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US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

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Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#61

Post by zie »

mistrial9 wrote: post #18
neom wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a couple of years consulting to earthforce.io (they make forest management software)- before I started I thought I understood forestry, boy how wrong I was, how little I knew! For those interested in learning the basics, this is a pretty good playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvOmkebY7k2UP4N_BicWV...

where is the Board of Directors, owners and investors of Earthforce.io declared in public?

Unless it's a public company/non-profit they don't have to make any of this information public in most(all?) US states. Usually all you have to do is make public the name of the company and the registered agent(typically the lawyer you hire to receive legal notices for the company).

They appear to be a private company: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/earth-force-technolo...

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#62

Post by partitioned »

seadan83 wrote: post #14
Firerouge wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trees per acre seems like a seriously misleading statistic. A freshly planted tree farm is going to have the highest trees per acre, but be the most useless forest. I would expect a few old growth trees in an acre would be a substantially better forest, visually, environmentally, and ecologically, than having three times as many young trees.

I think you and parent comment might actually agree. The 3x trees is an indication of too much, too many small trees, too much fuel. Places that burn and recover lose their "excess" trees. The trees get more space and are healthy top to bottom. OTOH, tree farm trees are bred to have few branches and are planted very close together. Tree farms grow tree trunks, not trees. There is a line of thought, which honestly I t…

I mean if you’re turning carbon into wood and then turning that into buildings that’s good right

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#63

Post by chimpanzee »

parineum wrote: post #54
seadan83 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and parent comment might actually agree. The 3x trees is an indication of too much, too many small trees, too much fuel. Places that burn and recover lose their "excess" trees. The trees get more space and are healthy top to bottom. OTOH, tree farm trees are bred to have few branches and are planted very close together. Tree farms grow tree trunks, not trees. There is a line of thought, which honestly I t…

> They do argue that the tree farm is actually better because it is growing. I'm extremely skeptical of that claim. One could measure the tonnage of tree farm wood extracted per day against the estimated tonnage of the trees in a non-farm environment pretty easily I would think. Frankly, the claim, to me, seems incredibly intuitive and your skepticism sounds like stubborn environmentalist thought.

> One could measure the tonnage of tree farm wood extracted per day against the estimated tonnage of the trees in a non-farm environment pretty easily I would think.

Old growth has a far deeper and broader root system which is a relatively permanent and ever increasing store of carbon in relation to farmed new growth. Roots and stumps of cut new growth are sometimes extracted and used for biofuel, transferring that carbon back to the atmosphere immediately. At best they are left to decompose or converted to mulch and biochar. But the growth process has been halted and no further carbon sequestration will occur. Any further human processing will itself release additional carbon.

Old growth is itself a habitat for other carbon stores. New growth…not really.

Old growth is a habitat for animals which themselves assist in the storage of carbon through indirect means such as pollination and defecation. New growth…not really.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and what I could come up with quickly off the top of my amateur-environmentalist head. It’s complex. A simple estimation of wood tonnage is not going to account for the complexity of the system at all.

> Frankly, the claim, to me, seems incredibly intuitive and your skepticism sounds like stubborn environmentalist thought.

Nice.

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#64

Post by mburns »

Retric wrote: post #59
mburns wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reality is that most of a state’s budget is set holistically and paid for out of the general fund. Isn't this just conflating states that do that with other states that don't? Oregon keeps the general fund and the lottery fund separate, 53% of the lottery fund goes to education (the rest to other voter-approved programs).

No because you can cut funding by slowing the annual increase from the general fund. Be that for inflation or just population growth. Year 0: general fund hands 100m to schools. Year 1: General fund hands 101m / year and lotteries add 10m to that yay! 111m for school, or except ‘inflation’ was 2% so it’s more like 109m. Year 2: General fund hands 102m / year and lottery adds 10.2m, ‘inflation’ was 2%. So adjusting fo…

Backdoor defunding by not adjusting for inflation is definitely a thing but that seems like a separate issue from what I was responding to re: where the funds come from and if they are kept separate, not how much should be spent in total.

> Repeat as needed until general fund is handing the equivalent of 90m with the slack taken up by the lottery.

The lottery picking up the slack so that the general fund doesn’t have to do all of it is the whole point.

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#65

Post by chimpanzee »

partitioned wrote: post #62
seadan83 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and parent comment might actually agree. The 3x trees is an indication of too much, too many small trees, too much fuel. Places that burn and recover lose their "excess" trees. The trees get more space and are healthy top to bottom. OTOH, tree farm trees are bred to have few branches and are planted very close together. Tree farms grow tree trunks, not trees. There is a line of thought, which honestly I t…

I mean if you’re turning carbon into wood and then turning that into buildings that’s good right

If the building would be built anyways using more destructive processes or materials, then perhaps. There’s no guarantee that the building would have been built though. Sure most would probably be built anyways, but at some point the different costs would affect the supply and demand at a macro level.

