5 ms·

It seem to be the case that we're losing the biodiversity of rainforests and natural forests, but in their place gaining palm oil plantations, and monoculture "

It seem to be the case that we're losing the biodiversity of rainforests and natural forests, but in their place gaining palm oil plantations, and monoculture "sustainable" forestry in more temperate regions. So environmentally it's still a loss that's easy to miss, especially if people don't look past the headline numbers. At least the article points this out.

stephengillie 8y ago
Is there no way to win? Despite having more forests and trees, we are still in a worse state than before. If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.
- tempestn 8y ago
  I'm not following your logic. Even if the planet is in a worse state than it was, despite the increase in forest cover, it doesn't follow that we would be better off having done nothing.
- oihoaihsfoiahsf 8y ago
  > If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action. ??? "I'm going to die someday, so I might as well subsist on nothing but sugar and alcohol 'til then?" Anyway, characterizing our efforts as "greatest" is far too generous. They were the efforts we gave. Not the greatest possible efforts that could be given. If biodiversity were the priority, we would have solved this problem.
- adamc 8y ago
  No. This doesn't follow. It's like saying that if cancer treatment only extends your life by 5-10 years, it had no value. We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. There was never a promise that planting trees would make carbon emissions irrelevant (or plastic in the oceans or...)
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    >It's like saying that if cancer treatment only extends your life by 5-10 years, it had no value. My understanding is that it's like taking a cancer treatment, and the cancer is unaffected, but at least we got free t-shirts from the cancer clinic. >We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. The article says the new trees and forests are not equivalent to the used trees and previous forests: >Tree cover is not necessarily forest cover. Industrial timber plantations, mature oil palm estates, and other non-natural "planted forests" qualify as tree cover. For example, cutting down a 100-hectare tract of primary forest and replacing it with a 100-hectare palm plantation will show up in the data as no net change in forest cover: the 100-hectare loss is perfectly offset by the 100-hectare gain in tree cover. That activity would be counted as "deforestation" by the FAO. Therefore, tree cover loss does not directly translate to deforestation in all cases.
- mjewkes 8y ago
  >If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure To date, this may be true. But human cultivaiton _can_ result in an increase in biodiversity and ecological productivity vs non-intervention. This generally looks like gardening instead of monoculture agriculture. It may be the case that the biodiversity and ecological productivity of the amazon rainforest was greatly aided by human cultivation. See: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear-that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-...
- crispinb 8y ago
  > Is there no way to win? There isn't. Once evolutionary processes churn out a species capable of pullulating, at the cost of other species, essentially without limit, the die is cast. The notion that 'we' can 'decide' to escape this biological heritage is just another case of the old superstition: that humans magically transcend the physical world. Just as some tree species may be stripped and killed by a beetle new to the region, our planet's current ecosystems will be destroyed by Homo sapiens. New ecosystems will develop over millennia. Human history will cease. There will be no lamentations.
btilly 8y ago
Also area is not the same as volume. Second growth forest tends to have less wood than old growth. I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I remember when you could see a whole row of logging trucks driving by carrying one tree. As in, each section of the tree filled a logging truck. There are trees where that tree was today, but they represent nowhere near the same amount of carbon stored in the form of wood. The article failed to point this factor out.
- weberc2 8y ago
  But now that carbon lives in buildings, paper, landfills, etc and there is new carbon in the form of the smaller trees. From a carbon sequestration perspective, it would seem that this is strictly better than waiting for trees to get old, right?
  - andyidsinga 8y ago
    this might be the case, but we would also need to know how much of that wood is being used for heating and cooking
    - armenarmen 8y ago
      I am certain that percentage of the biomass of an old growth trees, like the one mentioned, devoted to cooking and heating is negligible.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - btilly 8y ago
    Some, but not all. A lot of the wood gets burned. Either as the purpose of the wood, or as how the forest got cleared. (Fires are particularly common in the tropics on purpose, and fairly common in the temperate zones by accident. As California demonstrated this month.) In the process of turning tree into manufactured goods, there is a lot of waste that tends to wind up in the atmosphere. Manufactured goods are themselves vulnerable to fire, decay, beetles, etc, so some of them are released. Tracking how much is released, and when is very hard. That is why according to the Kyoto protocol, a tree is counted as released as soon as it is cut down. All told, deforestation is estimated at around 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
People in temperate regions largely stopped cutting down trees for fuel. The northeastern US and Japan we're once heavily deforested. Then people changed their priorities and found alternatives to wood.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  I don't think people changed their priorities at all. We just ran out of wood to fuel the advancing industrialization. Then figured out that the black stuff you can mine or pump from the ground burns really well. Which got us to where we are now.
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  I wonder if there are comparable "stone fences" through Japanese new-growth forests as in New England. What I mean is: You look at paintings from 100, 150 years ago of Western MA and it's farmland ... farmland everywhere. Before and kinda-sorta after, it's woodland. Take a walk through and there's dilapidated stone fences from the farms. Beforehand, of course, pure "virgin forest". If Japan is at least vaguely similar in terms of de- and re-forestation, are there artifacts running through the re-forestation areas of the de-forestation period?
genericacct 8y ago
Not to mention the fact that total world population has likely increased even more than the number of trees. (No idea though, would love to see the numbers)
fucking_tragedy 8y ago
The ecosystems that took hundreds, thousands if not millions of years to develop will not magically spring to life in plantations, either.

