What a waste, turning a forest into decks!
We need to make sure the wood is responsibly harvested as much as possible but turning trees into part of a home is a actually pretty much inline with how nature works in general.
A redwood forest is, on the scale of a human lifespan, a non-renewable resource.
> The trees being harvested commercially today are only a few decades old.
The province of British Columbia publishes figures on old growth logging. They're cutting down ~40,000 hectares per year. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/old-growth-l...
But, you know, public opinion changes, policies change and, as it turns out, they have learned a lot about the ecosystem from studying how the clear-cut areas regrow.
Suburban housing boom, building more homes is one good way to put that into long term storage while reducing cost of housing and improving our carbon footprint as suburban homes can last for a century.
We can also genetically modify trees to grow faster and bigger.
Forests are good at carbon capture but forests are intricate biotopes with different plants serving different functions and debris from dead trees fulfilling an integral role.
Building more homes is definitely important but suburbia is probably one of the worst ways to do this as sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is. It also assumes those homes will last for centuries when most American houses are torn down and rebuilt on much shorter cycles than that. And that doesn't even get into how building more homes generates emmissions first.
Forests doesn't need humans.
I think this is the main issue here. They redefined "tree farms" as "forests" a long time ago, so they can put an equal sign between them.
A forest is an ecosystem. A tree farm is not.
You cannot regrow a forest.
Now that I recognize tree farms, I no longer feel quite as bad when I see then clear-cut. They were sick trees that were destined to be cut down.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/the-wrong-kind...
(all the trees you see in the guardian article are tree-farm trees, not just the ones that are clear-cut)
https://www.savetheredwoods.org/wp-content/uploads/cr-unders...
The clear-cut gives a nice cross view into the trees. It's a mess in there.. not much green. It's pretty clear the total available surface area in a natural forest is larger. The forest/nature/plants all optimize themselves to have as much surface area as possible. Loggers optimize for the greatest number of tree trunks and fewest number branches.
In my experience, degradation of wood-framed buildings comes down to one thing: water ingress. And that is independent of how "dense" the studs are. Old growth timber will rot just as quickly as new timber if water gets in, and I suspect new-growth wood will last just as long as old-growth if water is kept out.
I suspect that wood density, tree health, warping of lumber, and the resulting new ingresses of water could all be correlated. I'd love to know more if anyone knows more details.
Water penetration into a building is 100% down to the exterior cladding and waterproofing system, it has absolutely nothing to do with the material used for the skeleton of the building. Cladding is done with traditional plywood, which is infinitely better than old-growth diagonal planking used a century ago. Waterproofing is via plastic wraps like HouseWrap or more recently the Zip system where the waterproofing is integral with the sheathing.
Houses today may be less durable than houses 100 years ago (although there's huge survivorship bias in that claim), but if they are it will come down to tract houses being built to a very low standard of workmanship. It has nothing to do with old-growth versus new-growth timber.
Personally, I do wish we could strike a better balance in the US. I don't think we want these trees entirely constituting the "forests".
The way I understand it, a major difference between the two construction styles is that stone is wet and wood is dry.
Stone shouldn't be sealed (hence the notion that stone walls can't be painted) because this traps the humidity and erods the stone. A major downside of this is that this means stone houses are more prone to trapping humidity, especially with better insulation, and grow mold.
Wood on the other hand must be sealed so you can use forms of insulation that are highly efficient but very susceptible to damage from humidity. A major downside of this is that the outer layers essentially act as a water barrier and even things like driving a dowel into an exterior wall can cause damage over time from water entering the wall via condensation on the screw.
Traditional wood frame construction in my country used wooden beams along with loam or stone. Because these buildings often expose wood to the elements and are generally wet because of the stone and loam there is an inherent risk of the wood decaying over time and I've seen restorations that removed almost everything but the wood frame to remove integral beams. There are many very old wood and loam/stone buildings left in my area but there are probably many more that had to be either torn down or stripped down to the bones for restoration.
What I am saying is that it is possible to grow "that kind of forest" if you have money in much shorter time. Tree farming is one way to make the whole thing profitable (and hence sustainable) but it can be designed to resemble a natural forest with sufficient biodiversity and so on.
