Is it better to plant trees or let forests regrow naturally?
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A 'naturally regrowing' forest may be 400 trees per acre. They're scrub trees, none of the ever getting very large, unhealthy and scraggly and broken by every storm.
It takes maybe a century of trees dying, giving one of their cohort a chance to get ahead of the others, then shading them and 'thinning the herd' until you have a stable population. Then, they're still not very healthy because they 'grew from scrub'.
They have to then die of natural causes one at a time and be replaced by a single healthy one. Maybe another 50 years. Finally you have a stable healthy forest.
Or, you can just plant 100 trees per acre in a grid. And mow the volunteers until you have what you want. 20 years maybe.
I'm not sure how you'd even log that. Every tree that dies is going to kill a few of its neighbors, until there are giant triangles of dead trees.
Tree planters put in trees about one every pace. They don't all survive, but they're not all supposed to. As many make it to maturity as the light allows.
"Haunted pine plantation" just doesn't have the same vibe to it.
Maybe there's a model that's twice as wide as the distance between the rows, and they're going to take out every second row and every other tree. But then it's driving over trunks and leaving an awful lot of logs on the ground behind it...
On my desk in front of me sits one of the two viable American chestnut nuts I've found this year from a (barely) surviving tree of the blight. 100 years ago there were over 4 billion of these trees, now it's assumed that maybe 100 or so large examples exist inside the original range ravaged by the blight. There's no point in planting it, the nut I have has likely hybridized with the Chinese chestnuts we have nearby and it's almost certain it would also die from the blight before it reached maturity. Right now there's plans to introduce an engineered variant with a gene from wheat to stop the effects of chestnut blight, but it needs approval: https://www.acf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Newhouse-f201...
The undergrowth of the forests here are covered by tearthumb (mile-a-minute) and stiltgrass, and I can see dozens of dead ash trees covered in the zigzag scars caused by the emerald ash borer. The large elms were all wiped out before I was born, but many of the dead ones were still standing. We have fast growing tress in the form of things like tree of heaven (aka ghetto palm, which lives maybe 70 years at most), but that's now attracted the latest imported hell: the spotted lanternfly. Not far from me there's huge numbers of eastern hemlock dying off from woolly adelgid, which is manageable but at great expense and effort. What we could plant and have regrow 100 years ago just wouldn't work now for these and many other reasons that much better qualified people should write about.
Then Dutch Elm Disease came through Iowa. Our tree lost a lot of new growth, the next year grew a million suckers from the trunk looking like a furry tree, then was dead. The stump when we cut it down could hold all the kids sitting around it (big farm family).
Years later I went to California to school, then bought a house on 12th St in San Jose. Beautiful mature trees lining the street! 60 ft high, a green corridor!
Then they started dropping branches, destroying awning and car hoods. The next year the affected ones grew a million suckers on the truck like huge furry sculptures.
Unknown to me, they were 'Siberian Elm'. The Dutch Elm disease had reached the west coast! It had taken nearly 20 years to travel halfway across the US.
The city removed them all, and it became a sun-blasted street with no relief from the heat. Gone the tunnel of green. Gone all the Elm in the Western US.
Pick your own tree, your own scrub density. It depends on the tree of course. But much the same syndrome.
> A strong storm could flatten the entire grove.
I can't see why. Those are life beings, not dominoes
Much like the weather.
That seems like a subjective human label. If a lightening strike burns down a forest and it starts to regrow, is that forest now “unhealthy”?
Though, this all depends on where you are and what the natural disturbance type and frequency is as well as the natural age of the trees.
Speaking of coastal western old growth, the kind a lot of people think of, giant cedars and stuff. Old growth gets old, like thousands of years old because typically the disturbance types would be windfall and infrequent wildfires from lightning.
These events would cause patches where giant trees fall and crush neighbour trees, fires burn out patches and new growth starts. This means throughout a natural forest you'll get patches with different ages.
This creates the ideal situation for wildlife habitat and other things. New growth forest, not planted in rows as other commenters mentioned, tends to also have a lot of shrubs and underbrush that get killed off in old growth forests. These types of canopies are great habitat for birds and such, they provide forage for deer and bears. While having surviving, intact old growth stands in the forests provides different kinds of habitat. It's also extremely nutrient rich from advanced fungal colonies and hundreds of years of built up decomposing material.
