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Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

nytimes.com

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Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#181

Post by meheleventyone »

dmix wrote: post #176
avar wrote: post #6

For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…

I'm confused, there's no private property laws to prevent farm animals from grazing on non-farm property? Nor is there crown land to build national parks with giant forests? An effective farm lobby wouldn't be able to affect either of those things in almost any other western countries... The problem doesn't seem to be the lobbyist but some strange lack of fundamental laws, if the government can be coerced into allowi…

There are a bunch of reasons from tradition in terms of letting sheep roam free to farming always having been a source of power. Further you have other weird facets like the votes of people in the countryside being worth twice those in Reykjavik. But basically for a long time farming and fishing controlled a lot of voting power. Although the traditional party of the farmers is on the wane now. The whole country has the population of a medium sized town so it’s on the whole very similar but also very different to larger countries.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#182

Post by zackmorris »

akeck wrote: post #47

Maybe take an page from the Easter Islander playbook: Build vast networks of rock wall closed cells. Wind blowing over these will tend to deposit some of its soil. Bonus points if the walls are high enough to keep out sheep. ;-)

Many islands are deserts because they don't have high enough elevation to catch moisture. In Hawaii a guy planted trees along a ridge line to pull moisture from the clouds and converted the climate. I can't remember his name or which island it was, this might be it:

http://www.visitmauiblog.com/blog/pine-trees-lanai/

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#183

Post by peeters »

krallja wrote: post #148
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they lagged like nobodies business when they were loading despite having 11Mbps down all to myself.

11Mbps is less than half the FCC's definition of broadband: 25Mbps down.

IIRC Netflix's absolute highest bitrate is 15.6 Mbps (for 4k). This is ~5 seconds of much less than 4k.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#184

Post by bmurphy1976 »

irrational wrote: post #149
NegativeLatency wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose wolves wouldn't be popular in a suburban environment either.

There are tons of coyotes in suburban environments though. I live smack dab in the middle of the suburbs and we have see coyotes all the time.

They live in NYC and Chicago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/nyregion/that-howling-jus...

http://abc7chicago.com/archive/7945162/

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#185

Post by njarboe »

stevenwoo wrote: post #160
NegativeLatency wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose wolves wouldn't be popular in a suburban environment either.

Plenty of mountain lions in suburban California. I've seen them in Palo Alto and Cupertino (in the mountains that are on the edges of the cities). The people decided it was better to live with mountain lions instead of killing them off in 1990, after we killed off the grizzly and the wolf in the state. http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...

The grizzly, as a top predator, was not really very afraid of humans and many people were killed by them in California before they were hunted to extinction. I would definitely not want them around as a farmer in the 1800's. With antibiotics, helicopter transport, and ER rooms today, I might support a reintroduction of grizzlies to the state. There is one on the state flag, after all, and are amazing creatures. On the other hand, I like how relaxed I can be hiking in the California Sierra without them. Hiking and camping in the Canadian Rockies feels a lot different.

Mountain lions (at least the ones evolved when we hunted them for the last 12,000 years) are much less hazardous to humans than grizzlies or wolf packs.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#186

Post by riot504 »

devb wrote: post #155
riot504 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears a simple solution of allowing hunting to occur would solve the problem. Why is hunting restricted?

It's not a simple solution, because it's not very effective. In areas with limited open space, hunting is very much an exclusionary activity. In Staten Island, the NYC Parks Department is performing an experiment in deer sterilization: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/nyregion/deer-vasectomies...

I do forget the NE is dense living around the northern Idaho region.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#187

Post by vitro »

I've seen a write up of a test where tons of orange peels have been dumped and spread over big area [1]. After 16 years, ecologists returned only to find abundant flora at the areas covered with peels. Maybe to try this approach?

[1] http://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels-...

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#188

Post by riot504 »

hyperbovine wrote: post #166
saalweachter wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hunting restrictions are basically why the deer population recovered to the absurd levels they have. They need some tuning the other way, maybe extend the season (eg, shorten the exclusive bow-hunting season and lengthen the regular hunting season). If you're not allowing hunting on your property, it would also be good (albeit expensive) to fence it, so deer cannot easily move through, to reduce their available f…

Wolves kept the deer population in check for eons before humans ever showed up. The real reason the deer population is out of control is because we've extirpated their natural predator. Unfortunately for the forest's sake, it will never be politically tenable to have wild wolves roaming the exurbs of New England.

Mentioned it above but I live in the northern Idaho region. We've grown our wolf population for awhile. Now we are at the point of having too many wolves that we are opening hunting to them.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#189

Post by mark-r »

sliverstorm wrote: post #153
oh_sigh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyme disease isn't passed from human to human so herd immunity is irrelevant.

My mistake, I thought it was a vaccine for the deer.

As I understand it the vector is mice, not deer. There's a correlation between mouse populations where the juveniles feed and Lyme disease outbreaks 2 years later when the adults latch onto humans.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#190

Post by b1gnasty »

I spent years working in the forestry industry in Canada planting trees. The first picture says a lot in respect to why the process might be going slowly for them. It is an athletic endeavour that takes efficient tools and the mindset to endure a lot of suffering. It says they are planting 3 million trees a year; that is a tiny amount. I've worked with many planters who have planted over a million trees themselves. Here's a link to a picture of what an effective treeplanter looks like: https://i0.wp.com/hardcoretreeplanters.com/wp/wp-content/upl...
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