A healthy old-growth forest is maybe 100 trees per acre.
A 'naturally regrowing' forest may be 400 trees per acre. They're scrub trees, none of the ever getting very large, unhealthy and scraggly and broken by every storm.
It takes maybe a century of trees dying, giving one of their cohort a chance to get ahead of the others, then shading them and 'thinning the herd' until you have a stable population. Then, they're still not very healthy because they 'grew from scrub'.
They have to then die of natural causes one at a time and be replaced by a single healthy one. Maybe another 50 years. Finally you have a stable healthy forest.
Or, you can just plant 100 trees per acre in a grid. And mow the volunteers until you have what you want. 20 years maybe.
(disclaimer, I am part of a Climate&Energy R&D lab)
The goal is not really to produce a set of big trees, but to maximize the amount of carbon you can suck out of the atmosphere per year, heavily weighted to the near future. As a result, producing an old growth forest is not the correct metric (if you are optimizing purely for climate).
A stable forest (from purely a climate perspective) is also not the right optimization. Ideally, you'd lock away the carbon outside of the biosphere, instead of letting it get recycled.
Doesn't hurt explicitly mentioning the biodiversity crisis is, just like the climate one, also a pressing issue. And when it comes to solutions revolving around forests (or a collection of trees if you wish), it's the area where both clash: optimizing for one will be less ideal for the other. Personally I feel like in such cases it would be wise to strive for a solution which is sliglty in favor of biodiversity, just because for the climate there are a number of other solutions which have a larger potential effect.
I'm saddened that the concern over carbon in the atmosphere seems to eclipse the biodiversity crisis in the public eye. In my opinion biodiversity is a far more pressing issue and loss of biodiversity is much harder to recover.
We have a mixed redwood, pine and misc forest. What do we do to (1) get rid of the non-native species, and (2) capture lots of carbon in the process?
We’d like to make sure the redwoods survive. They’re all under 100 years old, so some are big, but not massive, and we have lots of seedlings.
I’m worried if we cut all the pine down at once, it’ll ruin the microclimate. It’s 10-20F cooler in the forest than in the field, with much more water from fog drip, etc.
What species of pine are they? Pines tend to grow fast but are short lived but I would only remove them if they are >40cm dbh. For the rewood the only thing you could do would be to thin and remove competition if there are trees to close, you could also prune if you want. (I study forestry science in New Zealand where we grow a lot of Californian species)
Have you considered something different for climate; mass production of climate change resistant (ie heat/acid) photosynthetic plankton and releasing to ocean?
i'm always a skeptic of muddling too much with nature (as opposed to just getting out of natures way and letting it do it's thing) Maybe its because I've read too much science fiction, but the first scenario that pops into my head is that we engineer some super plankton that grows out of control and smothers the ocean, not letting light filter down, and basically killing all ocean life. Kinda like a green ice-9 if you will...
A comforting thought for this sort of thing is that it would have happened naturally already, if it were possible at all. We can assume that we're broadly in a 'low energy state', and there's no tiny change that will cause a massive permanent shift. Similarly, Ice-9 can't be real or Earth would be covered in it, and we weren't going to set the atmosphere on fire at Trinity because Earth's already been hit by huge asteroids that didn't.
So sending in logging trucks, tractor saws, and burning all that fossil fuel to "reduce atmospheric carbon" only to have weakling brush landscapes that easily burn is the solution?
I don't know about Mother Nature, but silicate rich (or carbonate rich) rocks weather by sucking C02 out of the atmosphere (or oceans) and it can apparently be accelerated by spreading crushed rocks on fields or beaches.
I wonder how many tons of biomass in foliage regrows every single year. All that plant matter is primarily carbon by mass, and most of it probably comes from the atmosphere.
I came here to say basically this. I'm not a scientist but I live in a heavily forested and logged area with 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation forests (ie, logged 1-3 times in the last 150 years or so).
Here's my observation:
- old growth forests are beautiful and amazing, but old
- forests that are treated as a renewable resource are productive due to appropriate maintenance (thinning, etc)
- forests that were replanted but not maintained are unhealthy and take more than 50-100 years to cycle back to a healthy natural forest
- left alone, on the west coast anyway, there is a typical cycle of fast lived quick growing -> slow growing long living species that takes 100's of years to get back to where it was.
I recently built a house on a property that was 3rd gen but abandoned (last logged 30-40 years ago). We wanted to keep as many trees as possible but because the land was never maintained most of the trees were thin and had parasites. The "widow makers" had to go. You could definitely see the progression of different species doing their thing at their own paces. Alders were mostly gone, hemlocks and firs were starting to fall and die and the cedars were starting to take over, but most of those were still young (but healthy).
That's a gross over generalisation. There are many forests that will naturally regrow into healthy forests in 100 years with reasonably high stocking and large trees, I was in one a few weeks ago.
Not sure you'll see great results in every environment. I am not an expert but I can walk in the forests of the northeast and see things don't look super great and we won't ever see old growth like we had here. My neighbor is a 90 year old tree farmer, he's got an ag PHD and we sometimes talk about how the land has changed here (he's been living the same place for around 85 years).
On my desk in front of me sits one of the two viable American chestnut nuts I've found this year from a (barely) surviving tree of the blight. 100 years ago there were over 4 billion of these trees, now it's assumed that maybe 100 or so large examples exist inside the original range ravaged by the blight. There's no point in planting it, the nut I have has likely hybridized with the Chinese chestnuts we have nearby and it's almost certain it would also die from the blight before it reached maturity. Right now there's plans to introduce an engineered variant with a gene from wheat to stop the effects of chestnut blight, but it needs approval: https://www.acf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Newhouse-f201...
The undergrowth of the forests here are covered by tearthumb (mile-a-minute) and stiltgrass, and I can see dozens of dead ash trees covered in the zigzag scars caused by the emerald ash borer. The large elms were all wiped out before I was born, but many of the dead ones were still standing. We have fast growing tress in the form of things like tree of heaven (aka ghetto palm, which lives maybe 70 years at most), but that's now attracted the latest imported hell: the spotted lanternfly. Not far from me there's huge numbers of eastern hemlock dying off from woolly adelgid, which is manageable but at great expense and effort. What we could plant and have regrow 100 years ago just wouldn't work now for these and many other reasons that much better qualified people should write about.
Ah Dutch Elm Disease! We had a fine old elm in the front yard, a swing on a chain from a large branch with a pit under it from generations of kids scuffing in the dust. Beautiful.
