Hacker News Reader

Comment by ortusdux | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, living old grown trees >> old growth wood > new growth wood.

Modern 'new growth' forestry is very sustainable, but old growth poaching still happens quite often in the US. I have friends on the regulatory side of logging and I've see illegal activity first hand.

I know that this article is not advocating for the logging of old growth trees, but focusing on the idea that 'old growth is better' can cause customers to value it enough that the extra profit incentivizes illegal harvesting.

Personally, I would like to see densified wood become a viable option. Even lightly densified new growth meets or exceeds the qualities of old growth wood.

https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/new-densified-wood-...

https://jwoodscience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s1008...

View on HN

> Modern 'new growth' forestry is very sustainable

It is not, I live in southern Chile, my house is right next to a Radiata Pine plantation. The ecological damage of pine and eucalyptus plantations is immense – the loss of biodiversity, the excessive water consumption, the poisoning of other types of vegetation, the degraded state of the soil after clearcut logging, etc.

Plus the social damage, lots of those plantations are on indigenous lands stolen by various machinations in the past.

Plus the heightened fire risk because of the pyrophoric nature of pine and eucalyptus trees. Native forests show much greater resistance to the propagation of wildfires which have become a yearly catastrophe in Chile in the past decade.

> Plus the social damage, lots of those plantations are on indigenous lands stolen by various machinations in the past.

How is this “social damage” the fault of the forestry company and not the folks who took the land 200 years ago?

All land is stolen, as I’m sure the indigenous tribe in Chile who lived there took it from someone else who was already there. I’m not asking the modern ancestors of the Normans to give me back my ancestor’s Anglo Saxon lands in Northumberland. Nor am I blaming them for it 1,000 years later.

I think your time factor is off. It's not 1,000 years ago, or 200 years ago. In Brazil for example, it's often closer to 'yesterday' - it's happening right now. Imagine a mix of forgery, assault and theft, all of which is blatantly illegal.

See this link from Yale:

Piauí is what Brazilians call a grileiro, a land-grabber — someone who invades Indigenous or public land, or land that simply does not belong to them, before claiming it as their own. They frequently use fake documentation to carry out activities such as illegal logging, mining and real estate speculation.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/land-grabbers-the-growing-ass...

"All land is stolen" is a very lazy statement. Lots of land in this planet is occupied peacefully. It's just that Europeans have been doing it to each other and the rest of the world

In fairness, everyone has been doing it to each other for millennia.

Ahh yes, Europeans are the only ones who’ve done conquest through history. Sounds credible

As the other person said, these events are often much closer. For example, the Selk'Nam genocide happened in the first decade of the 20th century, the company owners behind it were never prosecuted, and the generational wealth have carried on to the present day. Then you have 20th century Latin American dictatorships that also redistributed the lands to their cronies.

According to the World Bank, "indigenous communities safeguard 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity and forests on their land are better maintained", and with less and less unoccupied land available, there are a lot of forces interested in displacing them.

> All land is stolen, as I’m sure the indigenous tribe in Chile who lived there took it from someone else who was already there.

Not necessarily, many tribes in the southern part of South America were first to settle here in the past 12,000 years.

Indigenous people still exist and are actively trying to regain control over lands they never ceded title to.

So ongoing logging and resource projects which preclude indigenous use of the land is active current day colonialism.

It's not some thing that happened 200 years ago it's active current day choices that persist the status quo.

My takeaway was not that we should harvest old-growth (doing so is inherently unsustainable), but that we should not throw out old growth wood when we find it (say for example when tearing down a house)

I know that was the spirit of the writeup, but I think it's important to be mindful of the big picture.

It reminds me of the struggle with the ivory trade. If you want to stop ivory poaching, the logical step is to ban the sale of ivory. Unfortunately, if the demand is still there, this new scarcity will drive up the price and incentivize more aggressive poaching.

The solution is to also target the demand. When billiards had a boom in popularity during the 1860's, a firm put out a $10,000 reward for anyone that could make a better alternative to ivory billiard balls. This led to the invention of the first synthetic polymer. The firm was able to corner the growing billiards ball market while undercutting the demand for ivory. The invention, for better or worse, also created the synthetic/polymer/plastic industry.

The problem is that old growth wood is better. This is why I would like to large scale densified wood product production take off. In theory, you can take a cheap sustainable product and turn it into a superior, stronger, longer lasting alternative.

Glulam is rocketing in popularity, though.

It's a good product, carbon-negative, strong, fire resistant, etc.

Northern Europe already uses it a lot, it's starting to come to North America slowly.

I looked up glulam and it was immediately recognisable as the giant wooden structural beams I've noticed in my local Tesco, so yes, can confirm :) very interesting thing to learn, I'd been struck by how massive they were but never really thought any deeper about it.

Recovering the wood from old houses costs a lot - mostly crew time. Demolition crews do recover the most valuable wood (large beams, planks and panels of rarer wood species that are no longer available). Safety and speed also matter.

Meanwhile the market for the recovered wood is limited. I've never seen someone use second hand wood for framing commercially (and I would suspect trying to do so would cause code or inspection issues). People building for themselves might - but they also often recover the wood themselves too.

Just my observations from watching many houses get demolished (still happening over a decade after earthquake here in Christchurch).

Recovered wood of nice old wood (particularly Rimu) does get used in furniture.

I caught up with an old friend a few weeks ago that just started a new career as a reclaimed wood salesman. Thanks to Pinterest, home improvement shows, etc, demand is at an all time high.

According to my friend, the largest seller of reclaimed wood in the US is a subsidiary of a fencing company that happens to have a significant number of government contracts to fence in federal grazing land. They replace their fencing every ~5 years and then sell the wood as reclaimed at a significant markup. It is technically reclaimed, but he said that they have to spend a lot of time removing those stapled on lumber yard price tags.

Less reputable operations force age lumber in the sun or use hydrogen peroxide, and then just lie about it being reclaimed.

His company mostly sources their wood from the demolition of old barns and warehouses. The senior sales people that trained him said that their job use to be much easier as they could just offer demo companies free removal. Now the DIY crowd is going around offering to buy boards off structures, and owners are starting to view that old eyesore of a barn as a cash cow. They had to bring on more sales people just to do the leg work and negotiate with owners.

Anyway, that convo is what was on my mind when I reacted negatively to the main post.

It is not inherently unsustainable but practically so. You can cut down one thousand year old tree per year for every thousand trees of similar size. I have not done the calculation but maybe a few trees per square mile per year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com