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I just purchased a very small part of a forest, an inholding within 8000 acres of protected land trust and 40,000+ of national forest surrounding. Having no cl

I just purchased a very small part of a forest, an inholding within 8000 acres of protected land trust and 40,000+ of national forest surrounding. Having no clue of the actual number, I suspect I now own thousands of trees. Last week, I owned zero trees. Thankfully this US state offers multiple forms of conservation easement, which will allow me to keep trees on 99% of the land (building two tiny homes on dozens of acres). Perhaps I might even generate some authentic carbon offsets?

losvedir 3y ago
That's pretty interesting. Do you have any more info about how you did that or how you found it or how much something like that costs? Was it just a sustainability donation kind of thing, or do you intend to (or can you) live there or visit? We donate to a Shirley Heinz Land Trust which buys up decrepit lots around where we live in Gary, IN and around there, and restores them into preserves. But it's nothing on the scale of what you bought, it sounds like.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  > Decrepit lots ... restores them into preserves I despair. The only thing left for “nature” is the land we've run into the ground, poisoned and shit on. Turning them into preserves is laudable, except they'll never, ever be as good as whatever was there before the land was cleared. The biodiversity will be gone. The complex interactions of thousands of species will be gone. Restoring the land also inevitably requires fossil-fuel inputs.
  - voisin 3y ago
    > except they'll never, ever be as good as whatever was there before the land was cleared 100 years? 500 years, 1000?
    - MrVandemar 3y ago
      Sure, leave it alone long enough and you'll get something. But I doubt even after 1,000 years you'll get anything close to the complexity or richness of whatever original ecosystem was there in the first place.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >Do you have any more info about how you did that or how you found it or how much something like that costs? Was listed on Zillow for less than a few hours. Our bid wasn't the highest, but we have conservation plans for majority of the land. >where we live in Gary, IN and around there, and restores them into preserves. What an awesome effort in quite tumultuous histories.
labster 3y ago
How authentic are those carbon offsets though? Are you willing to buy carbon offsets the next time a forest fire runs through your land, which may exceed the total amount of offsets you sold?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Trees burning and then forest regrowth is carbon-neutral. (Today's fire releases the last few decade's worth of CO2 temporarily, but then starts recapturing it.)
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    Probably even more than carbon neutral, because some of that carbon gets folded into the soil layer.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      That only works if you turn the wood into biochar. If you burn the tree down completely, only ash remains.
      - olddustytrail 3y ago
        Ash is mostly carbon.
  - labster 3y ago
    Desertification is not carbon neutral, though. You have to have the forest regrow to do that. It might be radiation budget negative though, because forests have pretty low albedo, and deserts reflect a lot more light.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  When you get down to it, Carbon Offsets, credits, etc is just a way on paper to let people keep polluting. They're not authentic at all. Forest fires are irrelevant to that though. We've planted thousands of trees. Do we get any of those credits? No. Do you know what does? The massive bluegum monoculture down the road that they are going to harvest in ten years with big fossil-fuel machines and turn into paper with a lifetime of about a week. It's basically fraud, another “business as usual” green-wash, another way for companies to get free money from mates in government, and people being able to feel good that “we're doing something”.
cpursley 3y ago
Can you share a bit more about how the rest of us can go about doing the same (purchasing and conserving land)?
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  Step 1: buy some land with some native vegetation on it. Step 2: Don't clear it. Step 3: Look after it. Counter intuitivively, this step might involve setting fire to bits of it, depending on where you live. There is no monetary “profit” step. Given our current trajectory and terminal velocity with regards to climate change and biodiversity loss, it probably will make no difference in the broader scheme of things, but the local animals will be happy to have their homes and food supply while it lasts. There are possibly some conservation organisations that will enable you to put the land under some kind of lasting “covenant” to protect it.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    Step 3: Profit This actually does exist, in certain locations. In mine's US state, I plan to install beehives and get an agriculture exemption, which prevents me from developing 99% of property (minus driveways / logging roads)... but also cuts property taxes massively. You can then get additional conservation easements (10yr contracts) that then allow you to offset essentially all of a DINK household's W2 income. Despite all the loopholes, this does keep the trees alive and generating oxygen / habitat.
    - thatcat 3y ago
      What state? Do you have more info?
    - MrVandemar 3y ago
      > install beehives Commercial beehives, or even hobbyist level bee-keeping, displace native insect populations. They're very aggressive insects. Pollen and nectar seem like limitless resources; they aren't. Swarms can take over bird-nesting hollows, and drive out native mammals. I have hives. Yeah, I don't feel great about it, but there are compromises baked into everything.
