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/#