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With sufficient investment in this it is pretty easy to grow a large forest. May not be redwood forest and may not be tree whose bark is wide enough to drive a

With sufficient investment in this it is pretty easy to grow a large forest. May not be redwood forest and may not be tree whose bark is wide enough to drive a car through, but you can grow pretty large trees in < 30 years which can capture tonnes and tonnes of carbon every year. Suburban housing boom, building more homes is one good way to put that into long term storage while reducing cost of housing and improving our carbon footprint as suburban homes can last for a century. We can also genetically modify trees to grow faster and bigger.

hnbad 3y ago
You're not talking about forests, you're talking about tree farms. Man-made "forests" are monocultures that are extremely susceptible to environmental hazards and the trees are usually intentionally short-lived. In Europe for example there are barely any natural forests left because most so-called forests were planted for pre-modern industrial uses. Forests are good at carbon capture but forests are intricate biotopes with different plants serving different functions and debris from dead trees fulfilling an integral role. Building more homes is definitely important but suburbia is probably one of the worst ways to do this as sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is. It also assumes those homes will last for centuries when most American houses are torn down and rebuilt on much shorter cycles than that. And that doesn't even get into how building more homes generates emmissions first.
- Jensson 3y ago
  I live in Sweden where most forests are natural, isn't that hard to make those either. Just do nothing with a piece of land and a ton of trees starts to grow, it is hard to not get trees every year you have to go and pull all the new small trees that started growing if you don't want a forest, not sure how it could be hard to plant such forests.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    Forest management is a little more complicated than "just do nothing" with a piece of land. Most of the US lumber stock is under private management; Canada is owned by the crown and licensed to private companies. Lumber is a very expensive, very bulky commmodity, and supply managment needs to balance a lot of market, logistic and environmental factors.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      If you want to make it cheap to cut down, yeah. If you just want a forest that lives there without cutting it down then it isn't hard. Forests doesn't need humans.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > You're not talking about forests, you're talking about tree farms. I think this is the main issue here. They redefined "tree farms" as "forests" a long time ago, so they can put an equal sign between them. A forest is an ecosystem. A tree farm is not. You cannot regrow a forest.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    You can grow a forest, you just do that in a different way than you grow a tree farm. And there isn't a lack of insects and other things to move in once you laid down the foundation for that ecosystem, they are still everywhere in Europe.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    In much of Canada the line is a little blurry. You can usually tell when you're in a replanted block but it could be 50 or more years since they cut it, and it doesn't look like an orchard or christmas tree farm. It really depends where in the country you are; secondary growth in BC can seem far more natural than untouched Northern Saskatchewan, for example.
  - seadan83 3y ago
    Tree farm is basically a solid brick of brown matter with some bushes on the top. The trees are sick, light starved, growing too closely together, and generally a mess. The things that live in tree farms are not nice, rats, it's too thick for anything bigger. This type of environment does not support a food chain. Overall, the trees grow like a group of sickly cotton swabs. Now that I recognize tree farms, I no longer feel quite as bad when I see then clear-cut. They were sick trees that were destined to be cut down.
    - seadan83 3y ago