stephengillie 8y ago

Is there no way to win? Despite having more forests and trees, we are still in a worse state than before. If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.

tempestn 8y ago
I'm not following your logic. Even if the planet is in a worse state than it was, despite the increase in forest cover, it doesn't follow that we would be better off having done nothing.
oihoaihsfoiahsf 8y ago
> If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action. ??? "I'm going to die someday, so I might as well subsist on nothing but sugar and alcohol 'til then?" Anyway, characterizing our efforts as "greatest" is far too generous. They were the efforts we gave. Not the greatest possible efforts that could be given. If biodiversity were the priority, we would have solved this problem.
adamc 8y ago
No. This doesn't follow. It's like saying that if cancer treatment only extends your life by 5-10 years, it had no value. We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. There was never a promise that planting trees would make carbon emissions irrelevant (or plastic in the oceans or...)
- stephengillie 8y ago
  >It's like saying that if cancer treatment only extends your life by 5-10 years, it had no value. My understanding is that it's like taking a cancer treatment, and the cancer is unaffected, but at least we got free t-shirts from the cancer clinic. >We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. The article says the new trees and forests are not equivalent to the used trees and previous forests: >Tree cover is not necessarily forest cover. Industrial timber plantations, mature oil palm estates, and other non-natural "planted forests" qualify as tree cover. For example, cutting down a 100-hectare tract of primary forest and replacing it with a 100-hectare palm plantation will show up in the data as no net change in forest cover: the 100-hectare loss is perfectly offset by the 100-hectare gain in tree cover. That activity would be counted as "deforestation" by the FAO. Therefore, tree cover loss does not directly translate to deforestation in all cases.
mjewkes 8y ago
>If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure To date, this may be true. But human cultivaiton _can_ result in an increase in biodiversity and ecological productivity vs non-intervention. This generally looks like gardening instead of monoculture agriculture. It may be the case that the biodiversity and ecological productivity of the amazon rainforest was greatly aided by human cultivation. See: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear-that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-...
crispinb 8y ago
> Is there no way to win? There isn't. Once evolutionary processes churn out a species capable of pullulating, at the cost of other species, essentially without limit, the die is cast. The notion that 'we' can 'decide' to escape this biological heritage is just another case of the old superstition: that humans magically transcend the physical world. Just as some tree species may be stripped and killed by a beetle new to the region, our planet's current ecosystems will be destroyed by Homo sapiens. New ecosystems will develop over millennia. Human history will cease. There will be no lamentations.

btilly 8y ago

Also area is not the same as volume. Second growth forest tends to have less wood than old growth. I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I remember when you could see a whole row of logging trucks driving by carrying one tree. As in, each section of the tree filled a logging truck. There are trees where that tree was today, but they represent nowhere near the same amount of carbon stored in the form of wood. The article failed to point this factor out.

weberc2 8y ago
But now that carbon lives in buildings, paper, landfills, etc and there is new carbon in the form of the smaller trees. From a carbon sequestration perspective, it would seem that this is strictly better than waiting for trees to get old, right?
- andyidsinga 8y ago
  this might be the case, but we would also need to know how much of that wood is being used for heating and cooking
  - armenarmen 8y ago
    I am certain that percentage of the biomass of an old growth trees, like the one mentioned, devoted to cooking and heating is negligible.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- btilly 8y ago
  Some, but not all. A lot of the wood gets burned. Either as the purpose of the wood, or as how the forest got cleared. (Fires are particularly common in the tropics on purpose, and fairly common in the temperate zones by accident. As California demonstrated this month.) In the process of turning tree into manufactured goods, there is a lot of waste that tends to wind up in the atmosphere. Manufactured goods are themselves vulnerable to fire, decay, beetles, etc, so some of them are released. Tracking how much is released, and when is very hard. That is why according to the Kyoto protocol, a tree is counted as released as soon as it is cut down. All told, deforestation is estimated at around 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

People in temperate regions largely stopped cutting down trees for fuel. The northeastern US and Japan we're once heavily deforested. Then people changed their priorities and found alternatives to wood.

Sharlin 8y ago
I don't think people changed their priorities at all. We just ran out of wood to fuel the advancing industrialization. Then figured out that the black stuff you can mine or pump from the ground burns really well. Which got us to where we are now.
drdeadringer 8y ago
I wonder if there are comparable "stone fences" through Japanese new-growth forests as in New England. What I mean is: You look at paintings from 100, 150 years ago of Western MA and it's farmland ... farmland everywhere. Before and kinda-sorta after, it's woodland. Take a walk through and there's dilapidated stone fences from the farms. Beforehand, of course, pure "virgin forest". If Japan is at least vaguely similar in terms of de- and re-forestation, are there artifacts running through the re-forestation areas of the de-forestation period?

genericacct 8y ago

Not to mention the fact that total world population has likely increased even more than the number of trees. (No idea though, would love to see the numbers)

fucking_tragedy 8y ago

The ecosystems that took hundreds, thousands if not millions of years to develop will not magically spring to life in plantations, either.