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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the ratio of this is good samaritan tree planting versus timber industry. Timber plantings account for a large portion of US land. Timber is a very popular investment among long term land owners. Not all land is suitable for farming, and timber is a relatively passive way to extract value form the land.

Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.

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> Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.

Sure, but the number of trees doesn't matter so much -- the amount of carbon sequestered by those trees is more important. Presumably, thinning out the weak trees allows the stronger trees to grow larger.

The US timber industry is actually pretty good for sequestering carbon because their economic incentives lead them to:

- Select fast-growing species of trees

- Harvest the trees before they reach their terminal state (when they stop acting as a carbon sink), then replant new trees.

- Promote the use of timber products as substitutes for carbon-intensive building materials, like concrete.

There was an interesting life-cycle analysis of this published a few years back:

https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2011/fpl_2011_lippke...

Thinning out weak to let the strong grow is standard forestry practice. No one expects 100% of saplings planted to mature into fully grown trees. I am just saying, don't believe timber industry numbers on face value. The 2 or 3 trees planted for each tree harvested does not translate into a net increase of forest size. If you compare forest numbers in the USA now to 50/100 years ago, we have seen tremendous growth. However, the number has stabilized in the last few decades.

At least in the West, the vast majority of forestry land is managed by the NFS. Private land is really only used for Christmas tree farms or specialty trees for the paper industry.

For public lands, the timber industry is responsible for their own replanting, but it's largely irrelevant. More timber is lost to wildfire than logging every year, so most replanting falls on the Forest service anyway: https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reforesta...

Edit: Apparently this is all wrong and out of date!

While the NFS still owns the majority of forestry land in the West, it only accounts for a tiny portion of the overall lumber produced. From the CRO:

> Since the 1990s, FS timber production has decreased, totaling around 2 billion board feet annually since FY1999.56 In 2011, NFS supplied 2% of U.S. wood and paper products. The decline is attributable to a multitude of factors, including (but not limited to) changing legislative directives and related forest management policies and practices—such as increased planning and procedural requirements—as well as changing market dynamics for wood products, public preferences, and litigation.

Basically, it became too hard to log NFS land, so logging companies turned to private or state lands instead (and states set their own criteria for how private forestry land needs to be replanted).

> More timber is lost to wildfire than logging every year

Gotta wonder how much of that is because of the way they replant? (ie: spray with round up, and then plant GMO pine, eliminating fire break species like aspen).

Not all timber is created equal. Dedicated logging tracts are a monocrop and are often yellow pine. Forested areas can also be counted as timber, but in a given tract only a certain percentage of trees are worth logging. These are generally high value trees like poplar, walnut, oak, or ash, and they are planted as generational investments.

Do you have any sources or literature on GMO pine?

I’m surrounded by thousands of acres of private land managed by foresting services.

Based on my conversations with the service (very large, multiple states, etc), most private land owners are hedge funds. They basically just hold land and lease it to the management services. No cost or risk to the hedge fund. Land values increase typically and they make revenue in the meantime. Further, many states have excessively low taxes for farm land and / or forestry so it’s really a decent investment.

This is also why we have more fires now: because public forests are not logged anymore, so fuel accumulates.

No, fires happen because forests are now made solely of trees, whereas a forest normally has multiple layers, allowing it to retain moisture much better.

Of course, climate change and human stupidity are very strong factors as well.

Having a fully matured forest takes hundreds of years. Logging it on a regular basis make sure this never happens and also reduces the overall carbon sequestration. This lead to the interesting conundrum which is that even though the actual number of trees is growing, carbon sequestration is going down in forests. (Apologies, unable to find the link about the carbon sequestration decreasing for decades, if someone has it please post, I need to bookmark it.)

The difference between a forest and a tree plantation: in a forest the soil is wet, in a tree plantation it is dry.