nkurz 3y ago
Not to discourage you, but mature forest is generally close to carbon neutral. It stores a reasonable amount of carbon, but usually isn't sequestering much more. For actually offsetting carbon, what you want is new growth. Typically, this is done by cutting the trees to make room for new ones while preventing the wood you cut from decomposing back into CO2. So if your goal is direct carbon offset, your best bet might cut a clearing and use it to build your house --- possibly even intentionally cutting a larger clearing than you otherwise would. Unless your land was cut recently, in which case letting it grow the way you plan might be just fine. If your new land is in the Northeastern US, you might enjoy reading the reports from this group: https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/vision/overview/ https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/vision/overview/
- pvaldes 3y ago
  People repeat this mantra a lot. The whole reasoning behind the idea is wrong
  - voisin 3y ago
    Conclusions are almost invariably stronger when presented alongside evidence or even supporting arguments.
    - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
      The evidence I will present (about the aforementioned land) is this: Two separate creeks are on either sides of the property, and I've already seen so much life blossoming! ...of course, this is only anecdotal.
    - pvaldes 3y ago
      The idea is based in the hypothesis that old trees grow slower, because the general universal rule that mature species spend resources on sexual reproduction, so they have less resources to grow This is just a general rule, but the real life has a few caveats. 1) Grow is complex. The first problem is that we don't really know "how much" slower is "slower". Has not being studied for most species, because finding a 500 year old ash that is not pruned or coppiced is basically impossible [1]. And we need to remind that trees are clonal organisms arranged around a very few parts that repeat themselves. Even if old trees would really grow much slower than saplings, they have a huge, huge difference on the --number of growing points--. This should overcome any speed difference. The result is that older trees still add mass on a velocity that young trees can't. Other problem is that identifying grow with "how taller respect to the last year" is not practical. Biomass is the correct term in ecology. Young trees grow abnormally fast because they are searching for light. And this fast grow is the thinnest possible that can support the tree and still put it over its competitors. It can't be sustained later without risking for the tree integrity. This grow shouldn't be promoted. Wider is what we want. A tree is not growing slow just because is only 1cm taller than the last year. Mature trees have a "deploying umbrella" phase. 2) In the real life, trees often don't grow a lot the first years. Most of the big oaks (and I had cultured a few) show a frozen grow in the first two years. They use it first year to make a deep root and 2 (two!) small leaves. Period. In the second year maybe four to eight leaves if the area is very favourable. The whole oak weights... dunno, maybe 50 grams? at this period. The CO2 captured from the air is close to zero and even could be a negative value while the sapling feeds on its acorn. Then at the fourth year there is a phase of (maybe) fast grow for a couple decades, but only if there aren't herbivores around and only if the area does not receive light. In the same time, older trees would have included tens or thousands kilograms in each one of its main branches and the same for their main roots. Plus the soil generated. Plus the fruits. And we can save the best for the last. Mature trees produce pollen. This is an output in our supposedly Carbon neutral system. The number of people that had quantified seriously how much pollen produces a tree could fit maybe in a small room, but I'll assume that a fair sized tree produces tens of Kg of pollen each flowering season. What we know is that one single conifer can "paint" a car with pollen in no time, and can do it for weeks. This pollen is protected and enclosed in a hard cage of Sporepollenin. Sporepollenin is simply one of the most durable organic substances known by us. This structure is able to trap C for hundreds of millions of years in favourable conditions. Hundreds of millions!. Is --exactly-- the stuff what we crave for, and that we are looking for like crazy. Except because some people can't avoid the itch to burn the soil. Though luck. [1] When you coppice a tree, you modify the speed of regrow. My bet is that when on panic mode, old trees could easily have bursts of superfast grow. Easily much faster than a sapling. This mechanism is behind the recent fever (ehum, scam) of planting kiri trees.
voisin 3y ago
Question that might be outside your experience, but I own some land in the Rockies that was clear cut at some point in the last thirty years. If I did absolutely nothing with it, how long until it turned back into Forest?
- toast0 3y ago
  Probably depends on how big it is, and what's around it, and how much water and what not. If it's a relatively small area that was clear cut, the surrounding forest is likely to encroach pretty quickly. But unassisted, trees may grow too densely so you don't get a lot of thriving trees. Going in and picking many trees to keep and a handful to thin can help the ones you keep be healthy and grow well. Most likely there are universities near you that can offer forestry advice tailored to your area.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
brutus1213 3y ago
How does one go about such a land purchase? Are there specialized brokers or websites?

