is some but its extremely rare. In Germany you for example have the Hambacher Forst, where parts are as old as 700 years. Its scale is however lacking

https://www.dw.com/image/45302299_401.png

Generally you have "untouched" as in oldgrowth/primary forest and not being a secondary forest, which takes a few hundred years.

Artificial forests are bound to be less resilient than wild ones.

The lack of biodiversity is a major concern, since we often take shortcuts by planting cuttings, which are genetic clones, or by using an initial pool that isn't sufficiently diverse.

An artificial forest is better than no forest, off course, but wild, ancient forests are more precious, since they are living DNA libraries.

Another common term is old-growth/primary forest

It actually says as much in the article linked by grand parent, but I also remember reading about it a few years ago in china daily or globaltimes (probably the latter), so it has been brought up in the Chinese press as well. Anecdotally as well: I was living in Beijing during the entire time period and noticed the dust storms going away and then coming back.

Fun story: Beijing kids are all required to plant trees on school organized trips (which they must also pay to plant). So they go to places in the hinterland that are designated for tree planting, and plant their trees. After each school group leaves, the trees are promptly dug out so they can be planted by the next group of kids.

I remember reading a Caixin article that says the plant they use in the north to fight desertification actually causes massive allergy to the population that are traditionally pretty healthy.

> After each school group leaves, the trees are promptly dug out so they can be planted by the next group of kids.

Green theater.

If all you really want to do is sequester the sand, why not deploy some large solar concentrators to roam the desert and fuse the sand into larger grains? It would obviously take a while, but you could have relatively unintelligent, solar powered drones just gliding over the sand and sticking it to itself. Bonus if you can figure out how to fuse the sand into bricks, or 3d print walls of fused sand.

This guy sort of proved it in concept: https://vimeo.com/25401444

> 66 billion trees planted so far

News in 10-20 years: massive wildfires decimate Africa. It's pointless and dangerous to have more trees than the waterbed can support. California re-learns this lesson nearly every year.

I assume there were many more trees in the same watershed before man chopped them down for pasture and cities.

Yes, and they burned quite readily and frequently without harming humans. But humans have this peculiar aversion to dying in a fire, and they use tons of groundwater for themselves and for irrigation as well.

Sure, but there was a lot more available water in the watershed then also. Agriculture in a lot of ways has been the biggest ecological disaster this planet has ever seen. Man has redirected and pushed water out of nearly every watershed on the planet vastly changing what biome a area can support. I say that fully aware of the benefits that Agriculture has allowed human society, I wouldn't change it if I could in the past but I deeply hope we figure out a way to co-exist with nature in a less destructive way.

We need to switch to just growing our plant food indoors, using hydroponics. It's much more efficient with water than outdoor irrigation, and can be done vertically so it doesn't take up so much land.

How is wildfire automatically a bigger threat with more trees? Is it because with more trees given the same quantity of water, the drier wood helps the fire spreads more quickly? Or perhaps the forest is more densely populated? But that doesn't increase the vulnerable area. Pardon my ignorance, I'd like to know more.

When there's not enough water for trees to survive, they die and dry out. Dry brush and trees catch fire more readily and burn better.

Wait, what logic says we should give up everything just because China planted some trees?

I don't think the article says anything about we should "forget" EVs because China does good busses. If anything it might inspire some more electric busses in the west.

From all the comments under your post I can totally be confident teraforming is an option if we ever need to get off the planet. /s (as in /sarcasm and /scared)

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