These nutrients are passed from these older trees along mycelium networks to the younger trees and so on.
A healthy ecosystem in general will have a mix of succession stages in a given area. This provides the maximum benefit to life in those ecosystems.
The goal is not really to produce a set of big trees, but to maximize the amount of carbon you can suck out of the atmosphere per year, heavily weighted to the near future. As a result, producing an old growth forest is not the correct metric (if you are optimizing purely for climate).
A stable forest (from purely a climate perspective) is also not the right optimization. Ideally, you'd lock away the carbon outside of the biosphere, instead of letting it get recycled.
How does it compare to trees?
We’d like to make sure the redwoods survive. They’re all under 100 years old, so some are big, but not massive, and we have lots of seedlings.
I’m worried if we cut all the pine down at once, it’ll ruin the microclimate. It’s 10-20F cooler in the forest than in the field, with much more water from fog drip, etc.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/08/spreadin...
We can certainly jump start the process, but the end result needs to be nature as it was before we broke it, or as close as possible. Its the path to an anti fragile, sustainable, biodiverse planet.
Here's my observation:
- old growth forests are beautiful and amazing, but old - forests that are treated as a renewable resource are productive due to appropriate maintenance (thinning, etc) - forests that were replanted but not maintained are unhealthy and take more than 50-100 years to cycle back to a healthy natural forest - left alone, on the west coast anyway, there is a typical cycle of fast lived quick growing -> slow growing long living species that takes 100's of years to get back to where it was.
I recently built a house on a property that was 3rd gen but abandoned (last logged 30-40 years ago). We wanted to keep as many trees as possible but because the land was never maintained most of the trees were thin and had parasites. The "widow makers" had to go. You could definitely see the progression of different species doing their thing at their own paces. Alders were mostly gone, hemlocks and firs were starting to fall and die and the cedars were starting to take over, but most of those were still young (but healthy).
At one point I asked the forester what I could do to help promote healthy regrowth of the forest. His response was that I didn’t need to do anything and that “the best way to grow a new tree [in a forest] is to cut an old one down”. This honestly seemed a bit like nonsense to me at the time, but watching the way things have already started to rebound has been pretty incredible.
I started counting new seedlings this summer but ended up giving up after I had counted more than 200 poplar seedlings within a relatively small area. Obviously all of those won’t survive to maturity, but it’s given me a new appreciation for just how effective forests are at regenerating themselves when harvesting is done responsibly.
I think I can safely speak for most of the uninitiated when I say that this sentence is completely meaningless to us.
Planting conifer seedlings can result in a young forest in as little as 20 years. Typically this is done to ensure a future harvest for the softwood lumber industry. Logging enterprises are the primary planters of trees in British Columbia, as they are required by law to reforest land that has been deforested.
The trees that are planted are typically some mixture of pine and spruce in the interior dry regions, or a mixture of hemlock, spruce, and cedar in wet or coastal regions.
This results in a somewhat synthetic forest that isn't really like a natural forest, but grows quickly. The trees that I planted when I was 23 are likely over 4 meters tall now.
Source: I worked as a tree planter for 3 seasons, grew up in a pulp & paper town, have known a lot of forestry people.
Project "trillion trees" exist since 2006
"... until 22 Feb 2020 13,638,907,054 trees have been registered around the world. That looks like an amazing achievement; in 14 years, the number of trees planted is almost two times the size of the human population. Unfortunately, that is not remotely enough as in comparison with the goal of 1,200,000,000,000 trees that is 1.14%. With the same speed, we would need 1232 years to finish the project."
so 1 trillion = 1000 billion = 1,000,000 million 1 billion = 1000 million
New Zealand = let say 500 million trees ? = 0.5 billion = 0.0005 trillion trees
Figures from Internet: 1.7 million hectares of exotics planted in NZ. 300 stems per hectare at ~30yrs old once thinned. 1000 stems per hectare when planted.
why does that sound familiar
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
> (1989) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
> He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
Not that we shouldn't do anything, because climate change is real. It would just be nice if people could stop being so fire and brimstone about stuff that turns out not to be the end of the world after all (like ACB getting confirmed to SCOTUS). The society that cried wolf.
I mean, people are talking about an overturn of Roe v. Wade, somehow failing to realize that RvW was ruled on by a SCOTUS with a conservative majority.
