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Comment by adreamingsoul | Hacker News Reader

I'm burnt out or depressed with my current career (or something else), but at this moment I would happily pivot to spending the rest of my life trying to help nature. How could I create a business or venture that allowed people to make a livable wage while also working to create a balanced ecosystem between human and nature?

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Factory food.

I realise that has icky connotations, and is anathema to some people, but we will need at least 50% more food over the coming decades, and we are already over-using the land (and especially the sea) by a lot.

Organics, permacultures, symbiotic planting, etc, are all good things, but not nearly enough to meet our future needs.

So we need to concentrate large parts of agriculture into a much smaller footprint.

Hydroponics, aquaponics, indoor fish farms (we really need to stop fishing wild fish at sea, except in the most artisanal line-caught manner), synthetic milk, juices, flours, even grains if possiible, protein from insects, engineered yeasts, etc, etc.

Ideally, we could actually make food much more nutritious, and delicious, by manufacturing most of it.

Good people can help keep it on that ideal course, not a more dystopian one of sickly 'protein pills'.

Why do we need 50% more food production when

1) Tons of food is wasted every year http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/world_food_consumptio... (40% of food in the US is wasted) https://www.nrdc.org/issues/food-waste

2) Population is expected to peak at 8.5B https://www.cnbc.com/id/101018722 (only a 10% increase above current levels)

3) Obesity is a major issue in many developed and developing countries, so we can clearly cut down on the amount of food people are eating.

Agriculture, countryside management, waste management or the like are probably areas where you could personally make a real difference. IMHO we have far, far too many clueless virtue signalling activists and politicians that are capable of nothing more than spouting the empty platitudes their handlers feed them, and far too few skilled engineers and technologists figuring out how to boil down these nebulous aims into practical, smart measures that can succeed without the need for draconian legalistic enforcement. It's extremely rare to see any of the latter groups actually dig deeply into a problem and persevere with developing solutions that make a change; for example they'll bleat on about the patriarchy and how we need more women in IT, but will they actually ever really learn anything about IT themselves to inform their thinking and help bring about the change they claim to want? Not a chance.

Honestly, tree farming is carbon negative. By continuously growing trees and turning them into lumber you capture carbon and turn it into houses and furniture. Using the profits to buy more land to reforest, then cycling though planting and cutting down trees on a cycle.

Are there methods of tree farming that are focusing solely on carbon capture? For example, is it known that a species of plant that grows quickly captures carbon very efficiently?

I've heard this tree grows extremely fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa

Thanks for this. From the article:

> "An acre of empress trees can absorb 103 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments.[12]"

There is a lot of marketing and some "scammy" practices put in selling Paulownia trees. Eucaliptus is faster and many coniphers also.

You can find photos of trees regrowing light fast after being chopped, and from an old root but this is not how you measure accurately growth in a tree. The tree enters in emergency mode and is using all the reserves in the root to restore the lost canopy ASAP. It will slow down considerably in the following years.

I'd avoid introducing Eucalypts to places they aren't already prevalent. Fires don't kill them, but do kill a lot of their competition, they drop very flammable leaf and branch litter, have oily explosive sap, so naturally they spread with fires. With more fires the more eucalypts spread, with more eucalypts there are more uncontrollable fires.

A country where Eucalypts are completely dominant is Australia. In the US California is full of them. Both Australia and California have uncontrollable fire problems.

There are plantations of eucalyptus trees in Brazil, either they don't know what introducing them will do to their country or they just don't care.

Before using eucalypts, consider what introducing a very invasive tree that transforms the countryside into something much more flammable than it originally was will do.

Agree with that, but must be noted that Eucalyptus has 700 species and not all make fireforests (I like that definition and we don't have any for that so I'll coined it).

> either they don't know what introducing or ...

Is a monoculture. They don't care. Is hard to claim ignorance still in the age of Google.

Wouldn't shallow pools of algea in a greenhouse be much more efficient than trees?

I don't know, are you familiar with carbon capture rates for algae? It's a good point and one to explore: trees/plants vs. algae for carbon capture. If you could make a modular system of tiles (say 10' x 10') comprised of carbon capturing method of choice (algae pools, trees), would it make sense to install these on buildings in cities (or anywhere, but suggest cities because that is certainly where such things do not exist at scale anymore) (then consider fabrication and maintenance costs)? I have no idea what the solution is to the carbon capture problem, but increases opportunities for carbon capture seems like a high level solution.

Technically yes but it would be generally worse at self-sustaining scalability - you need to construct more greenhouses, keep the higher exposed surface area of water from evaporating, and find a sequestering use for that algae.

Non-biodegrading bioplastic made with renewable eneegy could technically work for that role but more plastic waste isn't approved of for obvious reasons.

> find a sequestering use for that algae.

Beer.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/growing-algae-to-brew...

In addition to capturing carbon, forests (of native tree species) provide many ecosystem services, including fresh water retention in the land, food and habitat for other species, shading of the ground, etc that a greenhouse full of algae would be challenged to provide. Most of the carbon stored in a forest is subterranean and increases significantly over time.

This is how Sierra Pacific Industries does it in California. All the clear cuts are reforested while the clear cuts are used to make timber for houses, etc. Most forests in America are managed. However the way it is done is pretty manual maybe drones and robots would make it more efficient.

(Wife is a forester)

Is it even possible to help nature in a way that generates profit for a business? Most things that help, say, a rare fungus or a migratory bird, don’t make money for humans. That’s why we’re in this mess to start with.

I also don’t believe we know how to help nature. It’s too complex. I think most “ventures” just do more harm, possibly including reforestation (are we SURE big, dark forests are good?) I put more trust into “rewinding” projects that involve just leaving things alone, no matter how much it distresses humans to see dead/dying animals and weeds.

Figure out some useful logistics solutions for polyculture producers to complete with monoculture ones.

Help foster sustainable ag economy!

You could join me and help get the best idea for mainstream engagement with conservation up and running: https://fend.earth (hook people and give them what the want; a collective direct conservation movement at scale)

We could save a million+ acres of rainforest, grow to be a non profit of actual value and personally say goodbye to that "useless man" feeling and the waves of melancholy that go with it. Get in touch: infoatfenddotearth

syntropic agriculture, that's what I'm involved right now and that's where I found this balance

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