Phantom forests: Ambitious tree planting projects are failing
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Recommended reading: "Seeing Like A State" by James Scott. The first section on Scientific Forestry directly applies, and the rest of the book conceptually does too.
In summary, the state seeks to render its resources and populace legible, because local arrangements are very hard to quantify (and tax) from the center. This drive to achieve legibility inevitably distorts the world they are attempting to understand, for example by incentivizing monoculture forestry (easier to count the trees) instead of natural forest growth (providing many communal resources that are impossible to measure such as firewood, foraging, grazing, and so on).
There is a very prevalent idea that "subsistence farmers" know little about the land they work. It's usually the opposite; they tend to have far more practical expertise than the centralized planners.
If instead of planning these projects centrally, they were planned and executed by locals in collaboration with central funding sources, you'd be much more likely to get good results. The local farmers can usually tell you what trees will grow, where they will survive, what the village needs more of, and so on. To be more concrete -- why not provide a centralized program that subsidizes villages to plant trees, but does not specify which trees to plant? If the incentives are high enough you'll get people to plant anything (as the OP shows). But at a lower level of incentive, they will only do the work for something that they actually value. That's the sweet spot.
But I strongly agree that the end point to envision is the center acting as a library/facilitator to share knowledge between different groups, rather than The Source of Truth in itself.
Local farmers that succeed in these sort of programs would likely be happy to go share ideas and experiences with other farmers, and the government can certainly provide funding and logistical support to facilitate these small-scale collaborations.
And it's certainly the case that there are some scientific advances that farmers aren't aware of, that "the center" can help to introduce; things like sensors, democratized GM technology, and so on, could all be developed centrally and made available to the periphery. Farmers tend to be quick to adopt new tools and practices that actually help them.
Never trust any centralized agency - even if it did honestly represent what was true at some point it cannot hope to be what is true.
Bamboo needs lots of water, and I am unaware of a modified version that does not, so is not really suitable in many areas. How about low tech solar cookers instead?
In many places "naturally evolved" bamboo varietals outcompete most vegetation to the extent where many people want to eradicate the bamboo
It's possible that I learned the idea of forest death from it rather than a college class.[1] The German word for it is waldsterben and there seem to be few English language resources about it.[3]
My recollection is that monoculture forests promote forest death. Diversity is critical to a thriving forest.
[1] Or both. I was an Environmental Resource Management major.
Quite, and I'll venture that any form of monoculture is generally in an unhealthy state or will eventually cease to function. At best it will be sub-optimal. Diversity must be encouraged.
Whether you look at woods/forests, dogs, people, entire ecosystems, gut bacteria or whatever, you generally see rude health associated with diversity.
English is of course a (somewhat) Germanic language but as far as I know we don't even have a concept of forest-death or anything like it. We'd probably go for something like "dying-forest syndrome" instead. Actually, we'd probably call it something really stupid and contentious like: "German forest disease" or similar nonsense and then rapidly give it a Greek and Latin combo name when the sheer racism of the original name is called out.
Anyway, I recall wandering the forest near to this (1983ish): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermannsdenkmal My Dad was a British Army Officer and he very carefully got us lost via a complex "contouring" maneuver. We escaped eventually but it is said that to get properly lost involves a British Occifer and a map. Give them a compass and you are totally doomed!
Errr, anyway, we are wandering through the woods at Herman's Denk. Lots of trees and a lot of species seen. The woods looked and felt healthy. Any decent sized wood is a pleasant place for good reason - that's where we (humans) should be. We are a species of tree huggers 8)
My company owns a bit of land and we have three huge oaks (40' plus height, at least eight foot girth) on it. I will eventually kick my local council into bestowing "tree preservation orders" (TPO) on them because allowing harm to them will we environmental vandalism.
I went to Abingdon School in Oxfordshire 1985-89. We had a school band called "On a Friday". I remember sitting cross legged outside the cricket pavillion, near School House at the end of a Summer Term (1988?), being entertained by OaF. Thom was the singer and Ed and co doing their thing. They were quite good.
"Seeing Like a State" seems like a fascinating book.
I had traditional urban planning type stuff but also more sociopolitical type stuff.
I also bought a book about The Clemente Course.
Seeing like a state is probably the book that made the biggest impression on me.
It's a very difficult problem to resolve as coordination problems get exponentially costly as the number of parties grow.
In organizational terms, once there's two or more layers of middle management, delegating decision making to frontline managers create wicked problems.
Anecdotally, paper mills don't seem to have a problem successfully growing monocrop forests on their own properties because they actually have a reason to care about the success of replanting their own land.
