The average mature tree weighs more than 2 tons. Carbon makes up approximately 45% of the trees mass, or at least 0.9 tons for a mature tree. Not including the sequestration of leaves that are grown and loss, we can estimate that one tree sequesters at least 1 ton of carbon as it reaches maturity.
Globally, we released about 37,000,000,000 tons of C02 in 2018.
Let’s sequester all the C02 we emit with trees. If a tree takes about 50 years to reach maturity, then we can expect each tree sequestering 0.02 tons of carbon per year (Of course, the sequestration won’t be linear, but whatever.) To sequester all the C02 we emit with new trees, we need to plant 1.8 trillion trees. Trees can be comfortably fit at a density of 1200 trees per hectare, so we need 1.54 billion hectares of land. South Dakota is 1.99 billion hectares. We can likely find the space.
How much will it cost? Arbor Day Foundation is planting trees for teamtrees.org at a cost of $1 per tree, so let’s say $1.8 trillion. If we give ourselves 10 years to do it, then it’ll cost $180 billion per year. On a global scale, that is cheap. Global, we spend $900 billion annually on prescription drugs alone.
Of course, these numbers are estimates, but they aren’t unreasonable estimates. If we plant 1.8 trillion trees, those trees will sequester a non-trivial amount of C02, and it seems we have the capacity to do it.
p.s. I sourced/estimated these numbers on my own. I'm aware of this study. I purposefully haven't read it beyond the abstract yet, but according to articles about it, my conclusion isn't too different.
Update: kleinbl00 peer-review has noted that my South Dakota math is off by two orders of magnitude. The trees seem doable. The land, not so much.
If you just demonstrated that liberal applications of mutherfucking Arbor Day will solve the Crisis Of Our Time I will be alternately annoyed and overjoyed. I'ma run the numbers real quick myself. My google takes me to Quora which takes me to Trees For the Future which has no metrics to speak of but lots of Smiling People of Color. Digging down a little takes me to The Guardian which thinks we need a trillion trees, 1.2 in fact, which need to live on 1.7 billion "hectares", which is some unit used in places that hate freedom, but they say that's the size of the US and China combined, which is hella bigger than South Dakota, so I ask WolframAlpha how big South Dakota is and it gets all sciencey on me and says "1.997x10^7 hectares" at which point I wonder how you dropped not one decimal point but two. So okay I ask google "how much of the world is forest" and it's all "four billion hectares yo" because apparently scientists ALL hate freedom and I go "Okay so basically we need to increase the world's forests by fifty percent." I mean, I'm down. Let's do this. But I'll point out that before you get too carried away your napkinsketch is "South Dakota" and my napkinsketch is "increase the world's forests by fifty percent in the face of global warming and rising sea levels" and I love trees? And I am ALL ABOUT this? But it's a big ask. And that's probably why outfits like this get all pigeon-chested about planting 40 thousand trees even though it's five decimal places from useful.
Goddamnit. I swear I Google conversioned twice to check 77,000 square miles. It’s 19 million hectares. Ok, 100 South Dakotas. We’re fucked. No excuse for sloppy math, but I will say that this is a problem with weird units. I have no sense of a hectare whatsoever.
You might've misread the definition of hectare, (obviously) defined as "100 ares", which my brain wants to read as 100 "acres". But nope, 1 acre = 0.4something hectares. 'Cuz that makes sense. I'm going to try and phase out using the acre (imperial) in favor of the are from now on. This all also makes you realize that the recent 20 million tree-planting campaign was almost entirely symbolic. But we need that, too. edit to ruin Saturday: 1 square mile = 640 acres, and it absolutely infuriates me, because it means that a square with an area of 1 acre has sides of length 1/sqrt(640) miles. A literally irrational number of miles. edit 2: 1/sqrt(640) is curiously close to the conversion between millimeters to inches: 3.953E-2 vs. 3.937E-2, respectively. Anyway, it's best to just think about a square mile as a plot of land 8 acres wide by 80 acres long, and fahgettabout the metric junk propaganda with all the tens of things. Too easy
Another way to look at it. The Amazon is 550 million hectares. It's 16% deforested. That means to restore the Amazon rainforest completely we need to plant 88 million hectares of trees. That's four and a half South Dakotas. And we need to do it soon.