      Found the pictures, compare the tree farm to the red wood forest: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/the-wrong-kind-of-trees-irelands-afforestation-meets-resistance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/the-wrong-kind... (all the trees you see in the guardian article are tree-farm trees, not just the ones that are clear-cut) https://www.savetheredwoods.org/wp-content/uploads/cr-understory-7001.jpg https://www.savetheredwoods.org/wp-content/uploads/cr-unders... The clear-cut gives a nice cross view into the trees. It's a mess in there.. not much green. It's pretty clear the total available surface area in a natural forest is larger. The forest/nature/plants all optimize themselves to have as much surface area as possible. Loggers optimize for the greatest number of tree trunks and fewest number branches.
- hunter-gatherer 3y ago
  Another point to consider with parent comment is also that newer homes are built are often built with monoculture trees that are younger (as you point out). This wood isn't nearly as dense and won't last as long. A lot of the stick build homes going up now won't last like the home I am living (from 1905) where the wood is from local pines that were hundreds of years old when harvested.
  - rfrey 3y ago
    Is wood density correlated with how long a building will last? In my experience, degradation of wood-framed buildings comes down to one thing: water ingress. And that is independent of how "dense" the studs are. Old growth timber will rot just as quickly as new timber if water gets in, and I suspect new-growth wood will last just as long as old-growth if water is kept out.
    - seadan83 3y ago
      New growth is genetically engineered to grow quickly, in dense conditions, to have short branches & to drop branches quickly. Loggers have optimized for growing tree trunks, not trees. The wood quality is very different from these trees. They are sick. The wood from them is going to warp on you. I suspect that wood density, tree health, warping of lumber, and the resulting new ingresses of water could all be correlated. I'd love to know more if anyone knows more details.
      - rfrey 3y ago
        Your suspicion is incorrect. Warping happens as wood dries due to uneven drying and stresses in the wood. Old growth can be just as stressed as new wood - those stresses arise from winds, growing on a steep grade, etc. And old wood can be incorrectly dried just as new timber can be. The wood will not warp further after it is milled into a 2x4, kiln-dried and installed in a building. It may expand and contract due to humidity changes, but those changes will be minimal within a sealed wall. Timber found in a Home Depot is more warped than wood 50 years ago because of cost-cutting at the kiln and the use of much smaller trees for the mass market. Water penetration into a building is 100% down to the exterior cladding and waterproofing system, it has absolutely nothing to do with the material used for the skeleton of the building. Cladding is done with traditional plywood, which is infinitely better than old-growth diagonal planking used a century ago. Waterproofing is via plastic wraps like HouseWrap or more recently the Zip system where the waterproofing is integral with the sheathing. Houses today may be less durable than houses 100 years ago (although there's huge survivorship bias in that claim), but if they are it will come down to tract houses being built to a very low standard of workmanship. It has nothing to do with old-growth versus new-growth timber.
- KorematsuFredt 3y ago
  I was referring to the comment that said it would take 2500 years to grow "that kind of forest". What I am saying is that it is possible to grow "that kind of forest" if you have money in much shorter time. Tree farming is one way to make the whole thing profitable (and hence sustainable) but it can be designed to resemble a natural forest with sufficient biodiversity and so on. For example we can take a deforested region in Haiti or India or Zimbabwe, grow tree farms on say 10K acres of land and reserve another 10K to grow a more traditional forest. We don't have to wait 2500 years to grow sufficiently large trees which can host wide variety of species of fauna. Even for smaller shrubs and such we can do enough research to grow them faster with help of better irrigantion, enriched soil etc. One of the reason why this does not happen already is because we have reduced the entire topic to zero sum between normal people and tree people. > sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is. I am not sure why such statement should be made. Large homes with huge backyard offers great quality of life in ways the densely packed animal like city human farms can't.