If Obergefell gets overturned (it won't), an actual law can be passed this time, hell maybe even a constitutional amendment, since nearly a supermajority of Americans outright support gay marriage.
If states pass constitutional laws, I'm sure they'll be upheld by the current SCOTUS. If laws are unconstitutional, I'm sure they won't be.
What is the problem here? That originalist conservatives won't be legislating from the bench as has been happening? If abortion needs to be a protected right then amend the constitution.
And as for legislating from the bench, few are more guilty of that than Alito and Thomas.
The case I think you're talking about (DNC v WSL) was literally about whether or not state legislatures can decide when to require ballots. Wisconsin's legislature decided election day. A lower court said this was unconstitutional, but it's not, so the majority opinion was for WSL.
Please show me where in this opinion the assertion was made that election results must be called by TV networks on election night.
Also funny about his opinion is that he doesn't seem to understand that states rarely (never?) "definitively announced results on election night." States typically don't certify their results for weeks. Only TV networks call elections on election night based on projections of what the final results might be after states count all their legally cast ballots. Kavanaugh either doesn't understand or has a problem with how elections in this country have always worked.
How can you straight-facedly opine on the opinion when you clearly haven't read it? Instead of reading a NYT article, which is basically a partisan rag at this point, try reading the actual opinion.
And then you can quote back to me the parts about television. Except you can't, because they're not there.
> Kavanaugh just wrote an opinion last week that it is critical that election results must be called by TV networks on the night of the election.
This is a lie. Stop lying.
I have a lot of problems with NYT, including ideological problems, but to say it's just a partisan rag tells me all I need to know about this conversation.
A reputable news org shouldn't have a handful of problems, much less "a lot". And certainly not blatantly obvious ideological / bias problems.
Back to SCOTUS, the quote was:
> Those states also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.
Emphasis mine. Nowhere did the majority opinion say "certify" the results. States (or to be more precise, the districts within them) absolutely do start reporting their results on election night.
And from there, it’s pretty clear that indecision around the election (and specifically mail-in voting) has indeed caused issues, so if anything the last two weeks affirm the SCOTUS majority opinion.
Why do you believe a constitutional amendment is necessary for a right already determined to be constitutional?
An explicit constitutional amendment would establish it much more firmly, and would be impeccably legitimate in precisely the way Roe isn’t. These are very desirable properties if you value democracy, or if you wish to establish things more permanently.
But let's be honest - almost no one opposing Roe V. Wade does so on the grounds that the argument from the fourth amendment is weak, they argue primarily from religious grounds that pregnant women fundamentally do not have the right to terminate, as they consider such to be an act of murder in nearly all, or all cases.
The crux of the matter regarding abortion for most people has never really been a legalistic one but a metaphysical and often religious one - the rights of the unborn versus the rights of a woman's autonomy over her body.
While I would hope that Republicans who drape themselves in Christian piety and refer to themselves as pro-life in order to imply that their opponents are pro-death, and who have made an existential pillar out of repealing Roe V. Wade for forty years, would stack the courts with judges who would consider the matter without undue bias, I suspect that bias is the intent for stacking the court to begin with,and that the actual constitutional validity of the decision isn't meant to matter.
I regret that your post has derailed this conversation into a sectarian display of othering, aversion, and moralization. No further productive exchanges on the topic will be found here.
I will instead note that when we treat our ideological opponents as respectable people who are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time (so to speak) it is not because we expect that our enemies will reap the benefits of this respect. It is for our own sake that we ought do this.
That the Republican Party has sought the repeal of Roe V. Wade since the decision was made, and that the primary impetus behind that is religious, rather than legalistic, is so obvious that it should be banal. They literally campaign on getting justices in to repeal Roe V. Wade. Yet you've suddenly turned defensive and accused me of moralizing and condescending simply by mentioning it.
It probably is best to table this. It's futile to even try to have a decent political conversation here anyway.
While that sounds good on paper, 50 percent of people in this country live in 9 states. The population distribution is not compatible with passing legislation in that way.
Edit to add: those 9 states only have 44.5 percent of the electoral college and 18 percent of the Senate.
I am someone who does believe that we are having an impact on the global temp. and I do think we need to do something about it.
Screaming the sky is falling is not helping. Stonewalling any other source of power except Solar and Wind is not helping. Suggesting that we cut back farmland drastically, in a move that would kill a bunch of people is not helping. Telling people to give up cars and planes is not helping.