I'm feel it's really important to point out that it's a huge struggle to restore damaged biomes (I once heard a lecturer talk about how a restored prairie might have about a hundred different plant species at best, but a native prairie can literally have thousands) and while replanting trees is important, even more important is preventing further habitat loss. I mean, what's easier? Restoring an antique vase someone smashed with a hammer or putting said vase underneath hammer proof glass?
Hey man, you’re only fucked if you’re poor. Get it straight.
Part of the challenge is, part of the conversation, is what land gets used for that? There's tons of talks that we'd have to give up precious farmland for that, but there's ways to incorporate the two, known as agroforestry and silvopasture. Which, while isn't a total use of the land, it make for interesting balances of the two. There's also concerns about whether or not we need to plant trees in areas they weren't originally part of, like praries and wetlands, and as a result disrupting biomes. Obviously, I'm not a fan of that. Then there's people attempting to plant trees on areas you wouldn't expect, like the "Green Walls" being built around The Sahara and Gobi Deserts. We can't forget urban forestry, of course, either. There's tons more options that I've heard over the years, but I forget them. Anyway, reforesting that much land is a pretty tall order and there's a lot of debate if, saying we could pull it off, whether or not it'd actually be beneficial. elizabeth's comment hints at some of the struggle. In addition to that, countries in the northern atmosphere are starting to look at planting non-native species because native species are struggling to keep up with global warming, and that's just heart breaking. Either way, I'm of the mindset that it's not really possible, but that it's a piece of the puzzle, and a great tool for creative use. When #teamtrees started building more momentum, there were a lot of people saying how 20 million is a drop in the bucket, and it is, but 20 million well placed trees, well cared for, is better than zero trees. 40 thousand well placed trees is better than zero trees, and for the water they filter (some species of oak can filter up to 40,000 gallons of water a year, so they add up), the air they clean, the animals they provide shelter to, those trees have a collective meaning than is greater than their number on paper. I mean, me personally, if I had one more tree in my backyard, one more for the squirrel and songbirds, one more for the leaves and branches and bark and colors for me to admire, that's meaningful right there.
Historically speaking, most of it was trees. Lebanon? Trees. Scotland? Trees. Ireland? Trees. Norway? Trees. Greenland? Trees. Israel? Trees. Australia? Trees. That's the great thing about trees - they're pretty much the steady-state of the plant world. If trees will grow there, trees were what the original ecosystem was. You can see this from the shelterbelt - if trees were supposed to be there, they do well. If they weren't, they need tending. I would further argue that any transition from "damaged" to "less damaged" beats the crap out of "damaged" to "let's argue about what undamaged means until the oceans drown us all" but I'm a pragmatist. This sort of discussion comes up whenever cool ideas like reintroducing sabertooth tigers and shit get introduced - I mean, look. I recognize that you can't say megatheriums belong in Kansas with a straight face. But neither do fucking pigeons so c'mon bring on the ground sloths. I have enough trees on my 1/6th of an acre that I need a 12hp woodchipper to keep up with the pruning. I'm into it. I'm all on board. You're right - any impact is better than no impact. But to make a difference, with existing tech, is gonna be a fuckton of trees. Now - let's pretend we can genetically engineer a HyperOak. It'll suck down 800lbs of CO2 a year. But it's a disturbing shade of neon green and its acorns cause rashes like poison ivy. Should we plant 'em? I say plant 'em. Plant 'em EVERYWHERE. But I'm also aware that the Arab world hates the hell out of Israel for planting trees to restore Israel from being desert.Part of the challenge is, part of the conversation, is what land gets used for that?