Then Dutch Elm Disease came through Iowa. Our tree lost a lot of new growth, the next year grew a million suckers from the trunk looking like a furry tree, then was dead. The stump when we cut it down could hold all the kids sitting around it (big farm family).
Years later I went to California to school, then bought a house on 12th St in San Jose. Beautiful mature trees lining the street! 60 ft high, a green corridor!
Then they started dropping branches, destroying awning and car hoods. The next year the affected ones grew a million suckers on the truck like huge furry sculptures.
Unknown to me, they were 'Siberian Elm'. The Dutch Elm disease had reached the west coast! It had taken nearly 20 years to travel halfway across the US.
The city removed them all, and it became a sun-blasted street with no relief from the heat. Gone the tunnel of green. Gone all the Elm in the Western US.
Its a system. Clear cutting a balanced, self regulsting and niche efficient ecosysten and replacing it with grids, monocultures, etc is why we got to the problems we are in today.
We can certainly jump start the process, but the end result needs to be nature as it was before we broke it, or as close as possible. Its the path to an anti fragile, sustainable, biodiverse planet.
There was a horror movie that came out a year or two ago, involving haunted woods or somesuch, and I can't tell you anything more about the movie because all I could process was the fact that the 'forest' they showed was trees planted on like a 4 or 5 foot center, in perfect rows. Math says that's somewhere ~2000 trees per acre, which I think is the real horror story.
I'm not sure how you'd even log that. Every tree that dies is going to kill a few of its neighbors, until there are giant triangles of dead trees.
I'm not entirely sure what your objection is here, but if it's that they're too close together I encourage you to visit some of the productive forests in Western Canada. Trees growing (whether naturally or planted) 4-5' on center is pretty normal.
Tree planters put in trees about one every pace. They don't all survive, but they're not all supposed to. As many make it to maturity as the light allows.
I think the objection was that a "haunted forest" sounds like it should be something old and natural and tangled and wild (think the Old Forest near the beginning of Lord of the Rings).
"Haunted pine plantation" just doesn't have the same vibe to it.
With dense planting of that sort you will thin (and get some natural thinning) so that your final crop will be much lower, usually 300-1000 stems/ha compared to 5000+.
All I can figure is, I know that there's a tree harvesting device that picks the trunk up vertically and cuts it to lengths before dropping it.
Maybe there's a model that's twice as wide as the distance between the rows, and they're going to take out every second row and every other tree. But then it's driving over trunks and leaving an awful lot of logs on the ground behind it...
And in a drought overly dense forest can die wholesale due to insufficient water in the waterbed to support the forest density. See e.g. CA. This is "natural" in the sense that this is how trees have grown since time immemorial. But it's also undesirable if there are humans living nearby.
The 'healthiest forest is one with different ages of stands mixed throughout.
Though, this all depends on where you are and what the natural disturbance type and frequency is as well as the natural age of the trees.
Speaking of coastal western old growth, the kind a lot of people think of, giant cedars and stuff. Old growth gets old, like thousands of years old because typically the disturbance types would be windfall and infrequent wildfires from lightning.
These events would cause patches where giant trees fall and crush neighbour trees, fires burn out patches and new growth starts. This means throughout a natural forest you'll get patches with different ages.
This creates the ideal situation for wildlife habitat and other things. New growth forest, not planted in rows as other commenters mentioned, tends to also have a lot of shrubs and underbrush that get killed off in old growth forests. These types of canopies are great habitat for birds and such, they provide forage for deer and bears. While having surviving, intact old growth stands in the forests provides different kinds of habitat. It's also extremely nutrient rich from advanced fungal colonies and hundreds of years of built up decomposing material.
These nutrients are passed from these older trees along mycelium networks to the younger trees and so on.
A healthy ecosystem in general will have a mix of succession stages in a given area. This provides the maximum benefit to life in those ecosystems.
Competition is so fierce that they all grow spindly and weak. A strong storm could flatten the entire grove. It dies back and regrows constantly, no tree ever getting very large. Or rarely. With accompanying crash and surge in forest animal populations. Unstable.
Anecdotal, but I had around 40 trees harvested from my property last year as part of a larger forestry job on an adjacent property. These were mostly mature Poplar along with a few middle aged Black Walnut.
At one point I asked the forester what I could do to help promote healthy regrowth of the forest. His response was that I didn’t need to do anything and that “the best way to grow a new tree [in a forest] is to cut an old one down”. This honestly seemed a bit like nonsense to me at the time, but watching the way things have already started to rebound has been pretty incredible.
I started counting new seedlings this summer but ended up giving up after I had counted more than 200 poplar seedlings within a relatively small area. Obviously all of those won’t survive to maturity, but it’s given me a new appreciation for just how effective forests are at regenerating themselves when harvesting is done responsibly.
Conifer trees take a lot longer to establish naturally. It often takes a cycle of aspen or poplar trees, followed by a fire, for conifers to start growing and thriving. I don't know how long that typically takes, but I think it could easily be a human lifetime.
Planting conifer seedlings can result in a young forest in as little as 20 years. Typically this is done to ensure a future harvest for the softwood lumber industry. Logging enterprises are the primary planters of trees in British Columbia, as they are required by law to reforest land that has been deforested.
The trees that are planted are typically some mixture of pine and spruce in the interior dry regions, or a mixture of hemlock, spruce, and cedar in wet or coastal regions.
This results in a somewhat synthetic forest that isn't really like a natural forest, but grows quickly. The trees that I planted when I was 23 are likely over 4 meters tall now.
Source: I worked as a tree planter for 3 seasons, grew up in a pulp & paper town, have known a lot of forestry people.
I think Poplar and Aspen are particularly notorious for this. I just had to cut down a 50 foot Aspen in a small-ish backyard because it had started rotting and was becoming unsafe. No one warned us what was going to happen next. Within the next few months at least 50 suckers have popped up in our yard and -- worse -- our unsuspecting neighbor. As much as we loved the tree and were sad to see it go, this feels like an invasion.
Do you have deer? In my parents yard when trees drop there is a huge competetion to grow up in the clearing. but the deer swoop in and the maples and oaks don’t have a chance. The pines and holly trees take off.
12000 years ago that land was bare mud and rock devoid of topsoil. Huge tracts of today's forests stand on what was stripped, clearcut land 100 years ago when wood was a primary heating fuel.
Diversity and self balancing of ecosystem are quite important, mono-cultures can do more damage than good but on the other side, were have problem of unchecked climate change and we are running out time (at best we have 10 more years).
