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Whatever happened with the idea of using drones to plant 1 billion trees? I was in Iceland earlier this year - a country largely devoid of trees. There aren’t

Whatever happened with the idea of using drones to plant 1 billion trees? I was in Iceland earlier this year - a country largely devoid of trees. There aren’t any because the Vikings chopped them all down. Despite the cold - however - they do grow there albeit much slower then elsewhere. In any case, it seems to me we could be seeding a lot of barren locations so they’ll become forests within 20 years.

iNerdier 8y ago
Sheep. They’ve tried and sheep tend to eat all the saplings. Unlike in other places the sheep are not penned in, they’re free to roam which means any area you want to try and re-forest in a fairly hostile environment to begin with has to be expensively fenced off until they get to a fairly good size.
- rienbdj 8y ago
  Can’t fence in the sheep? Fence in the trees.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    It's a lot harder to build a fence with a drone than to airdrop a sapling.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - zeristor 8y ago
    Or bring in wolves. The shepherds farm the sheep, it might be an idea to ask them to stop it.
- d33 8y ago
  Perhaps the solution should also involve drones?
- fouc 8y ago
  Could have shepherd drones to go with the tree-planting drones.
titzer 8y ago
> using drones to plant 1 billion trees? sigh, more tech. Personally I think humans owe a debt of a little elbow grease here and sitting on the sidelines with a remote control seems a bit soulless and detached. Dirt under your fingernails will teach you a lot. > a country largely devoid of trees. Forests need to bootstrap entire ecosystems, a process that can take thousands of years. It'd be like trying to load an OS off an encrypted DVD into RAM and just jumping to it. It needs to be booted in the right way. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/20/climate/iceland-trees-reforestation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/20/climate/icela...)
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Dirt under your fingernails doesn't scale. If it did, it'd have happened already. We need solutions, not attachment.
  - titzer 8y ago
    Clearly deforestation scaled. We need people to realize they are part of this and it is not some videogame.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      > Clearly deforestation scaled. Yes, exactly my point. How do you want to fight something that clearly scales with something that doesn't scale? > We need people to realize they are part of this and it is not some videogame. Clearly that doesn't happen. Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish. Instead of hoping and arguing for emotional attachment with planting trees, we should be thinking of real solutions, like drones. Standing in the way of technology is exactly what will kill us, relying on humans has never worked out. Just like with German nuclear power plants (or their lack of, which caused another deforestation in pursuit of coal).
      - titzer 8y ago
        Ok, we're clearly on totally different pages, so let me take another try at this. > fight something that clearly scales My point was actually to refute the implied point that something that relies on manual labor doesn't scale. Industrial logging has got nothing on all those centuries of busy little humans. Deforestation scaled without tech. The Vikings had little but axes to deforest Iceland, just time. It's been the same everywhere people have gone, no matter what century or what tech they had available: cut down the trees faster than they can grow back. You can see it everywhere from North America to Easter Island to New Zealand. Same story. Over and over. Nowadays, a lot of deforestation in Africa is literally slash and burn: machetes and fire. We have to stop deforestation, clearly, because it is easier than reforestation. Reforestation is going to take time, no two ways about it. > Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish This is exactly my point. Sitting behind a keyboard and dreaming about billions of trees being planted by drones is the magical thinking. No matter how close you think these drones are to reality, this just simply does not exist, no one is funding this, and no one is building or running this. On the contrary, going out and planting a tree is literally something that you can do today, and people do by the thousands and millions every year. At a time when we need to actually do something, the loudest voices are techno-utopians who are literally telling people to sit down, the drones will take care of it. > Standing in the way of technology is exactly what will kill us This is why we are completely different pages. Technology is manifestly what is killing us, from global CO2 to enabling deforestation to overfishing to pesticides. Technology is prima facie the reason this planet is threatened by our existence. Technology is what has allowed humans to multiply from ~1.5 billion people in 1900 to 7.5 billion today and reach into every corner of the planet to exploit every kind of resource that happens to be profitable in the global economy. And when someone points this out, well, bring on the downvotes. Tech is like violence. If it's not working, you just need to use more. I know people don't want to process this, but this is where we are. Catastrophic overshoot. And the loudest voices are calling for more tech and more scaling. God forbid someone suggest manual labor, working with our hands, and thinking seriously about how we've seriously, seriously fucked up.
pjc50 8y ago
The problem in Brazil is not so much that it's now barren as that it's now somebody's farm.