I agree with you mostly, but a lot of the land loss to trees has been converted to farmland or other private land use. One of the things people talk about a lot is how to get private landowners to plant more trees, of which there are tons of programs out there experimenting on how to do just that, such as tax abatements and land use credits. But in a lot of places, where once stood trees now stand soybeans or cows or houses and there's economic and practical issues that prevent that land from being converted back. Hence my original comment talking about agroforestry and urban forestry as two different ways to alleviate some of that struggle. But if the new ecosystem is different now, and trees no longer grow there, we need to ask questions such as "why is the ecosystem now different and is that different good or bad" and "would planting trees here be beneficial or detrimental?" The choices and reasons behind them aren't binary, but protecting biodiversity is very important, so questions are often asked like "what plants and animals that are here now, would have difficulty thriving if trees are introduced" or "what trees, if introduced, would create environments for destructive animals and diseases to thrive?" The shelterbelt link is interesting, just because some of that area looks to be near the great plains. The reason I find that interesting is because when we lost all of the bison, trees started to sprout up because there weren't millions of giant herbivores around anymore to keep them from growing. So while they're not abundant, they're more common than they used to be, and there are unintended results from that. It's been suggested that these few extra trees here and there were enough to give the barred owl a bridge from the Eastern States to the Western States where it is now establishing itself and is starting to crowd out native western species like the spotted owl.Historically speaking, most of it was trees. Lebanon? Trees. Scotland? Trees. Ireland? Trees. Norway? Trees. Greenland? Trees. Israel? Trees. Australia? Trees. That's the great thing about trees - they're pretty much the steady-state of the plant world. If trees will grow there, trees were what the original ecosystem was. You can see this from the shelterbelt - if trees were supposed to be there, they do well. If they weren't, they need tending.
If trees will grow there, trees were what the original ecosystem was.
Another perspective on the same events: We didn't lose the bison, we exterminated them, deliberately, in order to starve out the Comanche. Once we starved out the Comanche, we were able to convince the poor and downtrodden of the East Coast to expand into the Great American Desert. Once we'd expanded into the Great American Desert and turned it into "the Great Plains", we encouraged people with no idea about farming to cut up all the buffalo grass and plant corn and wheat. Which, once it stopped raining, led to massive desertification and the only way we had any clue about controlling it was the Shelterbelt, still our largest public works project even after 100 years of the Army Corps of Engineers went about damming every body of water more than a few inches wide. "Converted to farmland or other private land use" doesn't make that land use holy, it makes it inefficient. Governments generally subsidize annual cereal crops because they're portable and can be stored. Governments generally reserve perennials for luxury because you have to be a wealthy mutherfucker to plant an apple orchard and know you won't see a dime for six years. We've spent $113b on corn subsidies since 1995. Using "20 million trees" metrics, that's 113 billion trees - ten percent of the number mk landed on - just from corn subsidies. A little math: one cow in Brazil requires one hectare. One cow in Brazil pulls down 23 real per kilo - or $6. U of Oklahoma figures you're looking at 430lbs of viable meat per steer, or 195 kilos, so you're looking at a market price of $1200 per hectare per cow. Cattle mature after eighteen months so you're looking at $800 per hectare per year. $70b a year to lock off the 16% of Brazilian amazon to replant it is one tenth what the US spent on defense in 2018. It's three times what NATO is budgeted for. It's 3% of Brazil's GDP. here's the thing: if the wealthy nations of the world decided to lock off vast swaths of the Amazon in trust? You'd see some real change. Shit, if we got all the ranchers and cattle farmers to stop raising cattle and subsidized the planting of perennials we'd likely be golden. And no matter how long something's been farmland, it wasn't farmland to start with and it wasn't farmed by anyone further back than that farmer's grandfather. We don't need to ask any of these questions because simply asking them presumes that there's some sort of ancestral right to grow cattle in countries that didn't even have cattle eight generations ago. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go buy some beef.we need to ask questions such as "why is the ecosystem now different and is that different good or bad" and "would planting trees here be beneficial or detrimental?