We need to work to come up with solutions that will work for everyone, not just San Fransisco, New York, Amsterdam. We need solutions for Valdosta, GA, Snowshoe, WV, Salmon, ID. These solutions can not be "Just move out of dying places". That is just as bad as telling coal miners to learn to code.
That means that different regions will have to have different standards, something we have not seem to come to grip with here in the US.
It it probably more fair to say that scary models get more attention and thus incentivize scary modeling though.
In fact it was never "always 10 years" as tipping point has been considered 450 ppm (it could be sooner), and CO2 is steadily increasing currently is 412.16 ppm. https://www.co2.earth/ So we can estimate how much time is left by progression.
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/128753852226676736...
Doesn't that describe most pseudoscience/conspiracy posts though? They rarely make up data outright, but instead they cherrypick data that fits their theory. This is why I asked if this theory was already a thing before the pandemic. If it's really the case that China (or any other major emitter) is underreporting their emissions, you'd think that someone at a reputable institution would have raised the alarm about the inconsistency in the past two decades. The lack of this is a reason to doubt the validity of this, at least to a casual observer.
With regards to actual explanations, the twitter thread provides many:
* chinese new year
* sanctions/tariffs
* different style of lockdown by china vs the US
Clearly they liked fewer complaints about environmental concerns because it wasn’t happening where the citizens could see it. In principal they were smart enough to understand the concept of outsourcing pain.
> That’s because western leaders were more than happy to let China manufacture things ‘over there’ so we could wash our hands clean of the environmental damage
Just saying that's not the driver. Not even close. Demand for cheap goods was the driver for the West and the fact that Chinese policies teed up super cheap supply via their policies is the story.
So I don't think your comment isn't accurate. But it would be accurate if you said our western leaders were more than happy to keep the flow of cheap goods going because it was a favorable arrangement and it had a nice side effect of not having to deal with environmental cleanup or pushback.
If the cost of goods was the same in the west, the west would surely deal with environmental issues in exchange for the jobs and tax revenue.
I have no doubt we're all in for a wild ride but I think we know significantly less than forecasting doom for certain.
Some examples include:
- increased fires increasing CO2
- melting permafrost releasing CO2 and methane
- less ice decreasing ocean and land albedo and absorbing more sunlight
- greater temperature and salinity gradient reducing the mixing of the ocean and reducing the amount of CO2 it can absorb
- warm water absorbs less CO2
- and lots more.
Frankly I have very little faith in these 'projections', whether it is for global warming, or presidential races. I think these are better thought of management techniques in the here and now, intended to achieve a present-day objective, eg increase fear, get consent to take more taxes, stuff like that.
==No matter where 2020 ends up in the standings, it will be warm enough to knock 1998 out of NOAA’s top 10. When that happens, all of the 10 warmest years in their records will have occurred since 2005—and the top seven will have occurred since 2014—Sánchez-Lugo says.==
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-2020-be-the-...
The thing everyone misinterprets is that there is no hard threshold beyond which things cannot get any worse. Even though the warming that is now locked in was considered the end of the world before, and will have catastrophic effects on the world, it is still worth fighting to keep it from getting even worse.
The worst case scenarios from a "business as usual" rate of emissions growth would in a few hundred years have mankind isolated to a few extremes of latitude as the only places left where the outdoor temperatures won't kill us.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/climate-emergenc...
You expect Armageddon will happen overnight?
I have no idea if we've hit the point of no return or not, but it's gotten exceedingly clear that we're already seeing the effects of climate change and that they are accelerating. Fires in California, the Amazon, Oregon, Washington. Record high temperatures in various places all over the world. Massive shifts in storm patters, etc.
Anecdotally, I've seen a good portion of trees planted near other wooded areas not make it for one reason or another.
I think the planters had already lost trees in the past to deer, because they had plastic guards around the stalks.
However, many only lived for a couple of years and dried up. It makes me sad to think about it.
Forests represent the mature phase of an ecosystem, so jumping right into tree planting from barren field is likely not the best idea. You look at the edges of a road cut through a forest and you get an idea of the phases of regrowth for a forest. "Weeds", ie. smaller grasses and annuals, are the first pioneers. They then give way to bushes, and then later, trees, as the soil's capacity grows.
