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Comment by ivm | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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