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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

#201

Post by spodek »

diego_moita wrote: post #28

For someone that lived in tropical places it is very awkward to see those videos on Iceland Air flights promoting tourism to Iceland and advertising its "rugged beauty", with lots of glaciers, geysers, volcanoes and ugly cold beaches with black sand. Sorry Icelanders, you seem to be lovely people but your country looks very ugly, barren, dead, sad and desolate. I can't see natural beauty without life.

> I can't see natural beauty without life.

Sunrise

Sunset

The moon

The stars

Clouds

Waves on the beach

Rugged peaks above the tree line

Stalagmites and Stalactites

Bubbling brooks

I could go on, but that's a lot of natural beauty you say you can't see already.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#202

Post by EGreg »

If more countries took reforestation seriously, then maybe our carbon footprint would diminish. And also, we should put this much effort into combating desertification. Make vertical farms instead of chopping trees down and wringing every last bit out of the soil.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#203

Post by gardarh »

b1gnasty wrote: post #190

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. H…

I spent two summers planting for the Icelandic forrest service and I imagine that is more or less how I and my coworkers looked like (well, somewhat less feminine I suppose). You shouldn't extrapolate too much from the newspaper picture.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#204

Post by avn2109 »

kibwen wrote: post #194
avn2109 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem is widespread in the urban areas of my rural, pro-firearms home state. They solved it by hiring sharpshooters to kill the deer with rifles at night within city limits. It worked really well and they gave a ton of meat to the food bank.

Which state is this? I'm surprised anyone would authorize hunting in an urban environment at all, given the risk of collateral damage. Just because you've shot the deer precisely doesn't guarantee the bullet isn't going to fully penetrate and keep on going.

http://helenair.com/news/local/sharpshooter-plan-on-target/a...

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#205

Post by godshatter »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #164
godshatter wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the person you were replying to, but if they want to sabotage my experience because I don't wish to be tracked or infected with malware, then that's their business I guess. I hope they don't expect me to think delightful thoughts about them for doing it.

Should they make two separate web pages, or rely only on less ornate tooling for a niche user base?

They could just load the images and videos without the need for javascript. We know that they can do this, because they specifically made it show low-res versions for those without javascript. They went out of their way to handle this admittedly niche user base already, purposefully to make their experience worse.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#206

Post by erikbye »

diego_moita wrote: post #28

For someone that lived in tropical places it is very awkward to see those videos on Iceland Air flights promoting tourism to Iceland and advertising its "rugged beauty", with lots of glaciers, geysers, volcanoes and ugly cold beaches with black sand. Sorry Icelanders, you seem to be lovely people but your country looks very ugly, barren, dead, sad and desolate. I can't see natural beauty without life.

Life does not equal beautiful vistas. Cities are full of life, but to me, they are often the ugliest of landscapes. While I find plenty of aesthetically pleasing natural landscapes, even desolate ones.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#207

Post by rconti »

brightsize wrote: post #156
kibwen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. Source? It would surprise me to see that many people voluntarily give up their farmland rather than, say, selling it to industrial farmers or real estate developers.

I grew up in Vermont and the woods are full of old stone walls put up by farmers and cellar holes where their buildings used to be. Not just on the edge of the woods, but deep within them too. I'm not a student of farming but I don't think that New England is a particularly good place to do it. Lots of hills and mountains and rocky soil. As for real estate developers, there's a lot more money to be made in heavily po…

Real estate developers pale in comparison to the sheer amount of land in the US. Hell, even just on the "wrong side of the tracks" in many very expensive cities there's often completely abandoned/disused land that's worth a tiny fraction of the land a half mile a way.

Once you get somewhere more rural/remote, the land is going to have even less value.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#208

Post by rconti »

Kluny wrote: post #105
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?

I don't know what the case is in NE US, but in my town in British Columbia, the deer population is out of control in the metropolitan area, and every time a cull is mentioned, animal rights activists put a stop to it through loud and effective lobbying. It's quite irritating.

In New Zealand they consider the deer to be an invasive species and were actually shooting deer from helicopters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter-based_hunting_in_Fi...

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#209

Post by rconti »

openasocket wrote: post #127
poulsbohemian wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came to post exactly this. Once upon a time there were vast western lands open for grazing. There were even "wars" fought between cattle and sheep ranchers over grazing rights. Today the feds have closed off many areas -- for example, if I understand correctly, in the Hells Canyon area there were once 300,000+ sheep left to graze, where today there are effectively none. Certainly there were areas that were significan…

My understanding was that Bundy was grazing his cattle on federal land and was refusing to pay grazing fees. He argued in United States v Bundy (1998) that he didn't have to pay grazing fees. https://www.scribd.com/document/218116757/1998-U-S-Dist-LEXI...

Which is an effing joke, as the federal government charges pennies on the dollar for grazing rights compared to what a private landowner would charge. And yet, the Bundys want the taxpayers to take it in the shorts even more for their privilege and profit.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#210

Post by bluepeter »

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…

Open range is a thing in the Western US too.
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