hnbad 3y ago

You're not talking about forests, you're talking about tree farms. Man-made "forests" are monocultures that are extremely susceptible to environmental hazards and the trees are usually intentionally short-lived. In Europe for example there are barely any natural forests left because most so-called forests were planted for pre-modern industrial uses. Forests are good at carbon capture but forests are intricate biotopes with different plants serving different functions and debris from dead trees fulfilling an integral role. Building more homes is definitely important but suburbia is probably one of the worst ways to do this as sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is. It also assumes those homes will last for centuries when most American houses are torn down and rebuilt on much shorter cycles than that. And that doesn't even get into how building more homes generates emmissions first.

Jensson 3y ago
I live in Sweden where most forests are natural, isn't that hard to make those either. Just do nothing with a piece of land and a ton of trees starts to grow, it is hard to not get trees every year you have to go and pull all the new small trees that started growing if you don't want a forest, not sure how it could be hard to plant such forests.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  Forest management is a little more complicated than "just do nothing" with a piece of land. Most of the US lumber stock is under private management; Canada is owned by the crown and licensed to private companies. Lumber is a very expensive, very bulky commmodity, and supply managment needs to balance a lot of market, logistic and environmental factors.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    If you want to make it cheap to cut down, yeah. If you just want a forest that lives there without cutting it down then it isn't hard. Forests doesn't need humans.
hulitu 3y ago
> You're not talking about forests, you're talking about tree farms. I think this is the main issue here. They redefined "tree farms" as "forests" a long time ago, so they can put an equal sign between them. A forest is an ecosystem. A tree farm is not. You cannot regrow a forest.
- Jensson 3y ago
  You can grow a forest, you just do that in a different way than you grow a tree farm. And there isn't a lack of insects and other things to move in once you laid down the foundation for that ecosystem, they are still everywhere in Europe.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  In much of Canada the line is a little blurry. You can usually tell when you're in a replanted block but it could be 50 or more years since they cut it, and it doesn't look like an orchard or christmas tree farm. It really depends where in the country you are; secondary growth in BC can seem far more natural than untouched Northern Saskatchewan, for example.
- seadan83 3y ago
  Tree farm is basically a solid brick of brown matter with some bushes on the top. The trees are sick, light starved, growing too closely together, and generally a mess. The things that live in tree farms are not nice, rats, it's too thick for anything bigger. This type of environment does not support a food chain. Overall, the trees grow like a group of sickly cotton swabs. Now that I recognize tree farms, I no longer feel quite as bad when I see then clear-cut. They were sick trees that were destined to be cut down.
  - seadan83 3y ago
    Found the pictures, compare the tree farm to the red wood forest: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/the-wrong-kind-of-trees-irelands-afforestation-meets-resistance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/the-wrong-kind... (all the trees you see in the guardian article are tree-farm trees, not just the ones that are clear-cut) https://www.savetheredwoods.org/wp-content/uploads/cr-understory-7001.jpg https://www.savetheredwoods.org/wp-content/uploads/cr-unders... The clear-cut gives a nice cross view into the trees. It's a mess in there.. not much green. It's pretty clear the total available surface area in a natural forest is larger. The forest/nature/plants all optimize themselves to have as much surface area as possible. Loggers optimize for the greatest number of tree trunks and fewest number branches.
hunter-gatherer 3y ago
Another point to consider with parent comment is also that newer homes are built are often built with monoculture trees that are younger (as you point out). This wood isn't nearly as dense and won't last as long. A lot of the stick build homes going up now won't last like the home I am living (from 1905) where the wood is from local pines that were hundreds of years old when harvested.
- rfrey 3y ago
  Is wood density correlated with how long a building will last? In my experience, degradation of wood-framed buildings comes down to one thing: water ingress. And that is independent of how "dense" the studs are. Old growth timber will rot just as quickly as new timber if water gets in, and I suspect new-growth wood will last just as long as old-growth if water is kept out.
  - seadan83 3y ago
    New growth is genetically engineered to grow quickly, in dense conditions, to have short branches & to drop branches quickly. Loggers have optimized for growing tree trunks, not trees. The wood quality is very different from these trees. They are sick. The wood from them is going to warp on you. I suspect that wood density, tree health, warping of lumber, and the resulting new ingresses of water could all be correlated. I'd love to know more if anyone knows more details.
    - rfrey 3y ago
      Your suspicion is incorrect. Warping happens as wood dries due to uneven drying and stresses in the wood. Old growth can be just as stressed as new wood - those stresses arise from winds, growing on a steep grade, etc. And old wood can be incorrectly dried just as new timber can be. The wood will not warp further after it is milled into a 2x4, kiln-dried and installed in a building. It may expand and contract due to humidity changes, but those changes will be minimal within a sealed wall. Timber found in a Home Depot is more warped than wood 50 years ago because of cost-cutting at the kiln and the use of much smaller trees for the mass market. Water penetration into a building is 100% down to the exterior cladding and waterproofing system, it has absolutely nothing to do with the material used for the skeleton of the building. Cladding is done with traditional plywood, which is infinitely better than old-growth diagonal planking used a century ago. Waterproofing is via plastic wraps like HouseWrap or more recently the Zip system where the waterproofing is integral with the sheathing. Houses today may be less durable than houses 100 years ago (although there's huge survivorship bias in that claim), but if they are it will come down to tract houses being built to a very low standard of workmanship. It has nothing to do with old-growth versus new-growth timber.
KorematsuFredt 3y ago
I was referring to the comment that said it would take 2500 years to grow "that kind of forest". What I am saying is that it is possible to grow "that kind of forest" if you have money in much shorter time. Tree farming is one way to make the whole thing profitable (and hence sustainable) but it can be designed to resemble a natural forest with sufficient biodiversity and so on. For example we can take a deforested region in Haiti or India or Zimbabwe, grow tree farms on say 10K acres of land and reserve another 10K to grow a more traditional forest. We don't have to wait 2500 years to grow sufficiently large trees which can host wide variety of species of fauna. Even for smaller shrubs and such we can do enough research to grow them faster with help of better irrigantion, enriched soil etc. One of the reason why this does not happen already is because we have reduced the entire topic to zero sum between normal people and tree people. > sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is. I am not sure why such statement should be made. Large homes with huge backyard offers great quality of life in ways the densely packed animal like city human farms can't.