Just seeing that stump makes me terribly sad for what has already been lost.
Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article specifies that they took cuttings, a pretty ancient technology. But the fact that the technology is old doesn't mean it's not cloning. Plants are easy to clone.
It says “DNA” and “genetic material”, while also talking about finding living tissue and growing from it. I think the presentation is either misleading or confusing.
It’s a tissue culture. The result is an exact clone of the tissue doner. They didn’t get Dino DNA from amber but a clones a clone.
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#43“Cloning” here seems the wrong (click-batey) choice of words. They have horticulturally propagated redwood trees - that’s a relatively simple technique, commonly used by your average gardener. What’s special here is that they found which conditions maximize the yield of the redwoods propagation and they are planting colonies of the new trees in areas around the world that offer particularly good/promising climatic co…
> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture.
Surely it's not size but speed of growth that matters? Wouldn't forests of Leylandii (a fast-growing conifer that can grow as fast as 1m/year) felled and resowed every few years/decades capture more carbon?
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consumers around the world are buying the wood and the palm oil that gets planted after the trees have been chopped down.
I've never been a fan of this sort of argument. If everyone decided to stop buying something, that still doesn't stop a regular batch of that thing being produced, or in this case it doesn't stop them from cutting down the trees with the assumption that they will sell. If they don't sell well, they can't un-cut the trees.
How does that make any sense? If you keep buying something, they'll continue for ever. If you don't, they'll do it for a bit more and then stop. What kind of an argument is "they won't stop immediately, and stopping almost immediately is the same as never stopping at all"?
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#45Sadly a lot of our forest eco-systems, especially in CA are at risk. Drought, poor forest management, bark beattle, over forestation, etc. Were forestry practices 100+ years ago good, not really - a lot of these ancient trees spawned eco-systems in themselves (evident in the Headwaters groves). That said, modern "do nothing" approaches pushed by environmental "concerns" are the exact opposite of the over-logging. Sad…
Can you explain what's wrong with the "do nothing" approach? It seems to me to be the most natural and clearly the cheapest too. Perhaps simple steps like putting up fences or signs saying 'nature reserve, keep out" might be worthwhile, but I don't see how any more invasive steps will lead to a more natural forest.
Death is the natural outcome of heart attacks, but you don’t seem to apply your logic to what hospitals do. There’s no a priori reason to believe the “natural” outcome is a good outcome.
Large wildfires are natural, like heart attacks. If we want to let nature be nature, we need to stay well clear, put up defined firebreaks, and let the forest burn down everything next to it periodically. And then accept half or more of certain states will be clouded in smoke some years.
Since people generally seem unwilling to do that, and live next to the forest, or just don’t like smokey cities, the next choice is to manage the forest and minimize the intensity of forest fires while having some control over the timing through managed burns. This has side benefits like increasing the air quality across the whole state, because you never get these giant fires.
The worst outcome seems to be having people live next to the forest while doing nothing, because we periodically have random disasters and financial messes.
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#46“Cloning” here seems the wrong (click-batey) choice of words. They have horticulturally propagated redwood trees - that’s a relatively simple technique, commonly used by your average gardener. What’s special here is that they found which conditions maximize the yield of the redwoods propagation and they are planting colonies of the new trees in areas around the world that offer particularly good/promising climatic co…
> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture. Surely it's not size but speed of growth that matters? Wouldn't forests of Leylandii (a fast-growing conifer that can grow as fast as 1m/year) felled and resowed every few years/decades capture more carbon?
I guess it matters a lot what happens to the grown out wood as well. If it's burned after cutting it down, you're back to zero for that particular tree. So assuming you're not storing large amounts of cut-down wood, the relevant metric is amount of bound carbon per surface area, and I think larger trees might have a higher density (in the long run) than smaller ones.
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people that felled that tree for its essential raw materials did so under hardships and conditions thankfully many of us will never know, and not in small part due to the toil and labour of previous generations.
That does not make it any better for us. Previous generations bought good and bad both and that's the legacy we have to live with or die. We just don't know yet.
My point was its pointless and borderline disrespectful to project modern standards of ethics and concepts of "greed" onto people of the past that had different norms and extreme hardships to contend with. By all means we should discuss what to do about our present predicament and plan for a better future, but we can do that without denigrating those that came before us for failing against an impossible modern standard.
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#48Won't they have problems with the low genetic diversity the same way Cavendish bananas seem to be in problem now?
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It says “DNA” and “genetic material”, while also talking about finding living tissue and growing from it. I think the presentation is either misleading or confusing.
It’s a tissue culture. The result is an exact clone of the tissue doner. They didn’t get Dino DNA from amber but a clones a clone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_tissue_culture
Thank you, though I do understand. I’m saying that the article’s repeated mention of DNA is misleading, since it’s not being directly used by humans.
Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps
#50That stump is sad reminder of greedy destruction we have bought to the world. I hope we can reverse it.
For anyone looking to offset their carbon emissions, I looked into the various options and settled on Cool Earth[0] as the most promising charity for this. Here's some commentary on them from independent research on charities[1]: "We estimate that Cool Earth is able to reduce emissions by 1 tonne of CO2-equivalent for every $1.34 donated, for directly protected forest specifically (although this figure may be as low…
Huh, thanks! Are there others you've looked into that were close to Cool Earth or is everyone else in a different league?