Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#101

Post by Tharkun »

JudgeWapner wrote: post #91
maxerickson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge tree die offs in the US have been from invasive species. A big recent one is the Emerald Ash Borer. Lack of evolved resistance and predators are the key factors.

how does firefighting play into that? there was no firefighting before the 20th century. now everytime there's smoke it's squashed immediately. that cannot be natural.

Is it, though? There have been fires in the arctic for weeks (month?) which haven't been put out. I'm sure firefighters try to put out forest fires asap when they're near human settlements but the world is a big place, and there presumably aren't enough firemen to put out every forest fire.

Before the 20th century, there were likely fewer campers setting trash on fire in the middle of a super dry forest. Or maybe not, come to think of it.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#102

Post by krageon »

jwr wrote: post #22
akeck wrote: post #16

Related: A Toyota engineer grows forests: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...

The cool thing is that you can order your own dense, self-sustaining forest from https://www.afforestt.com — and it doesn't have to be big (100 square meters), and it doesn't take a hundred years, either.

100 square meters is very, very big unless you are almost unthinkably wealthy. Or at least it is in my neck of the woods.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#103

Post by krageon »

JudgeWapner wrote: post #84
dylan604 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the premise of thinning, but nature seemed to do just fine for quite some time before humans brought their theories on how to maintain forests. Man comes up with a theory on how to use the land, but then has to come up with new theories to undo the effect the preceding theory caused. Looking at how nature has coped with out humans in Chernobyl is a good example of nature not needing man's help.

I agree that nature doesn't need our help. I'm just saying that there is a demand for lumber. So thinning should be done to satiate the demand, which would thereby put the forest back to its natural state (where wildfires could not reach the trees but frequently burned underbrush and fertilized the soil). Instead we let perfectly good timber rot and spread fungus because thats somehow more "eco-friendly" than selling…

I don't understand why eco-friendly is between scare quotes here. It's not a big leap to see that leaving a forest to manage itself is the friendliest option. Yes, you are correct that wood can be converted to money and if we must do that we should do so responsibly.

Even given that that is the case, I fail to see how that connects to your obvious disdain for the stance that maybe money isn't the most important thing here.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#104

Post by krageon »

Retric wrote: post #42
jwr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Economists widely agree that carbon pricing is the most effective way to fix climate change That is true, and does not conflict with the findings of the article. I think the difference here is that we can start planting trees right now. Carbon taxation is something people still pretend doesn't have to be done. It's also worth noting, that given the accelerating pace of the climate crisis, the time to start planting…

Most people are overestimating the value in planting trees. Trees readily plant themselves in areas they are well adapted to. Areas that don’t quickly turn into forests are generally poorly suited to growing trees. Further, not all trees are equivalent with marginal areas generally resulting in small and often very slowly growing trees.

> Areas that don’t quickly turn into forests are generally poorly suited to growing trees.

For some value of "quick", you are correct. Fertile land will indeed eventually develop into some kind of forest absent factors that inhibit such development (such as grazing cattle). I do not agree with you about this process being quick, as it can easily take more than one human lifetime for this to happen.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#105

Post by krageon »

Maximus9000 wrote: post #9
gshdg wrote: post #2

Where can one donate to an organization that plants trees?

There are tree planting orgs like https://trees.org/ There are also very effective tree saving charities like "cool earth" https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/

https://trees.org was mentioned elsewhere as well, but when I tried to donate they really asked for a prohibitive amount of personal information. Then they had a "privacy policy" that I had to agree with, which was also chunky. I prefer donating to an organisation that recognises that there is no need for a huge amount of my personal data.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#106

Post by krageon »

empath75 wrote: post #86
nielsbot wrote: post #59

A glimmer of hope? Waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of "it will cost too much", "politically it's not possible", or some such...

It won’t matter if we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the air, once the forests are grown, unless we bury them all deep underground and grow them again. It’s a one time thing.

It will definitely matter (and potentially quite a lot). Whether or not it will matter enough to offset every problem is up for debate, but this is tractable and practical and we should therefore be doing it. As well as doing everything else we can do to solve this issue.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#107

Post by jillesvangurp »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #98
wlib wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on my phone in the country side with slow internet so I cant look up a link, but if I remember correctly, you should search "Alan Savory TED Talk" on youtube for an introduction to the use of livestock to reclaim land. Essentially, the issue with most livestock grazing is that it does not mimic natural grazing, which is a seasonal, high volume, high density event where the herd moves on and allows the grazed area…

> Alan Savory TED Talk I'm no expert, but I would approach this with extreme caution. There are a lot of replies that he is "misleading", "wrong", "dead wrong" etc.

There are also quite a few projects where this has been shown to get results in the real world. Enough that it's probably worth trying to replicate the results. Worst case it fails and you hopefully learn something.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#108

Post by maxerickson »

JudgeWapner wrote: post #91
maxerickson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge tree die offs in the US have been from invasive species. A big recent one is the Emerald Ash Borer. Lack of evolved resistance and predators are the key factors.

how does firefighting play into that? there was no firefighting before the 20th century. now everytime there's smoke it's squashed immediately. that cannot be natural.

Firefighting is basically not a factor. Insects can spread pretty far, carry some across the ocean and they'll go investigate the opportunity.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#109

Post by Retric »

krageon wrote: post #104
Retric wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are overestimating the value in planting trees. Trees readily plant themselves in areas they are well adapted to. Areas that don’t quickly turn into forests are generally poorly suited to growing trees. Further, not all trees are equivalent with marginal areas generally resulting in small and often very slowly growing trees.

> Areas that don’t quickly turn into forests are generally poorly suited to growing trees. For some value of "quick", you are correct. Fertile land will indeed eventually develop into some kind of forest absent factors that inhibit such development (such as grazing cattle). I do not agree with you about this process being quick, as it can easily take more than one human lifetime for this to happen.

By planting trees you can very much speed up this process, but it’s still going to take decades to get significant tree growth. Further, you can’t count 100% of those trees as net growth because the area would have gained a few trees in that same period. So, critically the impact of planting trees needs to be compared to an ever more forested area that would have occurred if similar measures where taken but zero trees planted.

On top of that grasslands can store significant carbon in root systems which is then slowly released as the grasses are killed of by tree growth.

Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas

#110

Post by lrem »

lrem wrote: post #41
tobltobs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you cut of the second part of this sentence? “Restoring trees at [low] density is not mutually exclusive with grazing. In fact many studies suggest sheep and cattle do better if there are a few trees in the field.”

Because it is not that relevant, for two reasons: 1. Most land used to produce meat and milk is actually not by grazing. 2. I was tunnel-visioned on the part I added. The article calls for reforesting 1.7G hectares, at average 50% density, for a total of 850M. Amazon is being deforested at about 500k-1M hectares per year[1] and the political climate suggests making it worse rather than better. According to a quick go…

Separate news touching on this: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-moist-tropical-forests-boost-c...

Note that opportunity claimed here is smaller than the loss from the other source. In my sparsely informed understanding, it seems slowing down deforestation should be our priority #1.

Post reply on HN