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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this right: Ireland was deforested. Now its a big carbon offender. Trees improve that drastically. So they planted trees, lots of trees, 11% of Ireland now covered by trees (up from 1%).

But, get this, they're not pleasant to walk through! They're the wrong color. They are 'dark and dank'.

Hm. Compared to what? The stripped, blasted landscape they replaced? The ecological disaster that was remediated?

This seems a trivial, silly article.

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It's absolutely non-trivial. Have you walked through planned pine forests? There is vast swathes of them around where I live in Scotland and there is no bio-diversity there at all. They are planted so close that the canopy coverage allows very little sunlight to the forest floor, and even if it did not much could grow because of the heavy littering of dead needles that cause very acidic soil. At best you will find patches of lichens and ferns and some squirrels and martins / other rodents.

Also working plantations are usually not available for public access for a portion of the year so they're not actually providing much quality of life for local people, which if you're going to go commit to large scale reforestation plans should be a considered part.

> There is vast swathes of them around where I live in Scotland and there is no bio-diversity there at all.

Um, you do know that forests have stages? Right?

Evergreens tend to be one of the first stages. Evergreens generally grow quickly and tolerate fairly crappy soils. "waterlogged soil with high clay content" (from the article) is a REALLY crappy soil for trees. The littering of needles generally helps add some level of nutrients back to depleted soils (an acidic humus is going to be vastly better than completely leached out waterlogged clay) It's why you plant evergreens on strip mined areas to help reclaim them.

After the evergreens, the deciduous trees start coming in from the edges--but this takes decades.

Now, it's possible that Ireland/Scotland don't have enough deciduous trees (or, in the case of Scotland, the climate may simply not be correct--Scotland has a lot of land that's really crappy for growing anything much at all) to start the process and those trees need to be added to their planning. Fair enough.

However, I don't see any discussion or acknowledgement of any of this in the article.

> Um, you do know that forests have stages? Right?

Calling you out for the needlessly confrontational tone here. It turns what could be an informative post into an agressive one.

These forests are essentially tree farms. There is no bio diversity and no deciduous trees growing in from the side. The forest will be felled for wood long before a deciduous tree would have time to grow. It's a travesty. Come to Ireland and see for yourself.

> These forests are essentially tree farms.

Then the real problem is that this really isn't "afforestation" at all and what trees are being planted is irrelevant.

> Um, you do know that forests have stages? Right?

Right. From the article, the stages are:

> The trees mature in about 30 years ... and are then felled, making way for a fresh plantation.

> When machines chop down swathes of forest, a controversial process known as clear-felling, the landscape is devastated, said Stewart. “It looks like Hiroshima.”

The words of the Scottish singer Jim Malcolm ring true here:

https://www.jimmalcolm.com/music/sconeward/#BARREN

Last verse:

Slow return to native timber

So they plant the sitka spruce

Only fit to wipe your bottom

No damn good to build a hoose

Is more complicated. Pines are "weak" creatures, always prone to be bullied and displaced by other trees in the lowlands, but they are survivalists. Pines grow in lands forbidden to other trees: high mountains, damp situations, sandy and the poorest soils.

When you had burnt the landscape stripped to the bone, to solid rock. When nothing grows, you put a pine and it will survive. Acid soil is better than no soil at all.

Some of this areas, when left alone, include slowly other species (holly, rowan), and dying pines, make interesting unique landscapes, peat bogs and moors. They host much more biodiversity than it could seem at first glance and a lot of endemisms also.

> There is vast swathes of them around where I live in Scotland and there is no bio-diversity there at all. They are planted so close that the canopy coverage allows very little sunlight to the forest floor, and even if it did not much could grow because of the heavy littering of dead needles that cause very acidic soil.

Be patient. Give it 80 years.

What happens after 80 years of acidification?

I mean, there are old spruce forests you can look at and see. Essentially the Boreal forest but with the benefit of your warmer weather in Ireland. Think Oregon coastal forests. People keep talking about a lack of biodiversity and acidity, but did you expect a fully functional old forest to be delivered out of the box?? For it to happen immediately after planting? Trees are a long, long-term investment. Building an entire functional forest will take more than a human lifetime, really a few. You need to wait for the trees to mature, a few generations of birds, animals to move in. Sooner or later other plants will start popping up, as they do in the wild, so you'll get hemlock in there eventually and depending on what else is spreading seed, other underbrush.

https://beautifuloregon.com/sitka-spruce-siuslaw-national-fo...

There are no bad trees, but the context for them just might be! Ireland's semi-state forestry co with just little planning & a healthy minority of native trees, could we have advanced this lovely idea by decades.

However, I do wonder if we're running out of climate runway, to ever seen anything as beautiful as Oregon's spruce forests in Ireland. The day after they clear a commercial forest here is not pretty!