To have any fighting chance we would need to plant 1 trillion trees in next 2 years, significant task considering how much is done up to this point.
Project "trillion trees" exist since 2006
"... until 22 Feb 2020 13,638,907,054 trees have been registered around the world. That looks like an amazing achievement; in 14 years, the number of trees planted is almost two times the size of the human population. Unfortunately, that is not remotely enough as in comparison with the goal of 1,200,000,000,000 trees that is 1.14%. With the same speed, we would need 1232 years to finish the project."
Current farmed count of exotic trees in NZ is a bit more than 500 million by my calcs.
Figures from Internet: 1.7 million hectares of exotics planted in NZ. 300 stems per hectare at ~30yrs old once thinned. 1000 stems per hectare when planted.
> (1989) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
> He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
That happened. It is no longer plausible for us to hold temperatures to 1.5C, which means that we will lose the polar ice cap, and greenland will slowly melt. The weather in the Northern hemisphere will consequently become chaotic and unlike any weather since we developed agriculture.
The thing everyone misinterprets is that there is no hard threshold beyond which things cannot get any worse. Even though the warming that is now locked in was considered the end of the world before, and will have catastrophic effects on the world, it is still worth fighting to keep it from getting even worse.
The worst case scenarios from a "business as usual" rate of emissions growth would in a few hundred years have mankind isolated to a few extremes of latitude as the only places left where the outdoor temperatures won't kill us.
I have no idea if we've hit the point of no return or not, but it's gotten exceedingly clear that we're already seeing the effects of climate change and that they are accelerating. Fires in California, the Amazon, Oregon, Washington. Record high temperatures in various places all over the world. Massive shifts in storm patters, etc.
I have not meant to sound apocalyptic, just wanted to say that after that time frame natural positive feedback loop of CO2 will take over and there is not chance of reversing, at that point it is big unknown.
But it will be very difficult for billions to survive as crops will start failing on regular bases, floods etc...
Totally agree we're going into uncharted territory, but does CO2 have a feedback loop like you say? The thermal forcing function is logarithmic, and a hotter earth means a technically wetter and perhaps greener earth, at least in the near-term.
I have no doubt we're all in for a wild ride but I think we know significantly less than forecasting doom for certain.
I think issue is desertification, and spikes in temperatures causing plants to get into state of shock. Some tree species are very susceptible to temperature change, so they can suddenly die.
Also, trees except being CO2 deposits are huge deposits of water, so tree evaporation draws more rain, and there is entire feedback cycle of water, so it is not simple as "more heat more rain as 2/3 of planet is water", as by same logic in deserts would be rain all the time.
It is interesting how clouds form as well, as they need small particles, basically seeds to form...
The CO2 part is easier to predict than nature's response, it's also the part that we humans have more control over. Part of the problem with assuming nature will do its thing is that it could take much longer for nature to sort out than what our short lifespans can reasonably feel comfortable with.
Agreed fully, although in media usually mention planet in danger, planet is fine, few million years now and then and there will be life again flourishing on the planet, but we do not know what/how will that life look like. Issue is that our race and ecosystems as we know it - are in danger.
I think the most interesting datapoint to have come from global covid lockdowns is just how little the world is contributing to greenhouse gases compared to china.
Just wondering, before the pandemic broke, was each countries' accounting of their co2 emissions in dispute? In other words, if you summed up every country's estimate and compared it to actual global co2 levels, was there a huge mismatch? I'm hesitant to take the tweet at face value, judging by the other posts the twitter user made.
yeah the author isn't very credible but the data is sourced and the point seems to stand as far as I can tell. The sources do not seem to be contested as far as I can tell.
>but the data is sourced and the point seems to stand as far as I can tell.
Doesn't that describe most pseudoscience/conspiracy posts though? They rarely make up data outright, but instead they cherrypick data that fits their theory. This is why I asked if this theory was already a thing before the pandemic. If it's really the case that China (or any other major emitter) is underreporting their emissions, you'd think that someone at a reputable institution would have raised the alarm about the inconsistency in the past two decades. The lack of this is a reason to doubt the validity of this, at least to a casual observer.
With regards to actual explanations, the twitter thread provides many:
conspiracy theory? As I understand it this is merely measuring data and comparing it to previous measurements. Either the data is wrong or it isn't - there's no need to complicate things with conspiracy theories or anything else
That’s because western leaders were more than happy to let China manufacture things ‘over there’ so we could wash our hands clean of the environmental damage our consumer choices were contributing to.
Clearly they liked fewer complaints about environmental concerns because it wasn’t happening where the citizens could see it. In principal they were smart enough to understand the concept of outsourcing pain.
What you mentioned is just a side-effect bonus if you want to call it that.
> That’s because western leaders were more than happy to let China manufacture things ‘over there’ so we could wash our hands clean of the environmental damage
Just saying that's not the driver. Not even close. Demand for cheap goods was the driver for the West and the fact that Chinese policies teed up super cheap supply via their policies is the story.
So I don't think your comment isn't accurate. But it would be accurate if you said our western leaders were more than happy to keep the flow of cheap goods going because it was a favorable arrangement and it had a nice side effect of not having to deal with environmental cleanup or pushback.
If the cost of goods was the same in the west, the west would surely deal with environmental issues in exchange for the jobs and tax revenue.
No one is going to be elected with the platform of increasing costs so the populace consumes less in order to save the planet. Certainly not 20 to 50 years ago.
And before that the predictions were for a mini ice age.
Frankly I have very little faith in these 'projections', whether it is for global warming, or presidential races. I think these are better thought of management techniques in the here and now, intended to achieve a present-day objective, eg increase fear, get consent to take more taxes, stuff like that.
I think if all you go by are headlines that press on the outlier events then you'll probably be in perpetual awe of how wrong science is. Comets are consistently flying by earth and always have some small chance of collision. Doesn't mean the science is wrong, but the headlines probably still touted the possibility. With climate change, it was always more in the realm of probability that larger events would be later down the road and we would see more gradual change (like we are now!), rather than the doom and gloom possibilities presented in many documentaries.
We can't even accurately state what the weather will be tomorrow let alone a 10 day forecast. Anything after 3 days is just solid guessing. 10 years is just someone looking to make headlines
==No matter where 2020 ends up in the standings, it will be warm enough to knock 1998 out of NOAA’s top 10. When that happens, all of the 10 warmest years in their records will have occurred since 2005—and the top seven will have occurred since 2014—Sánchez-Lugo says.==
Yeah, at this point climate change has kinda become nuclear fusion – always 10 years away from the end.