We really just need more foresters, with a broader mission that extends beyond simply government-owned park land, who can help individual landowners to plant the right kinds of trees in the right ways.
The problem is that people like big trees and big houses, and they aren't compatible long term.
I don't mean to be rude, but how brown is your green thumb? I get killing house plants, but killing a tree growing outdoors seems like something you'd actively have to do. The most common "mistake" I've seen are lack of care with lawn equipment like weed whackers. Are they just not being planted correctly so they don't have a chance?
Also trees might not be a good match for the soil, there's clay the roots can't penetrate, etc.
However, I have pecan/oak trees in my area. Every spring, I get free saplings from the nuts that actually germinated and sprouted in a lot of my pots that I use for my container garden. If I were to actually try to get one of these nuts to grow, it would never take. Yet every spring, Mother Nature gives me freebies that I feel guilty about plucking when it comes time to prep for the next round of veggies instead. I have an almost perfect spot to let another tree grow to full size. If it weren't for the remaining stump from where the shitty developer planted Bradford Pears, I'd transplant some of the Live Oaks saplings in their place.
=) I really wish I could make a lot of my decisions based on this alone.
If you have a short attention span, that's not good.
Yet, at the same time, if you zone out for an hour and doing this daily, that's not good but in an opposite manner.
In Florida, builders understandably plant a lot of palm trees. But the palm trees they plant aren't native to Florida. Palm trees grow wild in Florida, but they don't plant these because maybe they're not pretty enough or they produce fruit which attracts wildlife, so instead we get palm trees from Australia or other places. It's really insane.
Or contract a remote landscaper and do the right things since the start
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.2640043,-85.4463662,3277m/da...
The western half of the US has many monoculture forests where forestry companies manage them with thinning, herbicides and selective planting.
Natural forests in the west are diverse and contain many species of trees. They are different trees than you see in the east, and many of the coniferous species appear similar.
This summer a Dutch tree-planting company accidentally started a fire in Spain that burnt a much wider surface of forest than what they had planted. As a local major put it: "they were going to plant 200 hectares and ended up burning 1,000 hectares covered with 50-year old pine trees".
https://www.heraldo.es/noticias/aragon/huesca/2022/07/20/los... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/22/reforestation-... https://landlifecompany.com/news/land-life-statement-july-21...
I wouldn't be surprised if, from the point of view of carbon taxes, the saplings that were burnt in the fire were accounted as having offset carbon emissions just as much if they had lived a full life. Presumably, the new saplings that will be planted on their ashes will be accounted by the same amount.
The carbon offset market is deep with scams [1]. Most have no fix. The problem you mention does: issue offsets for trees buried, i.e. carbon sequestered, not planted.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/10/1024751/carbon-c...
Site preparation is a huge part of it. This photo gallery [2] gives some sense. It starts with soil testing and soil amendment, I doubt they ever consider the soil "good enough" at the outset. I'm not sure if they also do any hydrological changes? Then they plant a dense and diverse set of trees. I'm not clear how many trees ultimately survive. There's theories about the set of trees you'd use, but I can only imagine some of the process is just natural selection, and a belief that early density is positive to later growth.
Bringing it back to technology, I do wonder what tools could support this kind of higher-effort higher-impact forestation. It seems like there's work to be done performing soil tests and understand the results and recommended amendments, including some decision trees around tests and results. There's general guidance on the choice of trees, but it requires matching that guidance against local conditions and local plants.
In some ways the process is simpler than landscaping a house: you aren't trying to get a perfect set of plants, and you aren't imposing other requirements. You're really trying to build a mini ecosystem, and the ecosystem is there to do a lot of the work on its own.
I am less sure how this approach translates to more marginal locations. It's a bit easier to rapidly create a lush and vibrant forest in India than at the edge of a desert. Most of the examples are in tropical locations.
[1] https://www.crowdforesting.org/miyawaki-model/forest-kerala
But on a related note, the south west of India has a rich tradition of "Sarpa Kavus", literally, "Serpent Shrine", but which are in reality, sacred groves in some corner of the yard of many traditional homes (see [1] for a typical example) - these are mostly left to themselves for most of the year, except for a couple of festival days. In practice, it is almost a biome within the yard.
[1] https://nandakishorevarma.wordpress.com/2016/12/30/a-sacred-...
What's neat is that the tools already exist. Much of modern farming is a data problem- knowing soil conditions and nutrient levels across a large area and which plants would work best where. They often make use of satellite data, watershed simulation, weather and climate models.
I wonder if anyone has documented using those tools for this purpose.