So, this is gonna cover a lot and hopefully not be all over the place. I was out bird watching today and my head kept turning and connecting dots and there are a lot of dots. I agree with you in spirit in a lot of things, but probably come from a different philosophical place, though I think even philosophically we’re pretty in tune here. Maybe not. I dunno. Let me pump out some words and we’ll see. One of my concerns when it comes to private land and rededicating it to ecological recovery, whether we’re talking forests, or otherwise, is that it can often be a touchy issue even when it doesn’t seem like it should be. I’ve read about projects, both local and across the world, that are pretty reasonable on the surface, like repurposing golf courses, empty lots, what have you, and they’ve often butted up against resistance. For agricultural land in particular, I could see resistance ratcheted up for quite a few reasons. The biggest one is economics. Agricultural land isn’t just a source of income for the people who own them, but they’re also engines for communities they’re a part of. We see this dwindling a bit in America, where rural areas are struggling, and I think corporate farms are partly to blame. More on that in a second though. The other reason there could be a lot of vocal resistance is that we put a lot of stock as to who we are in our land, the resources on it, and how we choose to use those resources. Our land is often tied to not only our economic identity, but our national, cultural, and religious identity as well. Historically speaking, one of the ways governments have wrecked communities, intentionally or not, is through messing with land and the resources on it. The bison are an extreme, but appropriate example of this. If we were to repurpose land for ecological recovery, whether we’re talking about a cornfield out in Iowa or a vacant lot in New York City, it’s really important that we collaborate with the landowners as well as the communities that are invested in that land, and it’s really important that we approach these collaborations with honesty and compassion, because if people feel like they’re not being heard or worse, that they’re being threatened, they’re not gonna react positively and instead of taking steps forward, we could be taking steps back. There’s a aspects to this collaboration, from economic and legal incentives (like what you’re saying with the Amazon and Brazil), to educating people on why repurposing the land is beneficial to a certain community in a certain instance(say, storm water management), to most importantly, making sure that the land owners and community understand how and why they’re an active part in these projects and why these projects are beneficial. As a related aside, my wife and I listen to a podcast about urban forestry from time to time, where the host interviews everyone from urban planners to landscapers to architects. It’s an awesome podcast, despite some questionable production choices (like having conversations in restaurants), but the conversations are amazing. Recently, we were listening to one about developers who build houses and apartments and such, and that despite a good landscape improves property values, a lot of developers don’t feel that they have a long term economic incentive to properly implement landscape. I’ll actually touch on this a bit. So, corporate farms. I’m gonna lay my bias right out. I don’t like them for a lot of reasons. The biggest is, I do not like a lack of diversity, whether we’re talking about nature or business, because the less diversity there is, the less resilience there is. If you were to ask me “Hey, applewood, what would you say if the government overnight decided to grab a significant portion of all corporate farmland for ecological redevelopment?” I’d probably have a knee-jerk squeal of glee at the thought. Upon further inspection, I don’t think I’d like the legal ramifications, no matter how it would work out. I’m pretty wary of land grabs. Anyway. One of the reasons why collaboration and community investment are actually really important, is that they bake in a sense of investment, and with that, a sense of honesty. One of the real struggles we’re working with, in land development (circling back to those developers), in forestry, in mining, or what have you, is pretty crumby follow through. Here in America, and the world over. A lot of the time what happens is, we have laws, contracts, or other agreements that say one thing on paper with an intended outcome, but companies see it sufficient to do what they can to make sure all the check boxes are filled in, even if the end results are what’s intended in spirit. As a result, we often have waterways that aren’t properly cleaned, soil that isn’t properly restored, trees that aren’t planted in a way to ensure that they’ll survive, what