There's still so much we don't know about living soil, but most of what we do know points to soil health being the key ingredient to healthy ecosystems. How much we can accelerate that through tree planting and what not is likely very dependent on local environment.
I'm not a soil scientist, just an amateur gardener, but it's a very complex and interesting area of study.
Healthy soil has a ridiculously high number of individual microbes and invertebrates. When everything is going properly, soil carbon, pH, friability, gas/water permeability etc etc all work out to something forests like.
Feed the soil, not the plant.
In fungal soil, nutrient availability is a bit fuzzy, because if you're not in a symbiotic relationship with the soil fungi, or root fused to a sibling that is, you have a lot less access to minerals. Some people prefer to think of this as a benevolent relationship, but what's the line between exchange and extortion, especially when you can't ask either party how they feel about it? 'Codependent' might be the correct word.
I don't know if he still feels this way, but Paul Stamets has on at least one occasion accused the fungi of farming the forest and not the other way around. If the fungi maintain a situation that is unfavorable to a particular tree, then they are not interested in having that tree around (whether that ultimately proves to be self-inflicted harm is sorted out by natural selection).
Secret Life of Trees, Mycelium Running, and to a lesser extent Gaia’s Garden (by the late, great Toby Hemenway) all have different vignettes about solid ecology that created as many questions as they answered, but lacking a teacher that can be a good thing. I’m slowly filling those gaps in elsewhere.
So planting "trees" is not enough, you need to known and understand what each tree expects and wants.
And letting the trees grow can be detrimental also and the wrong option. None of the options is better than the other. Each case is different.
Healing nature is like healing people, just much more slow, much more expensive and much more complex. Must be done by professionals only.
After a wildfire only the mineral soil remains. Is sand and rocks basically. This soil can not store water at the same level.
Friend who does wetland restoration complained many times about how typical projects show up and plant 20 species all at once and walk away. Problem is, plants establish at different rates and conditions. They close canopy at different rates. They change soil biology in favor or against other species at different rates.
In his ideal world, the 'planting' would be spread out over 4 years, where the slow plants get a head start. However, I'm not sure he's entirely right either. Because after 4 years, you'll have an area full of opportunistic plants if you don't do something to close the canopy fairly quickly.
And if that's true, then there is no way to replant a forest except to spend 40 years doing it, forcing successions to get to your target species in 80 years instead of 200.
There is forest succession, and there is secondary forest succession. If a hurricane, ice storm, 2 year drought, or the shock wave of a volcano wipes out all of the trees in an area, you get what is called a secondary succession. Much of the soil and all of the wood is still there, so a shorter path that goes from forest clearing to mature forest species can be taken instead. Logging destroys the process, and you go back to prairie, which is a longer route.
If you're restoring an acre? You can ship in enough wood chips to approximate the food chain around a dead tree, kickstarting a secondary succession. It's a trick Permaculturists are using to build soil far faster than your science book says, but they only do it by diverting a waste stream from thousands of neighbors. You'd never find enough material to replant the forest between you and the next town.
But you could build an island, and when that's done build another, and let them grow toward each other and toward the next town (who does the same) and you might have something better than a million hectares of doug fir in forty years, ready to burn down again.
You can accelerate mature forest creation by planting native and more late cycle trees to prime the pump. I have a buddy who inherited ~50 acres in central NY after college. It had limited road frontage and sale value, so he basically pays the taxes by leasing ~10 acres to a farmer, and spent about $15k planting black walnut, oak, etc. It probably
Large scale farms at least. Some things like cheesemaking are still viable, because you only need a handful of cows to make an enormous amount of cheese.
Between 1990 and 2015 forests in Europe gained 90,000 square kilometer. A whole Portugal worth of additional forest.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/forest-europe-environ...
In less naturally forested areas we have to be careful not to upset things like peat and bogs which are even better at CO2 than forests.
Your friend had a field full of pioneer tree species. Those trees stopped his field from being a meadow (a badly, badly damaged meadow) but they have to die to make way for the real forest building species.
For instance, a pioneer tree dies. A hemlock, which likes to grow on fallen trees (nurse logs) takes its place. When the hemlock grows old and dies, your old-growth species might establish in the same spot, or it may wait to replace whatever grew after the hemlock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fir_wave
For more information, this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9698421-nature-guide-to-... has wonderful information about how northern forests change over time.
