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Comment by xipho | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a short term fix prone to all the problems of mono-culture. First pine-beetle infestations brining in disease put all that hard-work to naught.

There is a natural progression to growing forests, how about protecting, and just staying off large swaths of land, using fire treatment and land management techniques as we understand them and let the land restore itself? Perhaps we have to think past 5-10 year windows and start to work at plans that think a minimum of 50 years out. Old-growth forests take easily that long, at minimum, to get started "naturally".

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There's also a massive undervaluing of the naturally occurring fungal network that exists between the trees. The mushrooms we see on the ground are just the reproductive organs. If you dig into the ground (and you've probably seen this many times if you've dug a hole near vegetation), there's tons of white fungal strands that connect between the tree roots. They absorb or release moisture, they transfer nutrients back and forth to the tree roots. There isn't a ton of research on it currently, but I'd bet my hat that the lack of that natural fungal network between trees just planted in rows is why planted forests rarely take hold.

Same as there's so much focus on how to capture carbon out of the air while we pump megatons in every year, it's very silly how much focus there is on replanting forests instead of just ... not cutting them down.

I agree, 1000%

Having mister bottles with spore solutions to inoculate places where the seeds are planted could be a good solution. This would also reduce deadwood, increase the growth rate of the trees, retain water, and anchor more diverse ecosystems. Mushrooms have to be part of the solution. Identifying the various types of mushroom species in local healthy forest should provide a guideline for what's sprayed with the seeds. Blended suspensions of mycelium could be the best way of inoculation, but spores would definitely be better than nothing.

Wildflowers, lichens, and other flora should also be a part, based on the local ecosystems. Monoculture or insufficient diversity could result in making things worse, whereas healthy samples represent local optima discovered by natural growth.

There’s enough research that, according to [0], British Columbia started to adjust forestry policy in the early 2000s. I enjoyed the audiobook for the interwoven story of parenting and personal growth along with the descriptions of how data was collected and shared. If you’d rather just read the research papers, see Dr. Simard’s publications [1].

[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/finding-the-mother-tree-disco...

[1] https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/

Funny anecdote cannabis cultivators have for a long time been using mycorrhizae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

Not cutting forests down doesn’t provide sufficient opportunities for people to do things. At best you get a handful of people patrolling and maybe a small non profit with a speaker or two peacocking around.

Whereas planting carbon capture forests provides tons of opportunities for people to do things, be involved, make money, build an identity, puff themselves up.

Always look at incentives, not outcomes.

Planting trees doesn't puff you up. It breaks you down literally. Tendinitis, back pain, muscle loss. You get PTSD, you wake up years later in a cold sweat from the nightmares. And the bugs...

Is this a consequence of planting trees or of working at a breakneck pace for an abusive employer?

It's the consequence of being paid by the tree, instead of by the hour. It's the best way to do it but it does take its toll.

If the “best” way to do it is via a method which would discourage us from trying at all, we should change the definition of “best” to one that does not result in PTSD.

Well it's a go at your own pace sort of thing. Entirely self inflicted.

My son is in the boy scouts. A few years ago we met a man who had planted trees on a barren hill for his eagle project. He went back 30 years later and saw that that hill was now completely reforested. He was so inspired that he went around giving demonstrations to young scouts to try and get them interested in ecology.

Is this anecdote really to the contrary of what I said? You’ve told me all about how excited this person is about seeing the result, not anything about whether or not it was the optimal action to take 30 years ago.

It’s just human nature. There’s no way to fight it. Best to try to use it instead.

Not at all. I was just giving a concrete example from my own experience to substantiate your point.

It's not fast enough. "The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year, but to outrun climate change, it must move approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet—up to 10 times as fast." https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/10/trees-forest...

[Edit 2: a more direct source for that number is https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/111/4/287/4599572 ]

Edit: also, while the article only names one species of tree, it switches to using the term "tree seed" which I think covers more diversity. At least the linked project https://www.blm.gov/programs/natural-resources/native-plant-... mentions diversity a lot, so they're not aiming for a monoculture.

I don't know if "Mother Jones" is a great source also -- "to outrun climate change,"

What does that mean exactly?

The greatest carbon sink in the world is the midwest during growing season. Would converting that into forests improve that? No.

Also, it's not clear why they only grow at the given estimated rate. I don't think it's as simple as "plant more trees".

I would interpret it as meaning: We're not going to curb our current bad habits; we're not going to stop the current trend...therefore we have come up with new / different ways to reverse (with changing modern conveniences) and eventually "outrun" the trend.

Yeah, it sounds silly to me as well.

What does that mean exactly?

It sounds like they're talking about moving climate zone boundaries.

The greatest carbon sink in the world are actually our oceans, and we’re not even close to paying attention to their health.

I think all modern takes on climate change have become very reductive. Yeah monoculturing dead forests isn’t a solution, but so is not doing anything. The ideal solution at this point frankly is to reduce human consumption and leaving large swaths of land to their own devices. Give them time to heal. (And provide some help with native flora and fauna if the land is too far gone to heal on its own).

Pollution and climate change fall squarely within Timothy Morton’s “hyperobject” definition. I accept what’s happening and I try to imagine it, and I accept that I fail to understand.

I used to like E. O. Wilson’s half-earth idea, but it’s got an eracist undertone (or overtone if you can empathize with aboriginal people displaced from homelands in the interest of national parks and the many other reasons). The US National Park System is awesome, in part for the mission statement of perpetual stewardship, and it could be so much better. Allowing traditional land-use practices could help restore and preserve landscapes. We collectively need to reduce our energy-conversion demand and agree on government regulations that help keep a balance rather than promoting or allowing for exploitation. That kind of shift will not be easy.