have you. I think long term, community oriented projects, would prevent a lot of that, because there’d be at the very least, an emotional incentive to do things right, if not economic and legal incentives as well. Either way, landowners and the communities around them have rights, and that includes the right to self determination and to have a voice. I think it’s really important that we do what we can to ensure that they make healthy, well reasoned choices. I think this was a failure of assuming you understood what I was saying without me being detailed. When I talk about these questions, it’s not just in regard to agricultural land or a private lot in a city or a country club somewhere that’s gone out of business, or what have you. It’s literally anywhere. For example, there are lots of land out there that are currently contain prairies, dunes, marshlands, or what have you that have been that way for hundreds if not thousands of years without human interference that could possibly play host to some types of trees somehow. For these areas, if there’s a desire to plant trees there (and I hope, more often than not there isn’t), these questions are really important. These places are unique biomes and they play important roles in biodiversity. Planting trees there, might throw things off. One of the things that I see, when I read and hear and participate in conversations, is that people tend to think of planting trees as the goal of reducing CO2 first, and everything else is secondary. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, if nothing else than for the fact that by digging up and burning all of these fossils fuels, we’ve put millions of years worth of sequestered carbon into the air and trees aren’t gonna cut it. Your math post illustrated this really well. What is important though, is that not only do trees play a role in CO2 sequestration, they play a central role in participating in biodiversity. A lot of us, me included a lot of the time, talk and think about global warming and climate change as if it’s about to happen, when in fact, it’s happened. It’s not waiting at our doorstep, it hijacked a bulldozer, drove straight through our wall, and said “I’m here! What’s for dinner!” Where biodiversity comes into play, is that it allows nature a resilience to global warming. The more diverse our environments, the more diverse the species within them, and the more diverse the genetic variation among those species, the better ecosystems are protected from collapse. Unfortunately, we can’t just plant a bunch of trees everywhere and think the problem is solved. Trees by themselves, aren’t the answer. If we look at tree plantations for example, whether we’re talking for forestry or for agriculture, this is readily apparent. To me, they’re one step away from being wastelands. Yeah, trees are growing, but it might only be one or two species of trees, and there’s not much else there, plants or animals. If we plant trees with ecological recovery in mind though, then it’s less “trees” and more “forests,” less “monoculture” and more “ecological landscape.” Somewhere in this whole thread of mk’s, I mentioned how protecting what we already have is easier than trying to rebuild what we lost, and this kind of ties into that. The other problem we face, is that we have to be very careful with planting trees and make sure we’re planting the right ones, in the right environments. Trees, like any other living thing, have certain requirements to thrive. A tree that can grow really well in a certain area, might grow horribly in another area. Or worse, it might grow too well, and before we know it, it’s out competing other flora for resources, crowding out local species, or playing host to other types of plants, animals, bacterias, or fungis that could wreak havoc, and suddenly, what was a good hearted attempt to make things better, has actually made things worse by throwing off ecological balances. That’s one of the reasons why I really liked the whole #teamtrees effort that went on. The Arbor Day Foundation works really hard to not only make sure the right kinds of trees are planted in the right areas, but they work collaboratively with governments and public and private organizations. I think more importantly though, even if it’s only for a brief moment in history, is that they inspired a whole number of people to care and take action, and I think that the good will and the awareness that they have cultivated through this project can be built upon. Inspiration and enthusiasm are infectious, after all. I hope this isn’t too long, I tried to focus and trim this down a lot, and there’s tons of ways this conversation could branch things out.we need to ask questions such as "why is the ecosystem now different and is that different good or bad" and "would planting trees here be beneficial or detrimental?
