The planet now has more trees than it did 35 years ago (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The planet now has more trees than it did 35 years ago (2018)

psmag.com

95 pointsbookofjoe64 comments

Trees alone aren't enough. For example, ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest are highly balanced ecosystems that are in a perpetual recursive loop. You can't tear them down and then rebuild them by just planting trees. The rainfall the Amazon gets is itself generated by the canopied rainforest. And you can't bring back all the diversity of life that gets lost.

And this goes for any other ecosystem.

And the staggering statistic is that only 30% of the Earth is covered by forest now, a drop from 60% prior to humans going nuts.

Here's also an article that provides some counter arguments to the original paper: https://www.weforum.org/stories/nature-and-biodiversity/plan....

Exactly. I have seen some estimates that if you tear down a forest and then let it re-grow it is estimated to be upwards of 300 years until it starts to resemble the kind of diversity that was originally present.

Tree counts or green coverage is an awfully reductionist statistic. It can use a truthful statistic to imply something that isn't as clean cut as presented.

I think most people reading a headline about tree count would care primarily about deforestation and loss of habitat of indigenous species.

This article isn't about that, and explicitely states it doesn't touch deforestation per se, just sheer tree count, including production targeted tree farms.

TFA:

> While the classification may seem simplistic, powerful conclusions can be drawn from the data, including assessing agricultural expansion, climate-driven expansion and contraction of ecosystems, and forest clearing and recovery.

Make the case that "deforestation" is the primary things we should care about. Start by explaining what it is.

It's just a word to most people, something drilled into them by 90s era Captain planet type environmentalism

Similarly things like species population decline is insignificant and driven primarily through a few highly visible cases. And this ignores the dynamic nature of life. For instance I remember hearing about how great barrier reef will disappear in a few decades. By 2024, AIMS measured the highest coral cover in 38 years of monitoring in the northern and central regions: roughly 40% and 34%, respectively.

Not to say we shouldn't worry about things but it's just naive and overly doomer to believe everything negative even when presented w evidence of the contrary

I see "deforestation" as the destruction of an existing ecosystem.

Convincing people on the internet to care for local ecosystems is a fool's errand. I see your point about cartoon ecologism, but you seem to be jumping way too far in the opposite direction, and only looking at numbers will never tell what's actually happening on the ground. I'm not a diver, and don't know much about the great barrier reef, but the 40% and 34% number don't resonate in any way to me...was the volume of the coral the only point that mattered ?

There is evidence for the benefit of wood production done at a pace and in a way that preserves the forest's balance, but that's also not what the article is about, and explicitely so.

We also use far less farmland than we did in the past, mostly due to the "green revolution" in the 1970s.

Awesome. And remember CO2 is food for plants.

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