A study in North Carolina of dying trees | Hacker News Reader

A study in North Carolina of dying trees

smithsonianmag.com

I learned all about salinity and it's effects on our land in school in the 90s, it was a very big issue to us even then. The cause for us at the time was deforestation over the decades.

I welcome anyone to jump on to Google Maps and take a wander across the Australian coastal areas, then wander inland. Marvel at just how much land was cleared for agriculture. It's a patchwork quilt of farmland.

We only have 25 million people, so to have cleared so much land is truly saddening. We cleared land we couldn't even farm. Clearing the land was our first order of business when settlers arrived.

The good news is there are numerous national parks, growing every year, and revegetation is something we are doing a lot of. Let's hope it's not too little too late.

If I was President, I'd double the size of the national parks, connect them with wildlife corridors, and make national parks out of several marine offshore environments.

Of course, I'd never be elected!

My city did at least one of those last year! There is some hope. There is a national park corridor that cuts from the mountains, right through suburbia, and down to the coast. It was disparate nature reserves that are now connected into a fully fledged national park thanks to some land purchases. Not a little sliver between the highways either, pretty decent size land portions!

Ah, marvelous!

In the early 2000s an acquaintance told me about the time they joined as spectator a crew who were dragging down a forest with a massive chain between two huge tracked vehicles. The downed trees were then burned. Is this still practiced?

Edit: this was in Australia

That or dozers are still used but I am not sure what happens to the downed trees now.

They used to use big horses and the chains which is how we cleared so much land even before industrialisation.

Plant trees. Never thought of becoming a "tree hugger" but I've recently setup a recurring donation to a few charities - Ecologi, EdenProjects.org, OneTreePlanted, TreeNation, NationalForests.org. Spreading it across several orgs as I don't know yet which ones are more efficient than others.

It's nice to think that somewhere in Amazonia my small forest will be offsetting tons of CO2 produced by driving around and consuming products, and it will live long after I'm gone.

I wish that $100M "Carbon Capture" prize by Musk would go to planting a billion trees, the perfect carbon capture machines.

> trees, the perfect carbon capture machines.

Why? plants are carbon neutral. They capture some carbon while they live, then liberate all that carbon when they die and are decomposed. No carbon ever leaves the biosphere.

Carbon capture would happen if you cut down a whole forest (regardless of who planted it) and buried it a few miles underground, sealing the mine. That way the carbon leaves the biosphere.

More trees, more biosphere

as I understand, the jury is still out on that one: https://news.arizona.edu/story/dead-forests-release-less-car...

You assume the dying trees did not reproduce.

> then liberate all that carbon when they die and are decomposed. No carbon ever leaves the biosphere.

No. They liberate very little.

Bury or sink wood and it will stay put.

(I am not a geologist:) From what I understand, burying wood stopped being particularly effective a few hundred million years ago at the end of the carboniferous era. Before then, plants were producing tons of lignin, which few fungi or bacteria were able to break down. Most coal comes from carbon sequestered in this era. Peat bogs seem to be an exception to this; certainly there are still some scenarios/environments where burying wood will sequester the carbon. Maybe conditions like that could be artificially engineered in other locations.

You are correct! (as far as I know)

I think you should challenge your beliefs on the statement "plants are carbon neutral", because there might only be two scenarios in which you are right that planting something and planting nothing has no difference:

1.) If you plant a commercial forest and then cut it down and burn it entirely.

2.) In the cosmic sense that all atoms will return to dust at some point.

In all other scenarios the statement is not helpful in particular because:

1.) Climate change is happening right now and is an acute global crisis which requires extremely short term measures (on an geological time scales). Growing a forest right now, captures carbon now when we need it most.

2.) If you cut down the trees after some time, you can actually just stack the trunks and they will most likely just be inert for a long time. The number of fungi and beetles that are specialized in dealing with decomposing wood is surprisingly low. In comparison to Carbon Capture technologies, which try to capture carbon from air and then store that somewhere, using trees is extremely easy.

There's nothing wrong in growing trees, I love trees. My point was that tree-planting initiatives for carbon capture seem incomplete if they don't address the actual capture (the stockage of the dead wood somewhere safe and inaccessible to decomposition). At that point, you realize that you don't need to wait decades for the trees to grow, you can cut them down and store them right away, letting new trees grow in their place.

Even worse, a focus on tree-planting often feels like an inconsequential feel-good movement, that deviates attention away from the real problem: that every year we are unearthing millions of years worth of captured carbon and putting it back into circulation. Growing a forest while we burn thousands of oil tankers every year is like trying to remove water from the sinking titanic with a bucket. It doesn't harm, but it gets stupidly in the way.

You are actually spot on

As long as we don't remove fossil fuel usage, planting trees is just something to make us feel better without actually fixing the problem.

Also, you can plant as much as you want, it's going to be much less than what's burned by planters in amazon's forest alone, and they are actually burning the wood.

The main take-away is that destroying something is always several orders of magnitude easier than building that thing, and as long as we don't stop destroying we won't manage to build at a faster rate, therefore stop deluding yourselves.

I think answers need to be comprehensive and not exclude anything. We need to reduce consumption, we need to reforestation, we need to stop burning the Amazon, we need more wind and solar, we need technological progress, we need better power grids, we need better insulation of buildings, we need to eat less animals and travel less. The relative merits of each measure are up for discussion, but it is more important to act than squabble. Planting trees can and should be part of the solution.

Planting trees does do something. There are bigger problems that need to be addressed before tree planting can solve the underlying issue.

Thankfully the amazon reclaims farmland at a scary pace if left to its own devices.

The carbon from a dead tree doesn't just go back into the atmosphere. Most of it stays in the soil.

It would be wasteful to cut the plants down and truck the felled trees somewhere, just choose long lived varieties and leave them be.