Nonetheless, it’s ignoring the entire carbon-sequestration system that the tree enables. What percentage of buildings are a net carbon-sink (including construction, use, maintenance and eventual demolition), or improve the naturally occurring carbon-sequestration process by merely existing? Any? I really don’t know. It’d be cool if we were constructing such buildings, but I doubt they’d be as efficient as just leaving old growth forests alone.

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#66

Post by Retric »

mburns wrote: post #64
Retric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because you can cut funding by slowing the annual increase from the general fund. Be that for inflation or just population growth. Year 0: general fund hands 100m to schools. Year 1: General fund hands 101m / year and lotteries add 10m to that yay! 111m for school, or except ‘inflation’ was 2% so it’s more like 109m. Year 2: General fund hands 102m / year and lottery adds 10.2m, ‘inflation’ was 2%. So adjusting fo…

Backdoor defunding by not adjusting for inflation is definitely a thing but that seems like a separate issue from what I was responding to re: where the funds come from and if they are kept separate, not how much should be spent in total. > Repeat as needed until general fund is handing the equivalent of 90m with the slack taken up by the lottery. The lottery picking up the slack so that the general fund doesn’t have…

> The lottery picking up the slack so the general fund doesn’t have to do all of it is the whole point.

That’s identical to the lottery just putting money directly into the general fund. Unless the funding source results in an increase in total funding this stuff is pure theatre.

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#67

Post by loeg »

poorman wrote: post #40
tallowen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we now know about a lot more externalities of this kind of logging than we did generations ago. For example, much of the hydrological basis that provide drinking water to the Seattle metro area was aggressively logged 100 years ago which impacts the hydrology of the basin in a negative way for the purpose collecting drinking water. I think extra knowledge in the space of the environment often leads to indecis…

I'll admit I'm not up to speed on the affect of the aggressive logging of Seattle on the hydrological cycle. From the little time I've spent there, I managed to gleam one small fact, that by the 1950's the Seattle city sewage system was dumping up to 50 million gallons of sewage into the Puget sound (per day). I'm only a software engineer and have no understanding of hydrological cycles, but I suspect the evaporation…

> by the 1950's the Seattle city sewage system was dumping up to 50 million gallons of sewage into the Puget sound (per day).

Seattle started building water treatment plants in 1961 and they entered service throughout the 1960s: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dnrp/waste-services/wastewate...

Meanwhile, Victoria, BC (Canada) continued to dump raw sewage into the ocean until 2021: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-sew...

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#68

Post by loeg »

tallowen wrote: post #34
poorman wrote: post #22

People often forget the original purpose of these state forests was to harvest the timber and pay the teacher salaries as part of the Oregon Common School Fund... As the great great grandson of Francis Elliott (Oregon's first state forester), I have been reminded of this by my family many times over the years. I'm unsure of it's purpose today, but I suspect the teachers wouldn't mind the extra pay.

I think we now know about a lot more externalities of this kind of logging than we did generations ago. For example, much of the hydrological basis that provide drinking water to the Seattle metro area was aggressively logged 100 years ago which impacts the hydrology of the basin in a negative way for the purpose collecting drinking water. I think extra knowledge in the space of the environment often leads to indecis…

> logged 100 years ago which impacts the hydrology of the basin in a negative way for the purpose collecting drinking water.

Can you elaborate on the problems?

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#69

Post by loeg »

beaeglebeachedd wrote: post #39
poorman wrote: post #22

People often forget the original purpose of these state forests was to harvest the timber and pay the teacher salaries as part of the Oregon Common School Fund... As the great great grandson of Francis Elliott (Oregon's first state forester), I have been reminded of this by my family many times over the years. I'm unsure of it's purpose today, but I suspect the teachers wouldn't mind the extra pay.

Very common scam. Introduce revenue source, say "it's going to the schools/teachers." Do that for a bit, defund the prior source of cash so the teachers are at what they were before. When it's time to run the next scan rinse and repeat. Seen it done with about every new tax introduced. Teachers still get paid shit and other taxes either barely move or go up.

I'm not sure I'd call it a scam. It certainly takes advantage of the fact that voters don't seem to really believe (or understand) that money is fungible.

Re: US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban

#70

Post by paulmd »

doubloon wrote: post #20

Imagine if there was 'old growth internet' and the federal government forced big tech companies to preserve big chunks of it.

I mean we do have “old growth standards” that are legally mandated in the tech industry… EU mandates for USB micro-B and usb-C are an example, as are PCI standards and similar security standards around banking endpoint security etc.
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