For example we can take a deforested region in Haiti or India or Zimbabwe, grow tree farms on say 10K acres of land and reserve another 10K to grow a more traditional forest. We don't have to wait 2500 years to grow sufficiently large trees which can host wide variety of species of fauna. Even for smaller shrubs and such we can do enough research to grow them faster with help of better irrigantion, enriched soil etc.
One of the reason why this does not happen already is because we have reduced the entire topic to zero sum between normal people and tree people.
> sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is.
I am not sure why such statement should be made. Large homes with huge backyard offers great quality of life in ways the densely packed animal like city human farms can't.
People don’t do that because they don’t really want old growth redwoods specifically and or don’t generally care about sustainability. However, setting up a trust to manage some forest while maintaining an income stream is probably viable.
Humans' hand is always visible: the stumps of cut-down trees, and the (mostly, if not complete) absence of fallen trees. Besides the odd trail used for vehicles. And trash, wood chips, markings on trees, etc. Such signs remain visible for centuries.
Natural forests are littered with fallen trees, which serve as food for sapplings that take their place (nurse logs). And trees don't fall with a clean cut: they are ripped from the ground in a storm, split by a lightning strike, or they die, rot & come down in pieces.
Doesn't take an expert to see what's what.
I seriously doubt you’re going to notice century old wood chips and markings on trees. Similarly large branches would look like fallen trees in other forests.
A given section may not have seen anyone in 30+ years, others would have more noticeable impact but you’d have trouble seeing the logging vs all the trees. There would be remnants of trails and even some fresh ones, but that doesn’t specifically imply logging.
Yip, folks got greedy and cut down the redwoods. They use to be common, running all the way from south of San Francisco to well into Oregon. What remains is a patch work.
"Today, only 5 percent of the original old-growth coast redwood forest remains, along a 450-mile coastal strip." [1]
> You could use old growth redwoods as a renewable resource, you just cut down ~1/500th per year across a large enough area
Hence to do that, we're probably talking nobody cutting down another red wood for a good 500 years. Considering Europeans have been at it for only about 200, and have nearly cut down all of the redwoods... ...
I would urge anyone to go visit these trees. It's truly soul-touching, they are something to be protected, if only for that.
[1] https://www.savetheredwoods.org/redwoods/coast-redwoods/#
If they become decks, paper, or other useful products in between, reducing usage of plastics things which emit carbon, so much the better.
Convince me otherwise.
Fully grown trees are mostly carbon neutral, growing trees on other hand are capturing carbon. Perhaps we can cut down large trees, coat them with very durable recycled plastic and simply store them on coastal line.
Canada and USA can heavily subsidize logging industry where
1. They have 100 year plan to plant and cut trees.
2. Wood gets exported to poorer countries where deforestation is a problem.
IMO old growth forests should be protected, but at the same time we should plant new industrial forests as much as possible, and harvest them for building material. Old agricultural land that is no longer used for farming is ideal for that.
Likewise planting trees to be used for industry instead of materials with worse emissions is good and planting forests is good but the two are largely unrelated as the kind of forest you want for restoration projects is different from the kind you can use for logging.
It's a bit like how there were news headlines about bees becoming endangered followed by tons of startups selling honey bees for greenwashing when honey bees are specifically the one species of bees that is nowhere near endangered because they are used at industrial scales.
We need to protect old growth forests but also expand them, because they're vital habitats that help protect biodiversity and maintain plant matter for sustainable carbon capture. We also need industrial wood plantations to produce wood we can use instead of more harmful building materials. We also need to reduce the overall need for building materials, e.g. by investing in long-term sustainable housing projects rather than McMansions with a lifespan of less than one generation.
Ideally all that stuff would be sent to a facility where it can be properly sequestered long term, but most of it probably won't.
Sure, you can soak up some water temporarily, but eventually the water comes back out.
That's a serious question. I have no clear sense of what happens in landfills. For all I know, they might be the new fossil fuel reserves in the year 30,000.
Quite a lot of rainfall over land originates as transpiration from forests, for example; they're a key part of the water cycle, holding and releasing water which would otherwise just run into the sea.
Likewise, a lot of species depend on healthy first habitat. Clear cut all the trees, and you lose all the species that depends on them. And all the species in adjacent ecosystems which rely on the forests.
