11–20 of 28 posts
https://books.google.ca/books?id=6XfgBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA293&lpg=P...
I have one in my front yard, it's a neat but very aggressive and very thorny shrub.
86% or 60% dying is really not a big deal if the remaining surviving 14% or 40% are, in absolute numerical terms, greater than the amount it takes to transform the desert. The article unfortunately doesn't talk about what we think the latter is. edit: explain the down vote. you think planting trees to die is immoral, or something?
It depends on the species, but in many cases the best way to get ten big trees quickly is to plant many more, maybe even a hundred. The young trees enjoy having dense company. As they grow each tree needs more room, so cut down a few every year.
I wonder how we plan to terraform Mars if we can't even deal with a desert or two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As noted in that discussion, there are different types of sand – (ironically?) the growing desert is not usable as a construction material; the individual grains are too small and spherical, in construction sand the grains are coarser and larger. Why is why we have the situation where Gulf states import some of the sand for their construction boom even though a huge proportion of their land is desert (that is to say…
So what you're saying is someone needs to invent a cryptocurrency where the proof of work is measured by the number of spherical grains of sand you coarsen?
86% or 60% dying is really not a big deal if the remaining surviving 14% or 40% are, in absolute numerical terms, greater than the amount it takes to transform the desert. The article unfortunately doesn't talk about what we think the latter is. edit: explain the down vote. you think planting trees to die is immoral, or something?
It's both moral and practical. It depends on the species, but in many cases the best way to get ten big trees quickly is to plant many more, maybe even a hundred. The young trees enjoy having dense company. As they grow each tree needs more room, so cut down a few every year.
>>>> The researchers’ biggest worry is that the trees are depleting subterranean aquifers so that eventually nothing will flourish.
I know nothing about this subject so the above may be an issue, or it may not. What can you take away from the article? I'm sure there have been a great many displaced along the way by the project, is it going to be worth it in the end?
It seems like it should be a great project to analyse. There's a large amount of money being injected into it and it's at a large enough scale that you could try a lot of different approaches to see what worked. But, as ever, it sounds like incentives are misaligned so we may never get true information about what is actually working and what isn't.
Reading through the article it sounded spookily like China's Great Leap Forward at the end of the 50s:
> But plenty of scientists remain unimpressed. Many of the trees, planted in places they don’t grow naturally, eventually die. The survivors soak up precious groundwater that native grasses and shrubs need, causing more soil degradation. Meanwhile, thousands of farmers and herders are forced off their lands to make way for the trees. China may be winning its war against nature for now, but at what cost?
I was a STEM major, but my first reaction to this is still: so what the hell is the takeaway? Science news coverage is all like this: “some scientists do X; other scientists say Y; I’m a journalist so f--k if I know who is right.” Science gets turned from something that offers clarity to something that underscores humans’ inability to understand the world around them.
I think preserving our commons is the most important role of government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
I wonder how we plan to terraform Mars if we can't even deal with a desert or two.
There is an advantage on Mars - it's already 100 percent nothing. We could try 1000 different species of plant, mold, lichens, or whatever. Anything that becomes self sustaining would be step in the right direction. The biggest problems on Mars are the temperature and the atmosphere, and I have no idea what can be done about those. Well I do, but they're such massive engineering projects as to be impractical.
http://marshallbrain.com/mars.htm esp. chapter 7
And in other places in the world, there's not enough sand, and we're stripping it away for concrete and killing the ecosystems that depended on it in the process.
I know the two sands might be different, but is there a reason we're not developing concretes that work with the invasive sands?