Not that we shouldn't do anything, because climate change is real. It would just be nice if people could stop being so fire and brimstone about stuff that turns out not to be the end of the world after all (like ACB getting confirmed to SCOTUS). The society that cried wolf.
I mean, Barrett was sworn in less than a week ago. Regardless of how you feel about her, it's far too early to make any kind of judgement about the implications of her confirmation.
I'll bite, how about all the dire predictions that Trump would start a war with North Korea? Or that he was going to crash the economy right away?
I am someone who does believe that we are having an impact on the global temp. and I do think we need to do something about it.
Screaming the sky is falling is not helping.
Stonewalling any other source of power except Solar and Wind is not helping.
Suggesting that we cut back farmland drastically, in a move that would kill a bunch of people is not helping.
Telling people to give up cars and planes is not helping.
We need to work to come up with solutions that will work for everyone, not just San Fransisco, New York, Amsterdam. We need solutions for Valdosta, GA, Snowshoe, WV, Salmon, ID. These solutions can not be "Just move out of dying places". That is just as bad as telling coal miners to learn to code.
That means that different regions will have to have different standards, something we have not seem to come to grip with here in the US.
There is no possible way the implications will be anywhere near the level of dire that you'd believe after reading the news articles and seeing people's internet comments and tweets.
I mean, people are talking about an overturn of Roe v. Wade, somehow failing to realize that RvW was ruled on by a SCOTUS with a conservative majority.
If Obergefell gets overturned (it won't), an actual law can be passed this time, hell maybe even a constitutional amendment, since nearly a supermajority of Americans outright support gay marriage.
The concern is less that Roe v Wade will be overturned outright so much as it will be de facto overturned by death by a thousand cuts. Dozens of abortion-rights cases are heading toward the Supreme Court, and Mississippi's attempt to pass a 15-week abortion ban is just the start.
Not sure why you think all the originalists on the SCOTUS would want to death-by-a-thousand cuts Roe v Wade.
If states pass constitutional laws, I'm sure they'll be upheld by the current SCOTUS. If laws are unconstitutional, I'm sure they won't be.
What is the problem here? That originalist conservatives won't be legislating from the bench as has been happening? If abortion needs to be a protected right then amend the constitution.
It is possible that this was decided in error. The reasoning referred to it using fuzzy terms about “emanations” and “penumbras” from the fourth amendment, and the right thus found is not clearly stated by the text of the law (let alone the intent of those who wrote it). The late RBG sorta thought it was trash as an opinion.
An explicit constitutional amendment would establish it much more firmly, and would be impeccably legitimate in precisely the way Roe isn’t. These are very desirable properties if you value democracy, or if you wish to establish things more permanently.
I don't know that RGB thought it was trash as an opinion. She believed in a woman's right to an abortion, but also believed the basis for the decision in Roe V Wade was weak and its scope made it vulnerable to attack (and she was correct in hindsight.) From what I read, she believed a stronger argument could have been made from the equal protection clause rather than right to privacy. But she certainly believed the underlying right was valid.
But let's be honest - almost no one opposing Roe V. Wade does so on the grounds that the argument from the fourth amendment is weak, they argue primarily from religious grounds that pregnant women fundamentally do not have the right to terminate, as they consider such to be an act of murder in nearly all, or all cases.
The crux of the matter regarding abortion for most people has never really been a legalistic one but a metaphysical and often religious one - the rights of the unborn versus the rights of a woman's autonomy over her body.
While I would hope that Republicans who drape themselves in Christian piety and refer to themselves as pro-life in order to imply that their opponents are pro-death, and who have made an existential pillar out of repealing Roe V. Wade for forty years, would stack the courts with judges who would consider the matter without undue bias, I suspect that bias is the intent for stacking the court to begin with,and that the actual constitutional validity of the decision isn't meant to matter.
> I suspect that bias is the intent for stacking the court to begin with, and that the actual constitutional validity of the decision isn't meant to matter.
I regret that your post has derailed this conversation into a sectarian display of othering, aversion, and moralization. No further productive exchanges on the topic will be found here.
I will instead note that when we treat our ideological opponents as respectable people who are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time (so to speak) it is not because we expect that our enemies will reap the benefits of this respect. It is for our own sake that we ought do this.
I never claimed anyone was incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, merely that a political party acts with political motives.
That the Republican Party has sought the repeal of Roe V. Wade since the decision was made, and that the primary impetus behind that is religious, rather than legalistic, is so obvious that it should be banal. They literally campaign on getting justices in to repeal Roe V. Wade. Yet you've suddenly turned defensive and accused me of moralizing and condescending simply by mentioning it.
It probably is best to table this. It's futile to even try to have a decent political conversation here anyway.
The idea that the conservatives on the court are "originalists" is a complete farce. Kavanaugh just wrote an opinion last week that it is critical that election results must be called by TV networks on the night of the election. This is of course despite the fact that (a) there is no such law, (b) none of the founding fathers could have ever imagined TV networks calling elections day-of, (c) and election results are routinely not known for many days/weeks after an election. This bizarre opinion is just one of countless that disproves the "originalism" myth.
And as for legislating from the bench, few are more guilty of that than Alito and Thomas.
The case I think you're talking about (DNC v WSL) was literally about whether or not state legislatures can decide when to require ballots. Wisconsin's legislature decided election day. A lower court said this was unconstitutional, but it's not, so the majority opinion was for WSL.
Please show me where in this opinion the assertion was made that election results must be called by TV networks on election night.
Also funny about his opinion is that he doesn't seem to understand that states rarely (never?) "definitively announced results on election night." States typically don't certify their results for weeks. Only TV networks call elections on election night based on projections of what the final results might be after states count all their legally cast ballots. Kavanaugh either doesn't understand or has a problem with how elections in this country have always worked.
Huh, literally nothing about announcing results on TV.
How can you straight-facedly opine on the opinion when you clearly haven't read it? Instead of reading a NYT article, which is basically a partisan rag at this point, try reading the actual opinion.
And then you can quote back to me the parts about television. Except you can't, because they're not there.
> Kavanaugh just wrote an opinion last week that it is critical that election results must be called by TV networks on the night of the election.
Media networks are the only entities that can call an election on election night. States can't and don't do that. Therefore, Kavanaugh is either talking about (1) the networks "calling" the election or (2) he's talking about some fantasy world in which states certify their elections night-of. Either is lunacy and either flies in the face of originalism.