Where humans are involved in planting the trees, I'd expect statistical clusters, because if you plant a thousand oak trees in the same year, many will die within the same decade or so. My forestry friend in college complained about how every time trees died on campus, they'd replace them all with some other species, creating waves of dead trees every few decades, whether disease or old age, instead of a tree or two every year.
But then even without humans, nut trees are born in statistical clusters as well, ('masting' is an adaptation to overwhelm predator populations) so it stands to reason they'd die in clusters too. And a bad spring may result in more seeds germinating the following year.
Agree about the clusters. I am most familiar with the northern forests of New England (strictly as an amateur) and they are a wonderfully dynamic place. From big events like the Hurricane of '38, to small wind storms, fires, ice storms, and just an individual tree getting old and falling over, they are in a wonderful constant state of flux.
One of the saddest things is the loss (or coming loss) of so many important species. The American Chestnut and Elms are long since gone. The Hemlock and Ash are also under threat from pests and the Beech may be as well.
Visible on google maps here https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-34.9279778,138.6043731,3461...
Probably more interestingly, I am skeptical about the premise. Obviously, cities need parks and trees. Largely they have parks and trees.
I see a lot of newer areas designed with mini-lawns and I always shake my head - in an urban environment, the name of the game is density and accessibility. Don't put a bush between the sidewalk and your shop: the shops are supposed to be on the sidewalk. Half of the time, these shops seem to be hiding their main entrance in the back, next to a parking lot, because it's actually a suburb with some apartments over a dentist office, not a real attempt at an urban environment.
So if we're talking about clearcutting, we ideally want to back up a step and make rules about the topology of a clearcut (not just shape, but holes as well).
If it's a forest fire, we may want to know how far natural reforestation can be 'stretched', and replant areas that are outside of that range, accounting for how fast the artificial forest will spread.
I don't understand; the perimeter of a square and a rectangle are the same? The amount of "edge" to spread out from should be the same?
The perimeter of a rectangle with the same area as a square is larger, so there is more edge for the surrounding forest to encroach upon at the same time.
The worst shape, from a 'fill from the edges' standpoint, would be a circle. (Although I suspect that a square turns into a roughly circular hole within a few years, since the forest encroaches on the corners from two directions at once)
If we recycle it we're keeping that carbon in play. But by wasting mass amounts of paper over and over again, we can remove a lot of carbon from the air. As we chop down more and more trees to make paper and bury the paper in a landfill, new trees grow up which get turned to paper which gets buried and taken out of the system.
So waste paper if you want to save the planet, because paper may kill a tree, but that tree will grow back, and the paper will sit in a landfill petrified.
Callaway Florida 32404 https://goo.gl/maps/rezXSYN8Hf6MRU2m7
All the tree-planting that we are doing to combat climate change should be done explicitly with a view to promoting natural vegetation ecosystems. Species extinctions in the next 5 years will be due to habitat loss, not climate change. There are few things more important than preventing the loss of the World's natural habitats and preventing species extinction: in my opinion every time we talk of climate change as a great challenge facing humanity we should also be talking of habitat loss and species extinction.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/the-wrong-kind...
For example planted trees can provide shade for seedlings.
This is what I like about the Groasis projects. They create special planters so they can plant trees in deserts. Most of the time they choose very hard trees but with the intention to make it possible for other trees to grow.
https//www.groasis.com
Weyerhauser has been getting a pass for deforestation for decades by tooting their own horn about their replanting initiatives, but if you replant only the most commercially viable species, it doesn't take a genius to know you're planning to cut 'em down again.
In my experience: agriculture wins in regards to hitting goals and targets. Nature will never grow as much food as our farming system, period. Similarly, I expect that our farming system (tweaked for carbon-capture instead of wood and/or other growth targets) would be superior at handling a specific goal (ie: Carbon capture) than nature.
Permaculture is considered as "farming" or "nature"? I think it corresponds more to the latter. And it's extremely productive
The expectation that permaculture is actually the best carbon-capture strategy is... strange. Trees eventually die, and at that point: their captured carbon is eaten by bacteria, turned back into CO2 and released into the atmosphere. There is a degree of carbon-capture with natural forests, but they aren't explicitly designed for carbon capture.