90%+ of these mass planting "1 million trees in 30 seconds" projects is usually little more than putting sticks in the ground, hoping some of them make it, with little regard for survivability, usefulness, tree species nativity, etc.
The old and magnificent trees we see today in streets and neighborhoods suffer from extreme survivor bias. Many tree species aren't even that large/long-lived as people tend to think about average trees.
There's also a strong correlation between speed of growth and longevity.
Going for the quantity approach that many of these low-effort projects do is little more than just tossing seeds out of a bag onto the ground. In the end you'll get more trees than you had before, but probably not by much, and with varying success.
One place supported all 4 kinds, the other three only supported 1 or 2 kinds of grasses.
I would think reforesting a barren land might have to take multiple phases of growth to prepare the soil, ability to hold water, fungal colonies to extract nutrients, etc.
It turns out that building a healthy forest is a long difficult process that can span multiple administrations and in some cases lifetimes. Building the conditions for a second growth successional forest is something most of us can watch in real time.
These things are quality over quantity, which requires some cleverness in order to leverage. Forests (vs tree farms) spread by mycelium, by root, by seed, and by wing, and pretty much in that order. You'll get more success planting the entire perimeter of an intact forest than planting a rectangular area next to it, and more success planting a rectangular area next to an intact forest than planting a random hill in the middle of a clearcut. I have a hypothesis that planting rich islands within line of sight of each other and then letting nature in-fill between them also works better, but I have seen no research supporting or refuting that hypothesis. Nature corridors seem to be pretty close to this model and those have been proven.
One thing I'd like to see us do is move away from square and rectangular clearcuts toward more linear ones. Perhaps on contour, and leaving support species instead of nuking everything before replanting. See also research by Suzanne Simard and her peers on the soil food web.
Furthermore, trees need organic material. A lot of it. A tree planted in "dirt" will be about the same size 3 years later. A (young) tree planted in rich compost can double in size in a year. You can't stick a tree in the ground anywhere and expect it to grow without a good amount of help.
ours sprouted quickly when first planted but then stagnated through the hottest parts of the summer. now we're entering the winter season and i'm wondering what we need to do to revitalize the soil again to help them grow in the spring.
And when you think about it, it’s normal - you’d never end up with a giant 100% consistent group of plants in a native area anyway. You’d have variable concentrations all over the place, with some devoid of one species, others overpopulated with it, all based on suitability of the local env. and and variations in the soil, water, shade, and competing plants nearby.
As humans, we just think we can point to a spot and it should comply and grow amazingly I guess, and we get flustered if that isn’t what happens.
As someone who has a green thumb, was fascinated of trees since a kid and is working a considerable amount of forrest partly with his own tools: It's not like that.
There are trees which fall into the category of early succession. They shy away of compost, their seeds do not even germinate in such an environment. They need bare soil.
Other trees prefer poor soil as they perform symbiosis with fungi (mykhoriza), essentially producing the type of soil they need (partly).
And then there are the trees which prefer rich soil.
The later category are trees where the lawn owner is to impatient to wait (how can I make my tree grow faster) or the aggroforrestry is dependent on highest yield in shortest growth time.
Rapid growth is not actually good for the longevity of a tree. A tree which grows rapidly (presumably to take advantage of a resource surplus) will be structurally weaker and die at a younger age to wind, pests, etc.
So it's true that planting in compost can accelerate the tree, but there's nothing wrong with planting a tree in "dirt" from a natural perspective (assuming it doesn't outright die from pH balance or lack of water etc).
And to what extent climate change would make the environment no longer suited for trees?
In the US forest fires burn about 7 million acres on average each year.
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF10244.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
The Dixie fire alone was about 1 million acres.
San Francisco is 30,000 acres for perspective.
I don't know how feasible it is, but using trees to transform parched landscapes is the mission of a company I interviewed at a while back called Terraformation, founded by the former CEO of Reddit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_Island#Botany
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11137903
Once, This Island Had Just One Tree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZPrk9IZ3Jw
Strangely enough, the Google maps satellite imagery is almost useless. Use Apple maps instead. If not on an Apple device, you can access Apple maps via https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascension+island (note: satellite imagery is not available this way on my iDevice).
Here is another BBC article, which I think is far more balanced and talks about the negative issues of the biological cost of the planting: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36076411
The last volcanic eruption was 1508 or so. I did a quick Google to find some information on how long takes it generally takes for vegetative regeneration after volcanic eruptions. Looks like it depends on type of eruption and rainfall: “Mount Kelud in East Java has erupted on a 15–37-years cycle for the past centuries [snip] Within 3 years of the eruption, stem diameters were 3–10 cm. [snip] being able to establish itself rapidly in the extreme conditions that prevail after a recent ash deposition event (given the short return period of eruptions), but by enriching the ash deposits with nitrogen, paves the way for grasses to take over, which in turn delay succession to other woody vegetation” (not sure if the landscape was purely volcanically virgin). Obviously it can also takes centuries in the example of Ascension. A study in Hawaii looked at the order that types of vegetation took hold: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/science/5/chap8...
