The global tree restoration potential (Bastin et al., 2019) | Hacker News Reader

The global tree restoration potential (Bastin et al., 2019)

science.org

I've been listening to the Kinks, what rhymes with global tree restoration potential?

#teamtrees and green walls don't scale.

First things first.. we need soil. Good soil requires large herds of free animals (not CAFOs). We need this. Not for meat agriculture, but for soil and ecological management.

https://blog.ted.com/fighting-the-growing-deserts-with-lives... (video, 2013)

This is a bad take. Of course methods meant for a local region don’t scale everywhere. Different regions require different methods of cultivation, and should be applied in the correct places.

Ideas like syntropic / successional agroforestry are needed to scale a place from having bad soil, to slowly accumulating nutrient density, and accumulate soil health. This then supports a successional planting of trees with an end goal of a mature forest with multiple healthy stories and a healthy loam underneath.

This doesn’t mean you need large herds of free animals (though obviously if you build these forests, you will accumulate more animal biodiversity since they can thrive there), but free roaming animals certainly can help in some circumstances. Though large herds of bipedal monkeys will definitely be needed.

Savory's ideas might work in some contexts (although he hasn't provided scientific evidence of their effectivity when confronted about it, for example, by Goerge Monbiot), but not every environment is a grassland and has evolved to depend on them.

Having said that, we definitely need to improve our soil.

I doubt the typical HN reader is familiar with the acronym CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), at least I wasn't.

Your link seems specific to grassland. How is it relevant to other types of land?

You have the internet and you used it. I'm not your encyclopedia or ChatGPT Wikipedia summarizer. There is no excuse for defending ignorance or the promotion of anti-intellectualism here.

Without healthy prairies, huge tracts of land decay into deserts and that fucking sucks. It's tragic and avoidable, but planting trees is a largely impractical, overly-simplistic strategy promoted by people who don't understand ecology.

Even on grassland I wonder if that’s ideal. Look at the prairie for example - the native tall grasses have massive roots and they don’t need cows chewing on them but they do need to burn every now and then. Most of the biomass and carbon is under ground in these systems

They don’t need cows, but praries evolved with bison. There’s positive effects on carbon sequestration from short, intense grazing, much like a roaming herd of bison would have done. It’s not just removal of grass, it’s also nutrient cycling, enzymes in their spit stimulating additional growth nodes, hooves causing disturbance and pressing seeds into soil, all kinds of neat stuff. That’s NOT the same as cattle on public lands. It’s also not the same as fire, even though fire is awesome.

For reference, I’m a prescribed fire practitioner and manage a chunk of grassland with primitive sheep.

I’m all for bringing more bison back

Bison are rad. Here's where to see them: https://www.fws.gov/refuge/wichita-mountains

It certainly made an impression on a lot of people (myself included), but there's reason to not take it as accurate: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t...

Cattle would be the wrong animal to use in most climates. Bison or herding ungulates. They also need some sort of predators to keep their numbers down.

It's that or let large swaths of the Earth desertify.

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