Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it!
It's by a massive margin, the most common lumber used in construction. Its strength and other properties are well understood and all you have to do is follow the specifications and it performs great.
I mean what would even be the advantage to using other woods for home construction? Using a "stronger" wood means what? You can make your structural members smaller than 2x4? What would be the point? Walls need space for insulation and wires and pipes, there's no good reason to use a more dense wood. And it would still be more expensive! Pine is perfect for what it does because it meets the practical and engineering needs at the least expensive price.
What isn't well suited for it's use?
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2022/06/16/for-the-love-of-p...
I've been woodworking for decades and would never use it for furniture. It moves way too much with the seasons (fine for barns where you can build large expansion joints, but not for my chair), and it doesn't take stain well unless you take additional steps to prepare it beforehand.
Also many/most barns used whatever wood they had available. In my area the insides are mostly cottonwood and the outside is oak.
That's not an argument to use pine. It's an argument to use whatever you have at hand.
This statement works just as well if you replace "pine" with "leaded gasoline".
It's exactly my point that not every material is good for its use. Even ones used in the overwhelming majority of cases -- like leaded gasoline. The ensuing environmental disaster shows it was exactly the wrong choice of material to solve the problem.
Even if people use that argument quite a bit.
The low quality stuff is full of knots, warped (with very high variable humidity- some beams weigh 2x other beams). The high quality stuff is.... not as nice as maple, but certainly it's dense, uniform, and doesn't warp. From what I can tell, it's because they select the high quality stuff, then kiln-dry it and mill it.
Also if you inspect cheap 2x4s, there are often some higher quality pieces (few knots, straight-ish, not too wet) which you can then trim and plane to get decent wood.
But yeah, pine is sort of an industrial product grown fast at scale.
That and the maximised sunlight
Lab / barge-cultured wood products could potentially have really great materials properties that the natural stuff doesn't. Plywood is super useful stuff, and the best is made from more layers. The orientation of the wood fibers is flipped 90 degrees from layer to layer to give its strength in multiple dimensions. The more perfectly uniform the grain of each layer, the better quality the plywood. Voids and grain runouts create a locally weak spot or cosmetic issues. Weak spots generally don't correspond through layers, and the material generally isn't pushed to its theoretical limits in application. And cosmetically, better quality plywood reserves the highest quality layers for the outermost visible layers.
Baltic birch plywood is considered The Good Stuff and is made by essentially peeling a tree that grows pretty straight and pretty uniform. But you can imagine growing a seamless sheet of plywood that is even more perfect. Maybe one or two layers of fibers running one direction, before the next layer is encouraged to flip orientation. The platonic ideal of plywood, without needing to peel trees and stick layers together with glue.
And again, if we get freaky with the cell cultures, you can imagine cool properties where layers take up minerals from sea water that help with e.g. rot resistance or fire resistance. Or even freakier, maybe we figure out how to incorporate synthetic or lab cultured spider silk with our plywood, giving it truly novel material properties.
As I understand it, you’re not taking any significant amount of nutrients when you harvest the trunks of trees and leave the branches behind to replenish the soil.
Controlled burning can also be used to speed up the process. Some species of pine trees actually require fire to reproduce.
There are questions about making the soil more acidic. Pine trees grow better in acidic soil. Correlation is not necessarily causation.
But a tree trunk is more than just lignin. Also it could be more complex than whether you're robbing the soil of nitrogen and phosphorous. There's a lot we don't know about the role of soil microbiota, for instance. I don't have any evidence that it's going to be a problem, but nobody has evidence that it's not going to be a problem either (only that it hasn't yet).
Although I guess this is all orthogonal to whether, once you've harvested the wood by whatever means, you process it into something stronger and denser.
Also, trees sway in the wind.