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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

This is because of the reductionist myth that all organic matter is fungible. It’s always “well we plant new trees, so what’s the problem?”

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>>> Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.

from The River Why

Can’t even have toilet paper without the logging industry. Housing would be pretty savage if we had to build everything out of rocks and mud. I strongly believe that any currently old growth forests should be protected but everything else really is just a crop.

If you consider concrete and cement to be rocks and mud, no, outside of NA, most of the world uses stones and mud just fine.

~~atleast an angry drunk can't punch through my wall~~

Having lived in both constructions, for the American environs, wood-built houses are vastly superior to cement ones.

Wood construction is better insulating, easier to repair, easier overhaul as the times inevitably change, naturally regulates temperature, adapts better to different weathers, flexes more and thus adapts to stress better, requires fewer and less stringent inspections, fails less catastrophically, has a smaller carbon footprint, is cheaper and easier to source, and is easier to transport.

That's interesting, can you elaborate? I was under the impression that the main benefit of wood+sheetrock was cost and speed of construction.

Updated my comment with details

Tl;dr, basically it’s just real cheap.

I've been watching a lot of real estate videos on YouTube, and it boggles my mind that people pay seven, even eight digit figures for houses made of wood. It's obviously rational (or so many people wouldn't do it), but it is really, really hard to drop the prejudice coming from my part of the world that Wooden = Flimsy & Cheap.

Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles because of their extremely low thermal mass. Basically, they heat up quickly and cool down quickly. In most of Europe and North America you want the opposite: a structure that evens out high temperature throughout the day, and radiates warmth at night. Brick, stone, or clay do that very successfully. Think of an old stone church at a warm summer day: it's comfortably cool inside, completely without AC

>Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles

I can't find any research backing this claim. The exact opposite appears to be true. Stone remains cold all winter and hot all summer. And it's expensive to heat and cool.

In addition, wood can be renewable and has a much smaller carbon footprint than mining and quarrying.

I'm still stuck on dirt-crete (concrete made from dirt and/or saw dust) walls after seeing the vibrant aircrete community on YouTube. It looks like an excellent solution for walls. Thermal mass, air entrained, cheap materials, easy to shape.

If your daily high or low temperature is still twenty Kelvin below or above a comfortable temperature, insulation is far more important than thermal mass.

That is good for temperate climates in the right season when there is a big difference between day and night. It's a terrible design for consistently hot or cold places. i.e. Norway in the winter you're running some kind of heating (coupled with insulation) around the clock. A large thermal mass would just be constantly sapping that energy away. In Spanish summers a large thermal mass just means you don't get to take advantage of the slight cooling you get at night.

> Wood construction [...] requires fewer and less stringent inspections

I would expect the opposite. I don't have to worry about the concrete of my home rotting because of a water infiltration, or being eaten by termites.

Rotting is a lot easier to spot than structural failures and cracks slowly building inside concrete walls. Wood beams can be repaired more easily and individually than concrete if they do rot. Finally, modern woods are less prone to rotting due to treatment.

> It’s always “well we plant new trees, so what’s the problem?”

This is a perfectly reasonable response to complaints that are about the overall amount of forest rather then about "this particular forest is beautiful and unique and shouldn't ever be touched... just like every other forest".

Not really, secondary forest is known to be less diverse in terms of both plant, animal and fungi species.

It's not just that you can't exactly recreate the original, it's that what you're recreating is often just a shadow of the ecosystems that were destroyed.

Better a shadow than nothing, of course, but better not to have destroyed it in the first place.

That's one of those lies I suspect the tellers don't actually believe, they just expect the masses to be uneducated enough to fall for it. I have to give them credit though because it seems to be working for them

James Scott writes at length about Germany's experience with "scientific forestry" in an early chapter of Seeing Like A State.

I highly recommend the book to ... well, everyone.

What would be a better option than wood for construction? Yes now days we have other products I suppose but wood previously and arguable long into the future is simply the best option. Forests for the history of man kind burn down and grow back and logging though could outpace the growing back is vital to society as it exists.

I think it'd be a false dichotomy to suggest that if we weren't clear cutting rainforests and old growth forests with abandon we couldn't have wood for construction and would need to "build everything out of rocks and mud". I think that it's likely possible to harvest wood for construction sustainably and responsibly, but what we're doing today isn't that.

Well where do you think we would get the wood from? Where I am from, considered the logging capital of the world, it is sustainable. We also have very regulated industry that is managed by environmental bodies separate from the logging owners. People are so emotional about trees being cut down but I believe it is much like those who say oil industry is bad but continue to use products like plastic wrap and buy cheap plastic made fabrics in their clothing just as logging means housing, toilet paper, the boxes your items are shipped in, the paper we write on, the pallets your appliances are shipped on and on and on. Wood is a vital part of society like it or not and being emotional and disagreeing with that point is equal to head in the sand mentality. Perhaps where you are from logging hasn’t traditionally been managed well but where I am from it is vital to the economy and management is absolutely critical that it remains long term viable business. Even after over a hundred years of logging in my area I am still surrounded by endless forests that one could get lost in and never found. That is not by fluke it is by the fact that like any other crop, forests are too a crop.

> forests are too a crop.

“When you understand that under capitalism a forest has no value until it's cut down, you begin to understand the root of our ecological crises.”

- Adam Idek Hastie

Density and quality of construction lumber has noticeably dropped over the past century. I doubt that there are anywhere that logging is managed in a regenerative way, just “sustainable” to the degree in which we measure that.

if anything is fungible, surely mushrooms are...

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