That is only true if the seeds can travel to get there! Moving many miles or uphill via seed dispersal is a slow process. The climate gradients and habitat pressures are moving much faster. While I agree that land suitable for forests will eventually reforest itself, if we want to do it on human timescales, we may need to kick-start the process with a seed transfer program.
There absolutely is. In my country, logging companies release statements complaining bitterly about effects to industry when new areas of land are protected from logging by the government. They equally are quite happy to quietly log ancient trees when allowed. Just because people don't march around with their agenda printed on a badge doesn't mean they don't exist.
Although if you were only interested in sequestering carbon (which currently has close to 0 economic incentive) you could grow algae, filter them out of the water, and then pump them deep underground into old gas/oil wells. It's still a lot of energy but possibly more viable than most carbon capture proposals. Over millions of years that algae will probably turn back into coal/oil.
Also, farming algae in natural waterways tends to have its own environmental impacts.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/the-environmental-messa...
It's a reason why those "we plant a tree every time you buy X" marketing claims are mostly BS.
However, farmers quickly found a loophole where they could find a plot of virgin forest, clear cut the hardwood for lumber and then use the bare land to sign up for the program. They would plant a fast growing monocrop of pine and tend it (and collect payments) for 7 years until they would harvest it for lumber. All fully paid for by the government.
Natural forests have a complexity that doesn't seem worthwhile to brute-force by massive tree planting. There's an obvious spatial complexity for different plant phyla patterns (see a bunch of links below).. a kind of blending between meadows to underbrush to trees, mosses and lichen in rocky areas, mangroves holding onto rivers. And there's plenty of fungus and animal participation to consider as well.
I like to listen to permaculture people and their approaches.. thinking of the water tables, clay and soil types. I think there's probably also some new thinking to be done about how functional water cycles differ from arid areas and developing long-term plans to coax water back up with strong cloud-seeders, from coastlines and river basins towards inland deserts.
That all leads to healthier rivers and tidal estuaries, which are keystones for many maritime ecosystems, due to feeding and breeding migrations e.g. of salmon, crab, eels.
I guess I'm saying we're missing the forests for the trees :)
https://cache.desktopnexus.com/thumbseg/2276/2276110-bigthum... https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediu... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536460cbe4b02a... https://www.backyardgardenlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Bl...
The new idea I encountered in the book was one of deep rooted trees hydrating the soil by reaching into the water table and pulling it up to the surface. Particularly at night when evaporation rates drop off. I'd read years ago that some African cultures ascribe this power to fig trees (possibly from Wangari Maathai), but I've never seen anything but anecdotal evidence of this happening anywhere else. She anthropomorphized these things but I suspect that some of the activities she saw could more boringly be ascribed to osmotic pressure. Sugars and water are going to leak out across a gradient at some rate even if you try to stop it. Especially across a barrier that is designed to pass water in the opposite direction.
Also reminds me of the nutrient chain in PacNW connects the salmon spawn to becoming tree fertilizer via the bear fishing and discarding partly eaten carcases; they just eat the fatty skin. Deep ecology.
I think trees need a forest. The best place for a tree to grow is under a mature tree of its own species. But even trees of different species help prevent damage to each other from winds and storms. Perhaps instead of trying to plant a new forest, we should be jealously conserving and expanding what forest remains. Harvesting timber by clear-cutting should be illegal, and while the logging industry has adjusted somewhat to conservation, wealthy landowners still do it all the time.
The government and public authorities will sign a plan; then it goes down to multiple intermediaries, and by the time it reaches those planting the trees get little to care. It is rampant with corruption and fraud. If I have to put in numbers, here is an idea -- if there is $1 available for every tree to be planted, anyone in direct benefit at the final step gets less than 10¢. Those organizations and people "shouting" about planting trees goes on to the next plantation project, and it goes on.
I have been involved with and have invested in nurturing an ecosystem in a remote corner of India. I have got the involvement of the locals, and they know what trees/plants to grow that will benefit not just in sucking in CO2 but bears fruit that the locals can leverage. The idea is to have a tangible outcome from the trees that we can create a circular economy and treat the Climate actions as a good side-effect. The locales have no clue and don't even have enough to survive to care about Climate Change.