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Now if you think there are other benefits of permaculture, then of course, that's to be discussed. Maybe it'd be more beneficial to the wildlife (more room for predators / prey to roam the lands), and possibly beneficial for other reasons in the long run.
But if we have a specific goal (ie: carbon capture), that's easily measured and easily quantified, then frankly... modern science is the best approach forward. We should measure various methodologies, and then compare them. And then incrementally engineer a solution over the years based on the target quantifier.
In general we over focus on stocks rather than flows when it comes to natural resources. That is to our, and the planets, detriment. Much of modern agriculture, for its productivity, wreaks havoc on the soil and the surrounding ecosystems. It's something that can be solved by technology, but not without getting over this stocks vs flows conceptual hurdle.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/a-decline-in-the-...
It will be a very long and slow process, but it is a path forward, and there are huge benefits. If we get the technology right, we wont need pesticide, herbicide, etc.
Vertical farming certainly seems like an awesome idea with obvious benefits, but there are clearly plausible obstacles and drawbacks that I don't know enough about agriculture to deem valid or not.
I’m thinking more on the 100 year timeline.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200+W%2Fm%5E2+*+area+o...
LEDs have certainly gotten more efficient and cheaper since that lecture, but I think the general argument is still the same. The sun is pretty damn powerful.
Agriculturally trained means "I know how to grow corn". Or potatoes, or maybe even 10 or 20 species of veggies in a monoculture, that must grow just for a limited amount of time before collapsing, following a set of very clear instructions and killing anything that stands in the path.
Is the equivalent as being able to copypaste a small "hello world" program on internet.
CBC "What on Earth" https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-429-what-on-earth/cli...
naturally regrowing forests by using ancient technology to understand the best way for things to be arranged physically for optimal soil regeneration.
the Amazon was cultivated by humans for thousands of years. we can do this all over the planet
Because we continue to seek ways to profit from climate change, and re-wilding land is not profitable. The tree planting push is an example of the status quo attempting to maintain itself in the face of increased awareness of the consequences of it continuing. The recent fad of 'swipe your credit card here and we'll sequester carbon for you!' is another example. These attempts will probably get increasingly desperate over time. I would lend the tree-planting movement a lot more credibility if we were talking about re-wilding significant areas of developed land, and rendering them inaccessible to any possibility of profit. What you actually find is a large intent to expand the logging industries of various nations. A lot of it is obscured 'we don't have data on that' type stuff, but take a look at whether natives and re-wilding are on the cards or if it's about planting profitable species, and the reality is quite different from the spin.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
The longer we limit our thinking to solutions within the entrenched, centuries-old economic/social system which gave rise to the problem in the first place, the longer the problem will perpetuate unchecked before effective action is taken to mitigate and reverse it. If we're even in a state capable of such action by the time we realize that's what it's going to take.
>It was a good reminder that nature knows what it is doing
Couching natural processes in this language implies there is some level of knowledge humans could attain which would enable us to become a better steward than nature herself. Again, looking for solutions within the box that created the problem is folly when stepping outside of it is necessary to resolve matters. Nature has no idea what it's doing, it doesn't 'know' a damned thing, and this is it's inherent strength which we will never successfully emulate. Nature is chaotic and constitutes an incredibly complex ongoing battle of wills played out over at least 3.5 billion years of competition, death, birth, selection pressures and evolution. Misplaced hubris alone accounts for our belief we can somehow do better than nature with the power of knowledge.
"When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn." - Wendell Berry
We have the capability, knowledge, and power to restore balance to our environment but our only hope of success is to work with existing natural systems, not against them. The solution certainly lies in our ability to augment, complement, and enhance them. Anyone asking why we can't just settle other plantes or geo-engineer earth in a way that's beneficial to us hasn't thougt things through enough - We're already ON spaceship earth and it is capable, with cautious collective caretaking that our intelligence and knowledge affords us, of carrying us through and into the stars in perpetuity. If we don't completely fuck it beforehand.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams
I believe that if we as a species were to develop enough knowledge and attempt to effect a superior replacement for nature, what we would have invented at the end of it would look an awful lot like a natural ecosystem, probably just with some sticky-tape (technology) holding things up behind the scenes. So in the end surely it's better to ruthlessly preserve the ecosystem we already have than allow it to die and have to try and re-create it or adapt to whatever the hell emerges in the void it leaves.
“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.” – Gus Speth, founder Natural Resources Defense Council