On a related note (not that anyone reading this today will ever get to see its glory days) private individuals in Ireland have planted, far inland, a Redwood grove as a hedge against environmental disaster:

https://www.giantsgrove.ie/giant-redwoods/

edit: erroneous apostrophe

A stunning autumn

The problem is that this looks suspiciously like a subsidized logging activity.

If nature is tolerated only as raw materials maker, they are doing it wrong. Ireland is a developped country; they have scientists, they should use them. They have natural resources, the government should use them. They have firemen, the government should ask their firemen and police if to put a wall of big highly flammable conifers close to houses is a good or a very stupid idea. It opens the doors to blackmail and make them weaker against terrorism also.

Some delicate balanced ecosystems where created when Ireland forests disapeared. They host unique species that will be extinct in no time if you put a frontier of spika spruces sucking all water and light around. More trees is good, but only conifers from an non-native species just does not feel right to me. Feels like a wasted opportunity, and in some aspect also like a deliberate boycott to nature.

I was going to make a joke about Ireland being too damp to suffer from forest fires, but apparently it's a growing problem: https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0321/1037836-coillte-fi...

Although this does very much highlight that the forest is a cash crop first, not an environmental project: "The company lost 400 hectares of forest to wild fires in 2018 at a cost of €4m."

Putting a monetary value on something provides context- it's done in news articles of many types of natural disasters. Not many people (that I know at least) can visualize 400 hectares, or put into words a good description of the natural and ecological harm done by such a fire.

Saying that the fire cost 4m euros is at least something anyone can have context for, since even an urbanite who has never seen more than a handful of trees together knows what money is, and roughly how much some things cost.

Of course, most people will never have four million of anything remarkable, let alone moneys, but it's better than nothing.

There are places like that in Alaska, and I heard a forestry guy saying that even though a place get dumped on with rain regularly, a two or three day dry spell negates the preventative effects. A bit of wind and sun dries the trees out quickly, then it's just a matter of lightening, a camp fire, fireworks or an ill-tended burn and the whole thing will go up in flames.

The point it seems they're trying to make is not necessarily avoiding planting trees, but to not introduce non-native species of trees. The article mentions the opponent's claims: "acidic needles and smother wildlife", "saying carbon-soaking bogs were damaged", and "diesel-emitting machines often felled trees prematurely"

Since the article doesn't reference any studies or statistics to back up either claim, it's hard to tell, but a lot of people here agree that Ireland's environment could benefit hugely from cutting down or outright outlawing the harmful practice of bog cutting, and introducing non-native species to an environment can often be harmful.

They introduced pines, a fast-growing tree that can most rapidly remediate Ireland's contribution to global ecological disaster. Which would seem to upstage concerns about the machines that manage the trees, or that other (insufficient) carbon measures were affected (bogs). Such arguments are a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The issue of pine needle acidity shouldn’t be overlooked. Decomposing pine needles raise the acidity of surrounding soil, which could affect the viability of local flora and, in turn, affect the entire local ecosystem.

I have mixed feelings about this because I view climate change as an existential threat to civilisation. However the main issue isn't aethetics, its that from an ecological PoV the resultant environment is impoverished - the number of other species that can make a home in the forests - insect, bird and other plants is small. Ideally forestation should bring other ecological benefits with it.

The ecological disaster is that these kinds of forest are green dead zones. no other native plantlife can survivie in this ecosystem, if you can even call it that. Silka Pine should be considered an invasive species, IMO.

For what were the areas used before being turned into wood plantations? The sentiment in this thread seems to be that it was, or could have been, thriving green wildlife, but werent those areas formerly designated for commercial use as well? The article explicitly mentions farmland. Thats not really a functioning ecosystem either.

I haven't hiked in Ireland, but Iceland's even more deforested and this is a sentiment shared by many Icelanders.

Of course it's a matter of taste, but in general I'd much prefer to hike through the non-forested parts of "blasted landscape". You can see where you're going, you're free to pick any arbitrary route without being blocked by trees & foliage.

Hiking in heavily forested places in Scandinavia can seem like a long tour through a tunnel by comparison.

Yup eco-tourism would point to a slow, measured response to deforestation.

But global climate change wants a rapid response.

but this is just as much about growing timber. 30 years, the trees will be cut down. that's if some bug doesn't eat up the monoculture first.

my bet is that a rich diverse ecosystem will suck up far more carbon in long run.

Trivial and silly, but fortunately only to people who have so little experience with forests that they can mistake a tree farm for one...

The trees are there, now, doing their part. How many decades longer would the slow-growing native species have taken? Nobody is mistaking anything for a forest. What you have is, a stand of pine trees remediating an ecological disaster.

That eco-tourism approach is exactly what I was talking about. Moaning about 'but its not the right kind of forest!' when it was an emergency measure to start with.

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