There are two key places where we differ: economics and biodiversity. We differ here because your viewpoint is one of either/or, whereas mine is subsantially more nuanced. First, economics: Your discussion of land and its use touches on land use and "repurpose" and "engines for communities". The real world isn't like that. For example, when I was looking at land in Whatcom County, WA two of the big things that were never mentioned in real estate listings but were vitally important to the property were CREP and development swaps. CREP is a federal program administered by counties. In Whatcom County it kicks ass. You literally say "dear Whatcom County, I would like to sell you back your river." Whatcom County comes in, does an assessment, plants a shit-ton of native species and gives you CA$H MONEY$$$ in perpetuity so long as you promise to keep your cows away from the "riparian buffer" and observe the stewardship that they're paying you for. CREP in Whatcom County is no joke - they'll pay you $560 an acre per year to keep a buffer next to your stream. CREP in most places is a total joke: the next county over will pay you back for planting your own trees if you promise to never cut them down. Development swaps are similarly toothy in Whatcom County - you can pay someone to never farm their farmable land in exchange for being allowed to develop another part of land that shouldn't be developable. I saw all sorts of "farms" where you could never again plant a crop, which no realtor on the planet felt a need to disclose. Someone with bucks decided that it was worth paying double for the land so they could build a Starbuck's or whatever. And they had to do this because Whatcom County considers the land valuable. Skagit County? No fucks given. It comes down to incentive: the voters of Whatcom County have incentivized river conservation, at least. They're willing to pay for it because enough of them have been convinced that without rivers there are no salmon and without salmon there are no fishing jobs. Cows next to rivers has externalities that the voters of Whatcom County have labored to capture. Chances are good, however, that if Con Agra decided that they were going to start farming in Whatcom County there'd be a different outcome. Here's the thing: I benefit if there are clean rivers in Whatcom County even if I don't eat salmon. I benefit from clean rivers in Skagit County, too. But they're one and two counties over, respectively, so I don't really have a voice in that discussion. Should I? Should more of my tax dollars go into CREP programs for Whatcom and Skagit County in order to better incentivize clean rivers? You know what started the Malheur standoff? land management. The argument that the forest service knows better how to manage land than the ranchers who ranch cattle on it. The way the laws are written, pretty much anyone can graze cattle on public land, and pretty much no one can graze cattle on wildlife preserves. Malheur has been a beefing spot for 50 years because there's fewer places to ranch cattle because more and more public land has been developed. BUT, since the ranchers get the land pretty much for free, when the government takes it away nobody gets paid. This causes strife very much like what you're talking about. But we don't buy out ranching permits. And we don't buy out water rights. And we don't buy out mineral rights. We just go "hey, you might have been holding that for 100 years but since you got it for free, that must be what it's worth" while also knowing that if we create a bigger national forest we get it for free anyway. And who doesn't like national forests? The mechanism causes exactly the problems you describe: families whose trades have been plied for generations find themselves suddenly out of a job while guys with Sierra Club bumper stickers on their Teslas talk about "costs of progress". The Market giveth and the Market taketh away. And for some dumb reason the Market is expected to work without money. You know why ranchers cut down the Amazon? Because a former Amazon makes them money for raising cattle while an Amazon full of trees does not. If you pay a man not to work he will not work with all his might but nobody wants to buy off the Hammonds, nobody wants to buy off the gauchos, nobody wants to buy off the guys with the mineral rights. It happens, though. When I was a kid I couldn't go to the Valle without fearing buckshot in my ass. Now? Now they film TV shows there. Here's what I know. You can own land? But you can't own an ecology. If you're using land for something that isn't so great for the environment, then we ALL have an economic incentive to make you stop doing that. The person who needs to be incentivized the most is the person who is damaging the environment, but we rely pretty heavily on sticks not carrots. None of my tax dollars are going to preventing the deforestation of the Amazon, and not nearly enough of Brazil's tax dollars are, either, even though it's making the air we breathe. And that, I think, is the biggest change we're going to have to embrace: we can't just say "this is forest land, nobody is allowed to touch it anymore" we have to say "this is NOW forest land, here's some money for your troubles now let's figure out how you can make a living doing something other than running cattle on it." 'cuz here's the thing. It's not like we need to go back to nineteen diggity two. There is absolutely no need to plant trees where there weren't trees even a hundred years ago. If we can get back to 1955 we'll be kicking ass. When you say biodiversity you're talking about organisms that evolved for that biome... but you're also missing that forests have the highest biodiversity. Go out to the Olympic rainforest some time. Drive out towards the ocean. What you'll discover is that really, the exact same critters are in the fields as are in the forests but in the forests there are also thousands of critters that don't like fields. And really? That shit goes back to 1945. One of the arguments made in the Uninhabitable Earth is that 80% of the environmental damage of global warming has been caused within the lifetimes of the people inhabiting the planet RIGHT NOW. So we don't need to fuck with the snail darters. Nobody is here to destroy biomes. Personally, I'm here to argue that people say "tradition" as a way to argue the problem is thornier than it really is because fuckin' hell I come from a long line of lumberjacks who had to try something else when all the trees were cut down and my grandfather was perfectly happy spending his life as a plumber. Shit, he owned five acres. No water rights, though. He had to steal it.