I have a lot of problems with NYT, including ideological problems, but to say it's just a partisan rag tells me all I need to know about this conversation.
How can you say that and not agree that it is a partisan rag?
A reputable news org shouldn't have a handful of problems, much less "a lot". And certainly not blatantly obvious ideological / bias problems.
Back to SCOTUS, the quote was:
> Those states also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.
Emphasis mine. Nowhere did the majority opinion say "certify" the results. States (or to be more precise, the districts within them) absolutely do start reporting their results on election night.
Now that we're 2 weeks after the election, zero states have reported final results, and all of our understanding is based on TV networks calling the results, have you changed your tune on this?
Living through the past 2 weeks reiterates that Kavanaugh’s opinion was implicitly about AP/NYT/CNN being able to call the election despite the guise of “originalism”
I’m confused, wasn’t your original claim that it was implicitly talking about states calling the election, not news networks?
And from there, it’s pretty clear that indecision around the election (and specifically mail-in voting) has indeed caused issues, so if anything the last two weeks affirm the SCOTUS majority opinion.
The point was that Kavanaugh's opinion was that networks must call the election night-of or immediately thereafter, which is not an originalist interpretation.
>If Obergefell gets overturned (it won't), an actual law can be passed this time, hell maybe even a constitutional amendment, since nearly a supermajority of Americans outright support gay marriage.
While that sounds good on paper, 50 percent of people in this country live in 9 states. The population distribution is not compatible with passing legislation in that way.
Edit to add: those 9 states only have 44.5 percent of the electoral college and 18 percent of the Senate.
Not this time as all parameters are worsen by each year, Australia and California wildfires, lose of ice, most significantly thawing permafrost at Siberia that contains potential of 100 - 1000 Gt of CH4 (Methane 75 times more potent than CO2 currently there is only 5Gt of methane in atmosphere) which would be enough to tip things over instantly ...
In fact it was never "always 10 years" as tipping point has been considered 450 ppm (it could be sooner), and CO2 is steadily increasing currently is 412.16 ppm. https://www.co2.earth/
So we can estimate how much time is left by progression.
Young trees cannot not sequester amount of CO2 as mature forests. Not even close. And trends are showing that droughts will continue, so there will be not enough water for them to grow.
No, but young forests grow into old forests and while they don't hold as much CO2 they sequester it much much faster. (assuming of course that there is good regeneration after fires.)
Food for thought in this discussion: there are chemical battlefields from WWI that were thought to be largely inhabitable by any lifeform that have slowly but surely been retaken by nature. The trenches and craters created by mortars and landmines still pocket the earth, but trees and grass and wildlife have largely taken it back over. WWI was about 100 years ago, so it gives us a lot of hope to what can happen if you just give nature a chance.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/05/the-fading-battlef...
Probably the correct answer is: whatever rebuilds the soil.
Forests represent the mature phase of an ecosystem, so jumping right into tree planting from barren field is likely not the best idea. You look at the edges of a road cut through a forest and you get an idea of the phases of regrowth for a forest. "Weeds", ie. smaller grasses and annuals, are the first pioneers. They then give way to bushes, and then later, trees, as the soil's capacity grows.
There's still so much we don't know about living soil, but most of what we do know points to soil health being the key ingredient to healthy ecosystems. How much we can accelerate that through tree planting and what not is likely very dependent on local environment.
The correct answer is a combination of that and accounting for the dynamics between tree species.
Friend who does wetland restoration complained many times about how typical projects show up and plant 20 species all at once and walk away. Problem is, plants establish at different rates and conditions. They close canopy at different rates. They change soil biology in favor or against other species at different rates.
In his ideal world, the 'planting' would be spread out over 4 years, where the slow plants get a head start. However, I'm not sure he's entirely right either. Because after 4 years, you'll have an area full of opportunistic plants if you don't do something to close the canopy fairly quickly.
And if that's true, then there is no way to replant a forest except to spend 40 years doing it, forcing successions to get to your target species in 80 years instead of 200.
I say "no way", but it deserves a clarification. There is no way to do it at scale.
There is forest succession, and there is secondary forest succession. If a hurricane, ice storm, 2 year drought, or the shock wave of a volcano wipes out all of the trees in an area, you get what is called a secondary succession. Much of the soil and all of the wood is still there, so a shorter path that goes from forest clearing to mature forest species can be taken instead. Logging destroys the process, and you go back to prairie, which is a longer route.
If you're restoring an acre? You can ship in enough wood chips to approximate the food chain around a dead tree, kickstarting a secondary succession. It's a trick Permaculturists are using to build soil far faster than your science book says, but they only do it by diverting a waste stream from thousands of neighbors. You'd never find enough material to replant the forest between you and the next town.
But you could build an island, and when that's done build another, and let them grow toward each other and toward the next town (who does the same) and you might have something better than a million hectares of doug fir in forty years, ready to burn down again.
Generally soil health is measured by a number of things, from the easy to quantify like pH and percentage of organic matter and the availability of certain nutrients, or even simple physical measurements like depth, compaction, or water solubility, to more complex things like the makeup of the microbiota living within it. All of these things affect what and how well things can grow on top of it.
I'm not a soil scientist, just an amateur gardener, but it's a very complex and interesting area of study.
This is a chemist's answer. These are all proxies for "is there a healthy soil ecosystem?" Like a letter grade on your report card.
Healthy soil has a ridiculously high number of individual microbes and invertebrates. When everything is going properly, soil carbon, pH, friability, gas/water permeability etc etc all work out to something forests like.
Except that's not quite true, many forest soils are actually quite poor and the trees that grow there would grow much better in other, different soils. e.g many forest soils are much more acidic than ideal for tree growth.
Fair. There's a tendency in my circles to talk about temperate forests (with fungally dominated soils) as if they're the most important. It's what we see, and it's what most 1st world people who need to hear about environmental policy see, and it's where the most space for improvement exists, both in terms of restoration and carbon sunk per acre. Tropical rainforests are something else entirely.
In fungal soil, nutrient availability is a bit fuzzy, because if you're not in a symbiotic relationship with the soil fungi, or root fused to a sibling that is, you have a lot less access to minerals. Some people prefer to think of this as a benevolent relationship, but what's the line between exchange and extortion, especially when you can't ask either party how they feel about it? 'Codependent' might be the correct word.
I don't know if he still feels this way, but Paul Stamets has on at least one occasion accused the fungi of farming the forest and not the other way around. If the fungi maintain a situation that is unfavorable to a particular tree, then they are not interested in having that tree around (whether that ultimately proves to be self-inflicted harm is sorted out by natural selection).