There's a third option - unused land will grow trees over time as long as there are trees nearby. In fact that's what was the dominant reason according to the article:

> Ultimately the study found that tree cover loss in the tropics was dominated by tree cover gain in other regions, driven by AGRICULTURAL ABANDONMENT in parts of Europe, Asia, and North America

If you don't live in a dessert and you stop doing anything to your land, and there are trees in the region - your land will turn into a forest eventually. In my region (central Europe) it happens in like 15 years :)

> Timber plantings account for a large portion of US land.

Really? I can't imagine it's very big compared to agriculture, but maybe that's my midwestern bias? Do you have any figures handy (specifically for commercial timber rather than timber for other purposes e.g., hunting)?

That sounds pretty slimy, but the headline is that there are more trees. If timber is driving it, I would think the bigger concern would be over the homogeneity of the trees and the incumbent ecosystem damage?

Lastly, I would guess (perhaps wrongly) that palm oil and banana plantations are driving the inorganic growth (I haven't yet read the article--shame on me, etc--so perhaps I'm speculating unnecessarily)

I think the idea is that timber is a lot less labor intensive. Agriculture almost certainly produces more $ per M^2, but it takes a lot of work planting, fertilizing, and harvesting every year. Timber plantings, judging by what the above commenter wrote, probably consists of planting saplings from a tree nursery then waiting a decade or two for them to mature.

There could also be a higher risk in an agricultural crop completely failing due to unlucky weather compared to the risk of a timber crop failing.

Forests have a nasty habit of catching fire though.

I’m sure they are insured via some mechanism.

So are crops.

Mega fires aren't really an issue in most of the Midwest. There's large forest fires, but the fuel load isn't extremely high and there are not extended dry seasons.

Like here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (where timber is a primary landuse) there have been some big fires, but they don't compare in size or frequency to the fires out west.

This article has some great visualizations of US land use: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

About a quarter of US land is dedicated to ‘unprotected’ timber. About ten percent of that belongs to one single business - https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/

Agriculture is a little less (about a fifth), pasture is a little more (about a third) - although that includes range land which is barely ‘land use’ at all.

beat me to posting that. I do agree its a great visualization.

Not sure where you are getting your math here. From the article: "Weyerhaeuser Co. is the largest private owner of timberlands in the U.S. With 12.4 million acres, the company controls 2.3 percent of all commercially available timber"

We have some Weyerhauser "timberland" by us - I can say they are much more like intensive agriculture than forests. I wouldn't worry about replanting on them - you better believe Weyerhauser uses every square foot of their land to grow trees on.

You are correct, I misread that as 2.3% of US (which is about 10% of 25%), rather than the correct 2.3% of timberland. So, only 2.3% of 25% - or .6% of the US.

Thanks for the fact-check.

>I wonder what the ratio of this is good samaritan tree planting versus timber industry. Timber plantings account for a large portion of US land.

Why is Timber harvesting bad?

As long as we don't burn the wood, that carbon is captured.

I think most of it is china's great green wall. I can't say it won't work -- It is conceivable that the forestation will alter local climate to where water starts falling and sustains those trees.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02789-w

I wonder how much of this is The Great Green Walls of Africa and China...

I was under the impression that the Great Green Wall of Africa doesn't really exist at the moment, and that no project goals were ever reached.

True - the GGW of China has 88Bn trees. That's compared to 390Bn in the Amazon Rainforest.

The GGW of Africa only has 1Bn trees so far.

So not as noteworthy.

I would imagine planting a forest 1/5th the size of The Amazon is the major driver here...

Here's an article from 2020:

>What happened to Africa's ambitious green belt project?

https://www.dw.com/en/what-happened-to-africas-ambitious-gre...

You're failing to account for all the "buy one we plant a tree // for every N$ spent we'll plant a tree" promotions finally coming to fruition

I lump those into good samaritan planting. Also I am dubious on how many of those promotions just end up subsidizing replanting lumber tracts. I am trying to find numbers but anything by the timber industry just seems to tout "we are replanting more than we harvest on a national level," but doesn't seem to differentiate who is planting what.

Wow, they actually did it? I figured those were just empty promises that no one would follow up with to see if it was actually done.

Companies sell it - but as pointed out they’re sometimes charging to plant trees they would have planted anyway.

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