Development swaps are similarly toothy in Whatcom County - you can pay someone to never farm their farmable land in exchange for being allowed to develop another part of land that shouldn't be developable. I saw all sorts of "farms" where you could never again plant a crop, which no realtor on the planet felt a need to disclose. Someone with bucks decided that it was worth paying double for the land so they could build a Starbuck's or whatever. And they had to do this because Whatcom County considers the land valuable. Skagit County? No fucks given. We have similar programs around here, similar, but different, and a lot of them have similar struggles as well. It reminds me a lot about companies not following through on land cleanups and such, where the laws and contracts come from a good place, but there's flaws in implementation and enforcement. You mentioned carrots and sticks later on in your comment, and my previous comment was pretty carrot heavy, but honestly? Sometimes I think we need more sticks. There's a lot of sideways tomfoolery out there, not just with the environment, but in general, and I think part of it is because a lot of people who do wrong or decide to be just plain careless think that nobody is looking or that if they get caught, no one is really gonna do anything. Sadly, I feel like that's often the case. I cannot answer for you, obviously, but I think you answered it a bit here . . . I can answer for me though, and I'd say yes to all of that. While I don't think I should have as direct of a voice as someone who lives in a county opposite of me, knowing that what happens to a river a hundred miles upstream of me or what happens to the air a hundred miles upwind of me can affect me and my neighbors? I think I should have some voice in what goes on, and I do, through my state and federal representatives. If I have to share in some of the social burden of other people's decisions, I should have some say in what decisions are made and why. When I get to use my voice and how strong it gets to be, well, I dunno. One of the things I left out of my comment, cause I had way too many thoughts and a lot of them were hard to squeeze in, is that I think we're at the point where we can no longer shrug and turn a blind eye to our interconnectedness and the impact of our decisions. For better or worse, how we live our lives affect others, from the things we say to the things we buy to the foods we eat, so it's important to be mindful of our choices. It lead me to thinking quite a bit about "private land" and "public land" and all of those things and it's got me to wondering if maybe we're starting to go things out wrong way. I don't know what it would look like, economically or legally, but I wonder what would happen if we started to discourage individual land ownership and started to encourage collective land ownership. For one thing, I think it would do a lot to diffuse power, thereby reduce the risk of harm caused by a handful of individuals making unhealthy decisions, like strip mining or clear cutting, or what have you. I think at the same time, I wonder if collective ownership would spread the wealth around a bit, so to speak, and through that would encourage people to be more active and engaged and concerned with what happens with the land around them and why. But then, I dunno, in a world with misinformation campaigns and information overload, can we really trust ourselves as groups to make healthy decisions? That last difficult question aside, I think there's another good thing that would come with that, and I think that would be for reincentivizing us to connect with our land. I think part of why we've gotten lost these days is two fold. First, I think for a lot of us (me included sometimes) we think nature is something over there. It's in the park across town, the land preserves controlled by the county, the rainforests in South America or Africa, the great oceans. But nature's not just over there it's also very much right here wherever that might be. It's in our houses and apartments and places of work, in our cars, in our backyards and patios and driveways and parking lots. I think the more we realize it's "right here and now" the more we treat it as immediate and important and give it the gravity it deserves. I think additionally, we don't treat land as important as it is, maybe because we all seem to own less and less. Maybe by owning more and through that sense of ownership and responsibility and community, we'd make healthier decisions. I could rant for forever about corporate food. For the sake of brevity though, I'll just list some bullet points. Feel free to pick one out if you want to talk about it at all. 1) Too much concentration of wealth and power. 