Feral, a book by George Monbiot, discusses rewilding in Wales. The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook, is fiction about a group of humans opting into a rewilding experiment, exchanging the amenities and stresses of the city for that of a generations-long series of camping trips.

And the best way to do this is to stop consuming animal products, as the majority of our land worldwide used for agriculture is used to support animal culture. Moving away from consuming animals free huge portions of that land, as well as helps to heal the oceans which are devastated both by the byproducts of global warming, but also directly via overfishing.

There is no version of halting global warming that does not involve reducing our reliance on eating animals and their secretions.

I’d love if the folks downvoting would care to explain how what I’m saying is neither directly relevant nor true. I’m all ears.

I will not endorse Mother Jones. However, "outrunning" is straightforward. A forest can "move" a certain amount a year — it is not motion of individual trees, but new trees and plants can grow where there were none before.

If the extents of a forest are constrained by climate, and the boundaries of its climate zone moving at a speed which is slower than the trees can move, then the collection of organisms can meaningfully persist and be said to move north. If on the other hand the climate zones are moving too quickly, then sooner or later there will no longer exist a collection of trees and related organisms that functioned as this forest once did.

Unlike ents and huorns, terrestrial trees move over generations, thus outrunning, or maybe just keeping pace with, or losing the race against, climate change.

Higher elevation tends to be colder. It’s not as simple as the plant populations moving upslope, though; some plants might have a wider tolerance range, and while evolution involves both competition and reciprocation, too much stress and/or too little time leads to extinction.

Regarding tree growth, selectively logging, reducing soil compaction, and leaving or planting birch/alder/etc along with fir/pine/etc, so long as they’re tied into the mycelial networks of our Fungal Overlords will increase total tree mass [0]. Feel free to replace “mother tree” with “parent tree”, as Doug Fir, for example, are monoecious.

[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/finding-the-mother-tree-disco...

What happens in the Midwest that makes it a carbon sink? Growing crops that turn back into atmospheric CO2 within a couple of months would be carbon neutral at best.

"The strong atmospheric sink in the agricultural region is consistent with the difference in the spatial distribution of agricultural production and product consumption: a strong atmospheric uptake by crops during the growing season in the Midwest states, while much of the release of carbon associated with consumption of agricultural products occurs in other regions, in the United States and abroad. It must thus be pointed out that this apparent atmospheric sink in the Midwest does not imply a long-term carbon sequestration"

https://www.pnas.org/content/107/43/18348 , Discussion

Yes, the key to success here is restoring the soil. Once you have healthy soil, the only way to stop forests from happening is large herbivores. There are some interesting large scale efforts to attempt to restore soil across the world. It's a remarkably fast process once it gets going.

The Chinese have a few decades experience with regreening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)

Doing it wrong, can have some negative effects as well.

> Once you have healthy soil, the only way to stop forests from happening is large herbivores

...or primates.

As far as I understand, the natural progression to growing forest easily breaks once the forest is gone. Large swaths of land around the Mediterranean are now desert but used to be forest, until they were cut down. Erosion and other factors than stop new forests from growing. In these cases you need to kickstart the process by sending the correct starter.

Tbh “natural progression to growing forests” sounds to me like a mere excuse for doing nothing about the status quo. We’re already growing plants for agriculture and are currently looking to terraform Mars, and we as a species were so willing to break that “natural progression” when we started building cultures around automobiles and plastics.

Everything can be used as excuse. That's not an argument.

It is possible to cooperate with natural progression to create ecosystem that provides resources for humans. Actually humans did that for thousands of years. It has the advantages that requires much less energy input (less fertilizer, tilling) and it's more resilient to pests and climate change. It has the disadvantage that it isn't optimized for short term profit. And it isn't cool (likely to elicit "bah, weeds" response).

Tbh "mere excuse for doing nothing" sounds like a mere excuse for a lack of imaginative solutions and reluctance to take time to think things out. It doesn't follow from my statement. We can disrupt the status quo AND (in parallel) do other things. It will be incredibly difficult to take land from private shareholders and keep people "off" of it- something that will be highly disruptive. If you read 5 words further you'll see I referenced referenced land-management techniques, there is a huge wealth of science that exists, and is ongoing in this regard, applying these is the opposite of "doing nothing".

Managed grazing within forested land is an option. Our forests have become too dense in many areas due to overly aggressive fire management.

https://forestry.usu.edu/news/utah-forest-facts/forest-grazi...

Yeah, this is not growing a forest.

It's constructing a park.

Nailed it. It will need constant maintenance since weather patterns, fauna, and soil won't be self-sustaing.

If you want to see why we are in trouble look no further than this comment. Imagine thinking humans are required for nurturing all life on this planet. It's the other way around my friend. Are there situations where humans can help? Yes. Are we capabale of terra-farming. Heck no.

Terraforming or terrafarming? We already did ruinous terraforming with anthropogenic climate change.

The mainstream is stuck on nice-sounding, impractical, meaningless Bandaids rather than delving into scalable solutions that will likely require economic incentives and international coordination.

Reforestation can happen on its own if the land is left alone.

Rinderpest and the tsetse fly caused the reforestation of previously inhabited lands in sub-Saharan Africa.

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/pearce00.pdf

Anecdotal example not widely-applicable.

If the climate is changes from semi-arid Mediterranean to desert, forests will dry up, burn, and not return as they were.

This has got to be a troll, right? Basic succession ecology. Just how do you think forests came to be in the first place? You realize we have already wiped out, basically, whole species of old-growth hardwood forests here in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut)? Where do you think those forest came from? Have you ever seen an empty lot for more than a couple of years? Take a look at pictures in Michigan after the exodus there.

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