While yes, an extremely unbalanced perspective helps us focus on a rather important issue, I do wish the article were a mite more balanced.
Within the intended audience, this is a call for stricter standards to ensure this is done well and achieves its aims. Outside, for people who just read the headline, it's taken as further evidence that it's all BS. A fake solution to a fake problem, both pushed by evil people.
I'm not sure what you can do about this, climate change deniers are not famous for their appreciation of nuance, but we should probably take note of it anyway, otherwise you end up with people with very different opinions thinking they are agreeing when they say "this is terrible!". And nerds seem extra vulnerable to being sold this kind of know-it-all, "well, actually", cynicism for some reason.
As a climate change skeptic I’m very much in favor of having more trees around, having less pollution in general, and don’t really care for the idea of covering up vast swaths of native grasslands with solar panels. Reforestation seems like a pretty good way to take advantage of higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
From large scale, low initial investment and high yield tree planting: pick one. Any even the most amateur gardener can figure out that growing things successfully requires checking many boxes.
Last but not least: in climatic emergency maybe instead of as we can see a pipe dream of low cost, no maintenance, native species only eco-forest we may start to think about planting almost anything that grows successfully and does not burn too easily.
https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...
Sure planting trees is generally a low-yield operations, with <50% survival rate typical. But these referenced projects were abysmally low, egregiously low, around a percent or two. Low enough to see that no honest effort was made.
To replicate a forest means to replicate the entire mechanics and settings that forests thrive in, not just replicating the presence of plants/trees alone.
I can't give a wholehearted reccomendation for The Overstory since it was a bit melodramatic for my taste. The narrative cadence of the book goes something like: tragedy, pointless tragedy, ridiculous tragedy, unrealistic tragedy and so forth until the end... with a dash of interesting ecology and history sprinkled throughout. I suppose it should be read as magical realism with "rage against the machine" vibes.
There is no shortage of grasslands that are close of becoming desserts with one serious draught, but there is shortage of forests, that hold the moisture and prevent further desertification.
Well said. It makes one wonder how the Midwest Great Plains shelter belt and other regions like it will handle this current dry spell we're in globally.
re: "history isn't gone," that's a reductive position. it will certainly be very different millions of years from now, but it won't be as drastic within our lifetime. the ecological history of a place tells us where plants thrive and don't thrive. site selection is a fact of plant success. certain types of trees grow in grasslands but they aren't the dominate plant life — fossil records would indicate this.
i'm no ecologist or scientist, but i've read that grasslands can hold water too. just google "do grasslands store water"
Well, I am also not a formal educated ecologist, but I am friends with some (including regular heated discussions) and have had a strong interest in the subject since years.
So yes, grasslands do hold water. But afaik it is a really tiny amount compared to trees. Also just compare how deep the roots of trees reach, compared with grass. (even though the savannah grass is of course a special breed and way better equipped against droughts than the common gras on a lawn)
"the ecological history of a place tells us where plants thrive and don't thrive. site selection is a fact of plant success."
I agree that it is stupid to ignore that.
But we humans changed so much on the earth already, that the conditions in many places also changed. Winds, rain, temperature, .. including the soil but usually for the worse (acid rain and co, but also fertilizers). This is what I meant with history is gone.
So my point is, I would not not plant a forest, just because 100 years ago, there also wasn't a forest there.
(Also humans have had cattle for a long time and overgrazing is likely the number one reason for desertification or plain grasslands.)
I rather would just look at the current data. How is the soil. PH. Salt level. How much rainfall. What is the temperature, etc.
And then start with the right shrubs and bushes. And then trees.
A forest will grow on its own with the right conditions. We can help with those conditions.
if you're interested in this topic, i've learned a lot from the authors of this paper (paper is also good and relevant to our discussion and points to a lot of their sources): https://repositorio.unesp.br/bitstream/handle/11449/159556/W...
it's a fascinating topic! appeals to my social science and nature interests
Definitely.
I am also interested in the linked paper, but for some reasons it fails to download for me.
Tree planting seems the be the simplest/cheapest project to do that ostensibly removes CO2.
Basically, the carbon offsets serve as a conscience salve for rich people to continue their lifestyle, and then these tree projects exist as a way to say that you are at least trying to do something. Nobody really cares if they are effective or not.
A side effect is that you can end up with productive species. Imagine forests where many trees bear fruits, others have acorns that pigs can feed on, fruit vines and understory herbs that animals can graze on, large lakes with edible fish. This is the future I'd be excited for and it's all currently possible with the right policies.
That said, in areas that got deforested having any tree cover can make the area much more habitable for other trees. Thus single digit survival rates can still result in new forest over a few decades.