Hacker News Reader

Comment by ortusdux | Hacker News Reader

Florida has similar tax breaks for cattle grazing, and Washington has them for managed forests.

Managed forests are greenwashing. The term itself is a ridiculous illusion. It's like this bee article - it gives a process and metric by which things are improving while ignoring more general collapse that those same economic processes are generating

How so?

idk what the previous commenter means by it, but to me, a forest is more than a collection of trees that are planted in a grid, ready for clearcutting in a decade or so. A forest is an entire ecosystem that takes decades to build without the disruption of human intervention. Some of these "managed forests" are little more than tree farms, lacking the wildlife and diversity that comes with natural forests. Monoculture tree farming does not create a diverse ecosystem and the benefits that come from that.

It depends on what you're trying to do - some of those tax breaks are because the land is taxed "as if it grew corn" normally, but if people choose to grow trees you want to tax it at a lower rate, because trees are a lower profit crop.

If you're trying to preserve actual forest, you want to do something more like the land trusts that have come into existence (which already exclude the land from taxes usually anyway).

Yes though it's forgiving to say that it does not create benefits instead of that it destroys those needs without making up for them

Reply on news.ycombinator.com