I’m not much past 1000 hours myself, which is about when you can string together original thoughts that might be correct. I was always a fan of systems thinking so it’s been sucking me in. The matriarch of the family was the last master gardener as far as I’m aware, but I still have 15 years to match her and I think I might just... except she had a massive apple tree whose match I’ve seen maybe once, and I’ll be dead before any tree I plant is over 18”.
Secret Life of Trees, Mycelium Running, and to a lesser extent Gaia’s Garden (by the late, great Toby Hemenway) all have different vignettes about solid ecology that created as many questions as they answered, but lacking a teacher that can be a good thing. I’m slowly filling those gaps in elsewhere.
This is a result of the war plants and an effect of the biodiversity. Is normal. Very acidic soils are ideal for tree growth, as long as is the correct tree, because the other species can not enter there.
So planting "trees" is not enough, you need to known and understand what each tree expects and wants.
And letting the trees grow can be detrimental also and the wrong option. None of the options is better than the other. Each case is different.
Healing nature is like healing people, just much more slow, much more expensive and much more complex. Must be done by professionals only.
Very acidic soils are not ideal for tree growth, yes it does mean that other species can't growth there but that is not the same thing as being ideal for tree growth.
Except that lots of forests have terrible soil with low pH , low carbon, very low nutrient levels and are actually quite difficult for things to grow in.
A friend of mine had a 10 acre field in Vermont with bad soil. He did not mow it for a few years and the trees just took over. It took him years and a lot of hard work to clear it back to a field. Certainly in Vermont, the forests are voracious. They will quickly take over almost any open land. Obviously, different parts of the world have very different ecosystems, but in New England, I do not think replanting trees is needed.
A group of trees is called 'a wood'. And while it's really hard to have a forest without trees, it's really easy to have a bunch of trees but not a forest. The apex tree species in a forest don't come until much later. They are in many cases the tree that grows in the space left by the death of a tree that grew in the space left by the death of yet another tree.
Your friend had a field full of pioneer tree species. Those trees stopped his field from being a meadow (a badly, badly damaged meadow) but they have to die to make way for the real forest building species.
For instance, a pioneer tree dies. A hemlock, which likes to grow on fallen trees (nurse logs) takes its place. When the hemlock grows old and dies, your old-growth species might establish in the same spot, or it may wait to replace whatever grew after the hemlock.
True, although the notion of a climax forest in New England is a bit of a myth, since they are constantly changing. For example, there is something called a "fir wave" where waves of fir trees die and are replaced with other trees.
Don't think I knew about fir waves, but from a human perspective, most of the interesting things happen at the edges of a forest (much of the stuff we can eat grows in clearings or edges), so windbreaks falling like dominoes makes a good deal of sense.
Where humans are involved in planting the trees, I'd expect statistical clusters, because if you plant a thousand oak trees in the same year, many will die within the same decade or so. My forestry friend in college complained about how every time trees died on campus, they'd replace them all with some other species, creating waves of dead trees every few decades, whether disease or old age, instead of a tree or two every year.
But then even without humans, nut trees are born in statistical clusters as well, ('masting' is an adaptation to overwhelm predator populations) so it stands to reason they'd die in clusters too. And a bad spring may result in more seeds germinating the following year.
Agree about the clusters. I am most familiar with the northern forests of New England (strictly as an amateur) and they are a wonderfully dynamic place. From big events like the Hurricane of '38, to small wind storms, fires, ice storms, and just an individual tree getting old and falling over, they are in a wonderful constant state of flux.
One of the saddest things is the loss (or coming loss) of so many important species. The American Chestnut and Elms are long since gone. The Hemlock and Ash are also under threat from pests and the Beech may be as well.
That's been my impression of Vermont -- everywhere you turn, farmhouses with caved-in roofs, pastureland gone back to forest, shuttered country churches, forested hillsides where you can just make out what used to be a ski slope by the change in vegetation. On my last visit I had an almost opressive sense that stubborn nature was reclaiming the state. I usually enjoy the woods, but the sense of desolation in rural Vermont can be eerie.
The northeast in general is slowly evolving into suburb/exurb and forest. Farms are mostly no longer economically viable. That said, those "takeover" trees are often junk trees or invasive species. Nice hardwoods take time to establish.
You can accelerate mature forest creation by planting native and more late cycle trees to prime the pump. I have a buddy who inherited ~50 acres in central NY after college. It had limited road frontage and sale value, so he basically pays the taxes by leasing ~10 acres to a farmer, and spent about $15k planting black walnut, oak, etc. It probably
Large scale farms at least. Some things like cheesemaking are still viable, because you only need a handful of cows to make an enormous amount of cheese.
Headline is a false dichotomy. Some of the content is good - certainly natural regrowth is vital. So is planting trees. Replacing cement and buildings in concrete jungles with trees puts the trees exactly where they are the most needed.
Yes. The longer term environmental benefits are staggering and there are immediate quality of life and health improvements. There are also second order effects in jobs planting and maintaining trees and park areas, increased biodiversity, and better awareness of the need to take care of the earth which takes care of us. Regrowth is great but won't (directly) help those cities as much.
Your point seems a little out-of-place to me...TFA was about fighting climate change by having plants absorbing carbon, and cities are...not the efficient place for that, right?
Probably more interestingly, I am skeptical about the premise. Obviously, cities need parks and trees. Largely they have parks and trees.
I see a lot of newer areas designed with mini-lawns and I always shake my head - in an urban environment, the name of the game is density and accessibility. Don't put a bush between the sidewalk and your shop: the shops are supposed to be on the sidewalk. Half of the time, these shops seem to be hiding their main entrance in the back, next to a parking lot, because it's actually a suburb with some apartments over a dentist office, not a real attempt at an urban environment.
Aside from aesthetics, more plants (trees especially) within cities can reduce the local temperatures, along with providing habitat (food and shelter) for a number of animals.
Not OP but I would absolutely advocate for that. Urban areas are like huge toxic wastelands to the natural world and inhibit so much growth and biodiversity. Its very possible to imagine cities that integrate nature into their design rather than just plowing over it.
One of the things I love about my city is it was designed with a ring of parklands around it so even people living in the city without a car can access fairly undisturbed nature.
We know that intact ecosystem spreads out from the edges. They did studies in South America decades ago comparing recovery rates in rectangular versus square clearings, and the rectangular ones always won.
So if we're talking about clearcutting, we ideally want to back up a step and make rules about the topology of a clearcut (not just shape, but holes as well).