losvedir 3y ago

That's pretty interesting. Do you have any more info about how you did that or how you found it or how much something like that costs? Was it just a sustainability donation kind of thing, or do you intend to (or can you) live there or visit? We donate to a Shirley Heinz Land Trust which buys up decrepit lots around where we live in Gary, IN and around there, and restores them into preserves. But it's nothing on the scale of what you bought, it sounds like.

MrVandemar 3y ago
> Decrepit lots ... restores them into preserves I despair. The only thing left for “nature” is the land we've run into the ground, poisoned and shit on. Turning them into preserves is laudable, except they'll never, ever be as good as whatever was there before the land was cleared. The biodiversity will be gone. The complex interactions of thousands of species will be gone. Restoring the land also inevitably requires fossil-fuel inputs.
- voisin 3y ago
  > except they'll never, ever be as good as whatever was there before the land was cleared 100 years? 500 years, 1000?
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    Sure, leave it alone long enough and you'll get something. But I doubt even after 1,000 years you'll get anything close to the complexity or richness of whatever original ecosystem was there in the first place.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
>Do you have any more info about how you did that or how you found it or how much something like that costs? Was listed on Zillow for less than a few hours. Our bid wasn't the highest, but we have conservation plans for majority of the land. >where we live in Gary, IN and around there, and restores them into preserves. What an awesome effort in quite tumultuous histories.

labster 3y ago

How authentic are those carbon offsets though? Are you willing to buy carbon offsets the next time a forest fire runs through your land, which may exceed the total amount of offsets you sold?

sokoloff 3y ago
Trees burning and then forest regrowth is carbon-neutral. (Today's fire releases the last few decade's worth of CO2 temporarily, but then starts recapturing it.)
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  Probably even more than carbon neutral, because some of that carbon gets folded into the soil layer.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    That only works if you turn the wood into biochar. If you burn the tree down completely, only ash remains.
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      Ash is mostly carbon.
- labster 3y ago
  Desertification is not carbon neutral, though. You have to have the forest regrow to do that. It might be radiation budget negative though, because forests have pretty low albedo, and deserts reflect a lot more light.
MrVandemar 3y ago
When you get down to it, Carbon Offsets, credits, etc is just a way on paper to let people keep polluting. They're not authentic at all. Forest fires are irrelevant to that though. We've planted thousands of trees. Do we get any of those credits? No. Do you know what does? The massive bluegum monoculture down the road that they are going to harvest in ten years with big fossil-fuel machines and turn into paper with a lifetime of about a week. It's basically fraud, another “business as usual” green-wash, another way for companies to get free money from mates in government, and people being able to feel good that “we're doing something”.

cpursley 3y ago

Can you share a bit more about how the rest of us can go about doing the same (purchasing and conserving land)?

MrVandemar 3y ago
Step 1: buy some land with some native vegetation on it. Step 2: Don't clear it. Step 3: Look after it. Counter intuitivively, this step might involve setting fire to bits of it, depending on where you live. There is no monetary “profit” step. Given our current trajectory and terminal velocity with regards to climate change and biodiversity loss, it probably will make no difference in the broader scheme of things, but the local animals will be happy to have their homes and food supply while it lasts. There are possibly some conservation organisations that will enable you to put the land under some kind of lasting “covenant” to protect it.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  Step 3: Profit This actually does exist, in certain locations. In mine's US state, I plan to install beehives and get an agriculture exemption, which prevents me from developing 99% of property (minus driveways / logging roads)... but also cuts property taxes massively. You can then get additional conservation easements (10yr contracts) that then allow you to offset essentially all of a DINK household's W2 income. Despite all the loopholes, this does keep the trees alive and generating oxygen / habitat.
  - thatcat 3y ago
    What state? Do you have more info?
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    > install beehives Commercial beehives, or even hobbyist level bee-keeping, displace native insect populations. They're very aggressive insects. Pollen and nectar seem like limitless resources; they aren't. Swarms can take over bird-nesting hollows, and drive out native mammals. I have hives. Yeah, I don't feel great about it, but there are compromises baked into everything.