Or, instead of burying cut trees underground you could build houses from it. That's what we do in Finland where forests are plentiful. This way you effectively capture the carbon for 50+ years, and reduce use of cement which causes significant co2 emissions.

In fact, a well built log house can last for hundreds of years if maintained properly. We have plenty of those with original wood from 1800's. Wood can be used to build larger buildings as well.

New wood treatment techniques even allow for wooden "skyscrapers"

I grew up in the largest man-made woodland in Western Europe (Landes forest). I don't know about these organisations but I can say that "planting trees" is not enough, there are very different ways of doing it. So I always take it with a pinch of salt.

Let's the bad example of the Landes forest. It's a monoculture, all of the trees are the same: pinus pinaster. A "forest", usually shaped like a rectangle is just a block of pine trees having the same age. Everything else is cut, removed, because it would slow down the growth of the trees. At 35 or 40 years old, the entire block is erased. After that it's like a minefield, till the new trees are planted.

Now is that a good forest? Well it depends what you hear by "good forest". Wildlife is very scarce, because animals depend on an ecosystem, and not just one type of tree. To hide, to eat, to reproduce, to protect themselves etc. So, sadly, you will hear more birds in a town or city that in that kind of forest.

Is it resilient? Absolutely not. Since all trees have the same age, and the same weakness, these forests are very vulnerable. It takes one parasite (bark beetles or pine processionary for instance) to wipe out kilometers of forest. When usually trees in the middle of the forest are different from the one bordering it to resist to strong winds, here when a strong wind blows it can destroy an entire corridor (you can actually see the corridor) in the forest.

Does it consume a lot of carbon? Well, I could not find accurate numbers for that forest. I hope so. But is it sustainable? Hell no.

If you ask me, the best solution, instead of planting trees, is to just buy lands and let trees grow by themselves. It starts a bit messy, but after a few decades, the forest becomes self sufficient and resilient. And most importantly: full of life.

Now the greatest irony, at least in France, is that it's illegal. If you buy forests and plan to leave it alone, you'll be blamed to have "too much biodiversity". This is not a joke: it's called "Plan simple de gestion".

You make a good point about mono culture forestry and also forestry of the same age. That is bound to cause a lot of problems.

However, agro forestry where multiple types of fruit trees etc are grown and which can be accessed by the community is a viable idea because the communities living around these forests benefit from the produce available from these forests and it also leads to a thriving ecosystem for animals and birds as well.

Exactly, there are many ways in which the communities in and around the forest can benefit from a diverse forest. Various fruits trees, nuts trees are one way.

Yep, in NZ, hill country on erosion prone soils on the east coast of the North Island was burned off as part of settlers clearing land for livestock.

And then of course, significant erosion occurred during heavy rain events, spreading large amounts of clay and silt over fertile land downstream, rendering it useless for years.

So the government went on a mass pinus radiata planting exercise from the 50s to 70s. And then in the 90s, the state forests were privatised.

Leaving the risk of the monoculture aside, now, when large rain events occur, logging debris is what ends up on the fertile land downstream.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/109025916/prosecution...

I'd prefer replanting with a nursery species like Manuka tbh.

If you’re interested, there’s a interesting youtube video about how Japan needs to thin its forests. The youtuber initially set out to create a video about how great Japan’s forest coverage was, but it turns out that after the war (when the forests were stripped first for the war effort, then for the rebuilding) Japan replanted with just two types of tree, Japanese cedar and Japanese cypress, for their supposed superiority for industrial use. However, it was never cheaper than imported timber, so the industry fell apart and could not afford to maintain the forests.

Today these forests are thick and overgrown with these trees, and because they don’t let in much light through their leaves their forest floors are barren. Japan also estimates that allergy season from all the resultant pollen costs $2B a year in economic output.

https://youtu.be/VC4gRGPbTqE

I mean no offense to you. I question the actual "seven generations" value of donating to these charities, if I never see a single tree myself, nor able to partake in its planting directly.

I usually pick partially funded projects with active updates and thousands of followers with social media presence, like this reforestation project in Rioterra, Brasil https://tree-nation.com/projects/amazonia-rioterra-brazil/up...

The alternative is to dive into it myself like this startup did: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/reddit-yis...

I think YC should add sustainability startups/non-profits to their Request for Startups. The combined carbon footprint of YC network is huge.

I honestly wonder if creating dikes to protect these areas might someday make sense. Humans created this mess, and perhaps humans can help repair and/or save some of it.

If the Dutch can reclaim land from the sea, perhaps we must as well.

A related article on the challenges of decommissioning coastal towns:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/18/this-is-...

Are a list of these places tracked somewhere?

I wonder if there's potentially in trying to seed some of these coastal wetlands with potentially non-native Mangroves which thrive on brackish water. It's not a native species, but at a point, surely unnatural but living trees are better than dead swamps.

Sea levels have been rising since the end of the ice age. Nothing on the Earth is permanent. If you've ever been to eastern NC or VA, it's all sand near the coast. The ocean is reclaiming what was once hers.

Oddly enough this made me think of the Great Wall of China. A Great Ocean Wall of some sort sounds like it would be effective. Finance it with waterproof apartments in some areas.

In other news: 11 March: A review finds that the Amazon basin currently emits more greenhouse gases than it absorbs overall.[204]

Clarification as I totally misunderstood your comment (possibly due to not knowing the relevance of the term basin here): The BBC article covering this article describes this as being caused by deforrestation / dying trees. Part of the Anazon rainforrest is still a carbon sink and as a whole it is as well. But for how long?

Note that the scientific paper (at least at the time of the BBC article) is yet to be published.

I would not expect any steady-state forest to be a net carbon remover. But it is a large sink.

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