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Comment by earleybird | Hacker News Reader

There are 300+ yr old timber frame barns etc in Europe, so it seems to be plausibly a net zero impact.

Hrm, I figured Japanese is doing this in a sustainable way, but I can't help but wonder about the half a billion dollar price tag. It's a massive public works project since it's partly tax funded that benefits particular sectors.

Since they've been doing it for 1400 years, superstitiously inclined people will be adamantly against making changes to the interval.

From the Long Now post:

> As we walked from arch to arch, Maholo explained that the forest here had historically been used exclusively to harvest timbers for all the shrines, but over the last millennia they had been harvested too heavily for various war efforts, or lost in fire. Since the beginning of this century the shrines’ caretakers have been bringing these forests back, and expect them to be self-sustaining again within the next two or three rebuilding periods — 40 to 60 years from now.

Part of this is also a preservation of skills. It ensures that the artisans who work on it have a consistent demand for their skills.

Forestry in Japan is a disaster nowadays. Both driven by the lack of wood on the market and by the bad habit of "accounting fraud" in Japan -- the count of cut trees is systematically under-reported by the timber corporations.

This was revealed in particular after the huge landslides of 2021, as a forest holding together the soil had been silently harvested much more than what was reported.

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