nkurz 3y ago

Not to discourage you, but mature forest is generally close to carbon neutral. It stores a reasonable amount of carbon, but usually isn't sequestering much more. For actually offsetting carbon, what you want is new growth. Typically, this is done by cutting the trees to make room for new ones while preventing the wood you cut from decomposing back into CO2. So if your goal is direct carbon offset, your best bet might cut a clearing and use it to build your house --- possibly even intentionally cutting a larger clearing than you otherwise would. Unless your land was cut recently, in which case letting it grow the way you plan might be just fine. If your new land is in the Northeastern US, you might enjoy reading the reports from this group: https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/vision/overview/ https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/vision/overview/

pvaldes 3y ago
People repeat this mantra a lot. The whole reasoning behind the idea is wrong
- voisin 3y ago
  Conclusions are almost invariably stronger when presented alongside evidence or even supporting arguments.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    The evidence I will present (about the aforementioned land) is this: Two separate creeks are on either sides of the property, and I've already seen so much life blossoming! ...of course, this is only anecdotal.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    The idea is based in the hypothesis that old trees grow slower, because the general universal rule that mature species spend resources on sexual reproduction, so they have less resources to grow This is just a general rule, but the real life has a few caveats. 1) Grow is complex. The first problem is that we don't really know "how much" slower is "slower". Has not being studied for most species, because finding a 500 year old ash that is not pruned or coppiced is basically impossible [1]. And we need to remind that trees are clonal organisms arranged around a very few parts that repeat themselves. Even if old trees would really grow much slower than saplings, they have a huge, huge difference on the --number of growing points--. This should overcome any speed difference. The result is that older trees still add mass on a velocity that young trees can't. Other problem is that identifying grow with "how taller respect to the last year" is not practical. Biomass is the correct term in ecology. Young trees grow abnormally fast because they are searching for light. And this fast grow is the thinnest possible that can support the tree and still put it over its competitors. It can't be sustained later without risking for the tree integrity. This grow shouldn't be promoted. Wider is what we want. A tree is not growing slow just because is only 1cm taller than the last year. Mature trees have a "deploying umbrella" phase. 2) In the real life, trees often don't grow a lot the first years. Most of the big oaks (and I had cultured a few) show a frozen grow in the first two years. They use it first year to make a deep root and 2 (two!) small leaves. Period. In the second year maybe four to eight leaves if the area is very favourable. The whole oak weights... dunno, maybe 50 grams? at this period. The CO2 captured from the air is close to zero and even could be a negative value while the sapling feeds on its acorn. Then at the fourth year there is a phase of (maybe) fast grow for a couple decades, but only if there aren't herbivores around and only if the area does not receive light. In the same time, older trees would have included tens or thousands kilograms in each one of its main branches and the same for their main roots. Plus the soil generated. Plus the fruits. And we can save the best for the last. Mature trees produce pollen. This is an output in our supposedly Carbon neutral system. The number of people that had quantified seriously how much pollen produces a tree could fit maybe in a small room, but I'll assume that a fair sized tree produces tens of Kg of pollen each flowering season. What we know is that one single conifer can "paint" a car with pollen in no time, and can do it for weeks. This pollen is protected and enclosed in a hard cage of Sporepollenin. Sporepollenin is simply one of the most durable organic substances known by us. This structure is able to trap C for hundreds of millions of years in favourable conditions. Hundreds of millions!. Is --exactly-- the stuff what we crave for, and that we are looking for like crazy. Except because some people can't avoid the itch to burn the soil. Though luck. [1] When you coppice a tree, you modify the speed of regrow. My bet is that when on panic mode, old trees could easily have bursts of superfast grow. Easily much faster than a sapling. This mechanism is behind the recent fever (ehum, scam) of planting kiri trees.

voisin 3y ago

Question that might be outside your experience, but I own some land in the Rockies that was clear cut at some point in the last thirty years. If I did absolutely nothing with it, how long until it turned back into Forest?

toast0 3y ago
Probably depends on how big it is, and what's around it, and how much water and what not. If it's a relatively small area that was clear cut, the surrounding forest is likely to encroach pretty quickly. But unassisted, trees may grow too densely so you don't get a lot of thriving trees. Going in and picking many trees to keep and a handful to thin can help the ones you keep be healthy and grow well. Most likely there are universities near you that can offer forestry advice tailored to your area.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

brutus1213 3y ago

How does one go about such a land purchase? Are there specialized brokers or websites?