If it's a forest fire, we may want to know how far natural reforestation can be 'stretched', and replant areas that are outside of that range, accounting for how fast the artificial forest will spread.
>We know that intact ecosystem spreads out from the edges. They did studies in South America decades ago comparing recovery rates in rectangular versus square clearings, and the rectangular ones always won.
I don't understand; the perimeter of a square and a rectangle are the same? The amount of "edge" to spread out from should be the same?
When we clear forest or talk of devastation we tend to speak in terms of area.
The perimeter of a rectangle with the same area as a square is larger, so there is more edge for the surrounding forest to encroach upon at the same time.
The worst shape, from a 'fill from the edges' standpoint, would be a circle. (Although I suspect that a square turns into a roughly circular hole within a few years, since the forest encroaches on the corners from two directions at once)
If the goal is to remove carbon from the system, then the best thing we can do is waste as much paper and throw it in the trash where it goes to a landfill and never decays back into the air.
If we recycle it we're keeping that carbon in play. But by wasting mass amounts of paper over and over again, we can remove a lot of carbon from the air. As we chop down more and more trees to make paper and bury the paper in a landfill, new trees grow up which get turned to paper which gets buried and taken out of the system.
So waste paper if you want to save the planet, because paper may kill a tree, but that tree will grow back, and the paper will sit in a landfill petrified.
Paper mostly comes from massive tree farms that are close to mills and close to market on managed, easy to transit tracts of land close to shipping lanes. Take a look at aerials of the wooded areas surrounding Panama City, FL, miles and miles of rows of tree farms. What’s happening in the Amazon is terrible mismanagement, but it’s not the sole source of paper
The drive to combat climate change is creating a generation of people who are forgetting that forest-inhabiting species need forest ecosystems of native species, as similar as possible to the natural vegetation cover. Not plantations of "trees" of whatever species, done as part of some large-scale anti-climate-change program.
All the tree-planting that we are doing to combat climate change should be done explicitly with a view to promoting natural vegetation ecosystems. Species extinctions in the next 5 years will be due to habitat loss, not climate change. There are few things more important than preventing the loss of the World's natural habitats and preventing species extinction: in my opinion every time we talk of climate change as a great challenge facing humanity we should also be talking of habitat loss and species extinction.
Ireland has reforesting but is using the wrong type of tree. These forests are indeed weird. They're totally silent inside and there's no undergrowth because nothing can grown underneath all dead pine needles.
Planting trees can help to regrow a forest naturally.
For example planted trees can provide shade for seedlings.
This is what I like about the Groasis projects. They create special planters so they can plant trees in deserts. Most of the time they choose very hard trees but with the intention to make it possible for other trees to grow.
I think part of the problem is figuring out the motives of the person planting the trees.
Weyerhauser has been getting a pass for deforestation for decades by tooting their own horn about their replanting initiatives, but if you replant only the most commercially viable species, it doesn't take a genius to know you're planning to cut 'em down again.
If "natural growth" is best, it'd be possible to measure it. It seems somewhat straightforward to measure the carbon content of an area before its forested (or re-forested), and then measure it afterwards, and see which method does better.
In my experience: agriculture wins in regards to hitting goals and targets. Nature will never grow as much food as our farming system, period. Similarly, I expect that our farming system (tweaked for carbon-capture instead of wood and/or other growth targets) would be superior at handling a specific goal (ie: Carbon capture) than nature.
We can certainly measure mineral depletion in soil that agriculture drives. This affects the resulting nutritional value of agricultural products.[1]
In general we over focus on stocks rather than flows when it comes to natural resources. That is to our, and the planets, detriment. Much of modern agriculture, for its productivity, wreaks havoc on the soil and the surrounding ecosystems. It's something that can be solved by technology, but not without getting over this stocks vs flows conceptual hurdle.
I'd expect that the ideal carbon-capture strategy is to grow a tree as quickly as possible (ie: a fast and easy growing wood like poplar, or maybe bamboo), and then probably bury the wood deep underground. If any bacteria eats the wood, the CO2 gasses should remain trapped there.
The expectation that permaculture is actually the best carbon-capture strategy is... strange. Trees eventually die, and at that point: their captured carbon is eaten by bacteria, turned back into CO2 and released into the atmosphere. There is a degree of carbon-capture with natural forests, but they aren't explicitly designed for carbon capture.
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Now if you think there are other benefits of permaculture, then of course, that's to be discussed. Maybe it'd be more beneficial to the wildlife (more room for predators / prey to roam the lands), and possibly beneficial for other reasons in the long run.
But if we have a specific goal (ie: carbon capture), that's easily measured and easily quantified, then frankly... modern science is the best approach forward. We should measure various methodologies, and then compare them. And then incrementally engineer a solution over the years based on the target quantifier.
Burying newly-grown wood seems like a difficult thing to achieve economically. Surely it's almost as good to build that wood into long-lasting structures where it is equally protected from rot, and then when demolition does occur, ensure that the rubble is buried underground?
References? As far as I understand it, by personally visiting sucessfull alternative farms that are using management intensive grazing (holistic grazing, mob grazing, etc.), they really do have a paradigm changing method that could and should be adapted by almost all meat producers. The current practices are archaic and destructive and are completely missing the more recent (last 20 years) scientific advancement in understanding how to build soil, maximize forage use, and raise healty animals without the current massive use of pesticides, herbicides, and large expensive machines. The economics is there, the change is slow, but proceeding. Check out the research work at the University of Missouri by Jim Garrish, the Stockman Grass Farmer publication and the farms of Greg Judy and Gabe Brown, to start.
I guess it depends on your definition of permaculture, I was thinking more like an integrated orchard system. You are quite right about your 'alternative grazing methods', they are productive and much much better for the soil than Corn + Feedlots that you get in the US. I do work on a farm that does a fair bit of that sort of stuff.
Yea, we're arguing symantics. My apoligies. The word "permaculture", nowadays, is, in my circles, a big umbrella word for many different systems. Many of those systems would not necessarily call themselves "permaculture". A big umbrella - "permanent agriculture", or agricultural practices that do not degrade the land, but rather can run on for millenia, there are many systems we are now discovering, some ancient, some newly synthesized, that have that potential to feed the world, while, at the same time, healing past damage .