iNerdier 8y ago

Sheep. They’ve tried and sheep tend to eat all the saplings. Unlike in other places the sheep are not penned in, they’re free to roam which means any area you want to try and re-forest in a fairly hostile environment to begin with has to be expensively fenced off until they get to a fairly good size.

rienbdj 8y ago
Can’t fence in the sheep? Fence in the trees.
- adrianN 8y ago
  It's a lot harder to build a fence with a drone than to airdrop a sapling.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- zeristor 8y ago
  Or bring in wolves. The shepherds farm the sheep, it might be an idea to ask them to stop it.
d33 8y ago
Perhaps the solution should also involve drones?
fouc 8y ago
Could have shepherd drones to go with the tree-planting drones.

titzer 8y ago

> using drones to plant 1 billion trees? sigh, more tech. Personally I think humans owe a debt of a little elbow grease here and sitting on the sidelines with a remote control seems a bit soulless and detached. Dirt under your fingernails will teach you a lot. > a country largely devoid of trees. Forests need to bootstrap entire ecosystems, a process that can take thousands of years. It'd be like trying to load an OS off an encrypted DVD into RAM and just jumping to it. It needs to be booted in the right way. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/20/climate/iceland-trees-reforestation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/20/climate/icela...)

TomMarius 8y ago
Dirt under your fingernails doesn't scale. If it did, it'd have happened already. We need solutions, not attachment.
- titzer 8y ago
  Clearly deforestation scaled. We need people to realize they are part of this and it is not some videogame.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    > Clearly deforestation scaled. Yes, exactly my point. How do you want to fight something that clearly scales with something that doesn't scale? > We need people to realize they are part of this and it is not some videogame. Clearly that doesn't happen. Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish. Instead of hoping and arguing for emotional attachment with planting trees, we should be thinking of real solutions, like drones. Standing in the way of technology is exactly what will kill us, relying on humans has never worked out. Just like with German nuclear power plants (or their lack of, which caused another deforestation in pursuit of coal).
    - titzer 8y ago
      Ok, we're clearly on totally different pages, so let me take another try at this. > fight something that clearly scales My point was actually to refute the implied point that something that relies on manual labor doesn't scale. Industrial logging has got nothing on all those centuries of busy little humans. Deforestation scaled without tech. The Vikings had little but axes to deforest Iceland, just time. It's been the same everywhere people have gone, no matter what century or what tech they had available: cut down the trees faster than they can grow back. You can see it everywhere from North America to Easter Island to New Zealand. Same story. Over and over. Nowadays, a lot of deforestation in Africa is literally slash and burn: machetes and fire. We have to stop deforestation, clearly, because it is easier than reforestation. Reforestation is going to take time, no two ways about it. > Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish This is exactly my point. Sitting behind a keyboard and dreaming about billions of trees being planted by drones is the magical thinking. No matter how close you think these drones are to reality, this just simply does not exist, no one is funding this, and no one is building or running this. On the contrary, going out and planting a tree is literally something that you can do today, and people do by the thousands and millions every year. At a time when we need to actually do something, the loudest voices are techno-utopians who are literally telling people to sit down, the drones will take care of it. > Standing in the way of technology is exactly what will kill us This is why we are completely different pages. Technology is manifestly what is killing us, from global CO2 to enabling deforestation to overfishing to pesticides. Technology is prima facie the reason this planet is threatened by our existence. Technology is what has allowed humans to multiply from ~1.5 billion people in 1900 to 7.5 billion today and reach into every corner of the planet to exploit every kind of resource that happens to be profitable in the global economy. And when someone points this out, well, bring on the downvotes. Tech is like violence. If it's not working, you just need to use more. I know people don't want to process this, but this is where we are. Catastrophic overshoot. And the loudest voices are calling for more tech and more scaling. God forbid someone suggest manual labor, working with our hands, and thinking seriously about how we've seriously, seriously fucked up.

pjc50 8y ago

The problem in Brazil is not so much that it's now barren as that it's now somebody's farm.