This isn't to say that tree planting and harvesting can't be a part of carbon management strategies, but that it must be done judiciously. Clear cutting everything and burying it all is as short-sighted as, say, spending a century dumping leaded CO2 fumes into the atmosphere.
Who's going to pay you to cut down trees and bury them? Especially since they are considered an incredibly valuable asset by everyone (for very different reasons), from the environmentalist to the unrepentant capitalist.
One thing worth mentioning though is that people often forget that the trees themselves are not the only aspect of CO2 when it comes to forestry. So-called "natural forests" are apparently much more effective at sequestering carbon, due to the dense web of life contained within them – much more so than the monoculture forests that tend to get planted these days.
> Convince me otherwise
Why?
That sometimes leads to solutions, improvements, or startups, and if nothing else, better civic society and better personal choices.
First, let's consider tree farms, modern mono-cultures. Please look at google maps at anywhere in the northwest, and you'll see it looks like checkerboards. This is not satellite imagery being stitched together, that is what it looks like. So much forest have been cut and regrown several times over.
These tree farms - they're dense, bio-engineer to have small branches that are shed early. The trees grow like an overgrown bush, the canopy is almost exclusively at the top 10% layer. The effective area for photosynthesis is that of a field covered in a thick layer of bushes. Compare that to a field of conifers that have far more photosynthesis area on them overall, it extends from the top of the tree to the even the bottom half, in addition to the tree being taller. In a natural forest trees will fall and create gaps, allowing for more use of the vertical space. A natural forest is effectively a series of vertical gardens.
Next, let's consider tree rings. I don't buy the idea that a few saplings are going to do anywhere near the same activity as a 200 foot redwood. The amount of carbon in a tree ring for a 1000 foot tree is likely astounding. A new layer of bark on something that has a 10-40 foot diameter. (Red woods are amazing trees)
Next, it takes a good 30 years for that regrowth cycle to happen. What's more, humans have been doing that round-the-clock in North America since Europeans arrived. The "2nd" growth is like the 6th to 10th time we have been through this. The forests that have been managed like this are not great (they have low recreational value, they burn like crazy, they clearly don't have the same mass of green material that would be doing photosynthesis (so I don't buy that the carbon sink activity is lower), they are crap habitat for animals). More so, the wood from these forests is poor, it's soft, warps easily, not strong.
Back to the point of the 30 year cycle.. if our game plan is to bury a bunch of trees and regrow them in 30 years, and repeat that once or twice - the climate goals are not going to be achieved.
Another reason - small little trees burn easily. Trees need to get to a good height before they are "fire-proof". Trees in the NW drop their lower branches and their trunks grow thick bark allowing for the undergrowth to burn off & leaving the tree alone. This is where you can also get your rapidly growing "new forest". What's more though, if you cut down a forest, trees that are 10-20 years old are more akin to kindling, you wind up with a mega blaze. Where once there was a forest, you get a Savannah. This is happening in california, places that burned so hot, several feet of soil are burned, those forests are truly gone. If anything gets a foot hold again in those areas in the next decade, it'll all burn again before it's all big enough to survive a fire.
> If they become decks, paper, or other useful products in between, reducing usage of plastics things which emit carbon, so much the better.
The research from the "other side" notes that these "useful" products often go back into the atmosphere within a couple decades. [1] Compare that to the forest, which naturally buries its own trees as they die. Leaves fall, they form new soil along with other fallen trunks. Not to mention that trees do this on time scales of centuries, rather than decades. Point being, over time, the elevation of the forest floor grows. In sum, this idea of burying trees - it's already happening naturally.
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08022022/do-young-trees-s...
For completeness, here is a reference for "young trees" sucking up less carbon, complete with a payed-for google ad ranking: https://www.ncasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NCASI22_For...
Maybe the mentality would be different if we haven't ef-uped our planed by exploiting oil to drive oversized gas-guzzlers to the sprawling single-family oversized homes? but no... better keep ruining beautiful nature...
Continuous clear cutting is bound to dry out the soil eventually.
https://theconversation.com/british-power-stations-are-burni...
https://www.forest2market.com/blog/pacific-northwest-log-mar...
But old growth forests don't. Not on human scale, at least.