In New Zealand where we have a lot of commercial forest and a Emissions Trading Scheme plantation forests are certainly much better ate capturing carbon than natural forest.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the preservation of naturally-grown trees and forests, I think it may depend on what the proposed newly-planted trees would be used for. Oxygen production, timber cultivation, ecosystem support? If the first, phytoplankton in our oceans produce WAY more oxygen than all the trees on earth combined -- which is one of a billion reasons why we absolutely need to stop polluting our oceans (and land for that matter). If the second, sowing hemp plants takes up less land and resources while producing more usable material for even more applications than do trees. If the third, then yeah trees are definitely required to sustain entire ecosystems so I can't make an argument against that. It is extremely unfortunate that entire naturally-occuring forests get completely decimated just for the wood or other for-profit ventures, regardless of the impact to the entire planet's balance between all of nature...including but not limited to us as human beings.
The best policy is to subsidize vertical farming near population centers until we have such a surplus that we can start slowly reconverting land away from agriculture towards natural forests/plains/etc.
It will be a very long and slow process, but it is a path forward, and there are huge benefits. If we get the technology right, we wont need pesticide, herbicide, etc.
Have you heard anyone with agricultural training saying that because every person in the industry I've listened to thinks vertical farming is a silly silicon valley hipster fad.
Are there some links to elaborate on this topic you could/would share?
Vertical farming certainly seems like an awesome idea with obvious benefits, but there are clearly plausible obstacles and drawbacks that I don't know enough about agriculture to deem valid or not.
LEDs have certainly gotten more efficient and cheaper since that lecture, but I think the general argument is still the same. The sun is pretty damn powerful.
Sorry, I don't have time to dig much out. The tldr is that we tend to overestimate the inputs like water and fertilizers and underestimate the massive amount of energy added by the sun.
But then you will need the space freed from agriculture for the solar energy production, instead of forests? In the end, isn't a field of corn a massive solar energy plant?
Agricultural training is not the same as landscaping or nature restoration.
Agriculturally trained means "I know how to grow corn". Or potatoes, or maybe even 10 or 20 species of veggies in a monoculture, that must grow just for a limited amount of time before collapsing, following a set of very clear instructions and killing anything that stands in the path.
Is the equivalent as being able to copypaste a small "hello world" program on internet.
I enjoy sharing the short film in this vein, "Fools and Dreamers", that follows a group that bought some land in New Zealand and let it return to forest over 30 years.
There's more to creating natural ecosystems than planting "trees". Which species of "trees" are being planted? The answer to that question is...kind of important. And unfortunately, if you look at what we are doing right now, a lot of tree-planting schemes are just commercial species. If we go down this road, our zeal to combat climate change may in fact end up having negative consequences for species conservation. We must tie these two things together; it just requires us to understand that wild organisms are picky: a eucalyptus or pine plantation is no good whatsoever for the species we must save from extinction.
>Others ask: Why plant at all, when we can often simply leave the land for nearby forests to seed and recolonize?
Because we continue to seek ways to profit from climate change, and re-wilding land is not profitable. The tree planting push is an example of the status quo attempting to maintain itself in the face of increased awareness of the consequences of it continuing. The recent fad of 'swipe your credit card here and we'll sequester carbon for you!' is another example. These attempts will probably get increasingly desperate over time. I would lend the tree-planting movement a lot more credibility if we were talking about re-wilding significant areas of developed land, and rendering them inaccessible to any possibility of profit. What you actually find is a large intent to expand the logging industries of various nations. A lot of it is obscured 'we don't have data on that' type stuff, but take a look at whether natives and re-wilding are on the cards or if it's about planting profitable species, and the reality is quite different from the spin.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
The longer we limit our thinking to solutions within the entrenched, centuries-old economic/social system which gave rise to the problem in the first place, the longer the problem will perpetuate unchecked before effective action is taken to mitigate and reverse it. If we're even in a state capable of such action by the time we realize that's what it's going to take.
>It was a good reminder that nature knows what it is doing
Couching natural processes in this language implies there is some level of knowledge humans could attain which would enable us to become a better steward than nature herself. Again, looking for solutions within the box that created the problem is folly when stepping outside of it is necessary to resolve matters. Nature has no idea what it's doing, it doesn't 'know' a damned thing, and this is it's inherent strength which we will never successfully emulate. Nature is chaotic and constitutes an incredibly complex ongoing battle of wills played out over at least 3.5 billion years of competition, death, birth, selection pressures and evolution. Misplaced hubris alone accounts for our belief we can somehow do better than nature with the power of knowledge.
"When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn." - Wendell Berry
We have the capability, knowledge, and power to restore balance to our environment but our only hope of success is to work with existing natural systems, not against them. The solution certainly lies in our ability to augment, complement, and enhance them. Anyone asking why we can't just settle other plantes or geo-engineer earth in a way that's beneficial to us hasn't thougt things through enough - We're already ON spaceship earth and it is capable, with cautious collective caretaking that our intelligence and knowledge affords us, of carrying us through and into the stars in perpetuity. If we don't completely fuck it beforehand.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams
I believe that if we as a species were to develop enough knowledge and attempt to effect a superior replacement for nature, what we would have invented at the end of it would look an awful lot like a natural ecosystem, probably just with some sticky-tape (technology) holding things up behind the scenes. So in the end surely it's better to ruthlessly preserve the ecosystem we already have than allow it to die and have to try and re-create it or adapt to whatever the hell emerges in the void it leaves.
“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.” – Gus Speth, founder Natural Resources Defense Council
I am a loon, but my comment was a joke / ironic. I'm a tree lover. I love to sleep on a hammock suspended between two trees in the forest. I've heard of a person that fell of a tree while climbing and died, another reason for being careful with the trees.
PBS Terra on YouTube recently did an episode about the blue haze over forests in (IIRC) Tennessee. Trees emit VOCs that make the air hazy. The blue haze from trees was being replaced by brown haze from industry.
Maybe tree smog is safe to breathe, but trees do create smog in at least some places.
To make people think. Trees are a common symbolic representation of a female principle (hollows!). Why on earth would people deforest land in the first place.
A 'naturally regrowing' forest may be 400 trees per acre. They're scrub trees, none of the ever getting very large, unhealthy and scraggly and broken by every storm.
It takes maybe a century of trees dying, giving one of their cohort a chance to get ahead of the others, then shading them and 'thinning the herd' until you have a stable population. Then, they're still not very healthy because they 'grew from scrub'.
They have to then die of natural causes one at a time and be replaced by a single healthy one. Maybe another 50 years. Finally you have a stable healthy forest.
Or, you can just plant 100 trees per acre in a grid. And mow the volunteers until you have what you want. 20 years maybe.