1a) Controls the market instead of being controlled by the market. 1b) The idea of food companies being too big to fail disturbs me. 2) Destroys local communities and economies. 3) Divorces us from our relationship to food. 4) Promotes monoculture crops and all the risks that comes from those. 5) Large corporations are just icky and I don't like them. Forests have pretty high biodiversity and I love them for it. The majority of the time, when I got outside, I spend it in the forests. But at the same time, forests have different biodiversity too. The organisms that inhabit them are often different than organisms elsewhere. The types of birds you'll see in forests aren't always the types of birds you'll see in grasslands or marshlands and vice versa. If I saw a woodpecker out in the prairie, I'd assume it was lost. If I saw a sandpiper in the deep woods, I'd assume the same. Same for rodents, bugs, what have you. There's some overlap, but there's also a lot of differences too. Really diverse is really good, but that also includes other biomes. Niches are created and filled by accident. but they have an undeniable gravity to them. I hope you don't think I'm clinging to tradition to justify inertia. I'm certainly not. If anything, I'd say the more we become aware of ourselves and the world around us, the more important it is for us to be introspective about our traditions and think real hard about the impacts they have on our lives. That said, lots of people do hold steadfast to tradition, and not just when it comes to the environment and land use, and if we're to make changes, we need to know that traditions can be both an aid as well as a hurdle, depending on the tradition and its execution and context and all that. This feels like it is a little less focused than my previous comment. I apologize in advanced. I didn't have the benefit of a three hour walk to help me write it. :)CREP is a federal program administered by counties. In Whatcom County it kicks ass. You literally say "dear Whatcom County, I would like to sell you back your river." Whatcom County comes in, does an assessment, plants a shit-ton of native species and gives you CA$H MONEY$$$ in perpetuity so long as you promise to keep your cows away from the "riparian buffer" and observe the stewardship that they're paying you for. CREP in Whatcom County is no joke - they'll pay you $560 an acre per year to keep a buffer next to your stream. CREP in most places is a total joke: the next county over will pay you back for planting your own trees if you promise to never cut them down.
I benefit from clean rivers in Skagit County, too. But they're one and two counties over, respectively, so I don't really have a voice in that discussion. Should I? Should more of my tax dollars go into CREP programs for Whatcom and Skagit County in order to better incentivize clean rivers?
Here's what I know. You can own land? But you can't own an ecology. If you're using land for something that isn't so great for the environment, then we ALL have an economic incentive to make you stop doing that. The person who needs to be incentivized the most is the person who is damaging the environment, but we rely pretty heavily on sticks not carrots.
Chances are good, however, that if Con Agra decided that they were going to start farming in Whatcom County there'd be a different outcome.
but you're also missing that forests have the highest biodiversity. Go out to the Olympic rainforest some time. Drive out towards the ocean. What you'll discover is that really, the exact same critters are in the fields as are in the forests but in the forests there are also thousands of critters that don't like fields.
Personally, I'm here to argue that people say "tradition" as a way to argue the problem is thornier than it really is because fuckin' hell I come from a long line of lumberjacks who had to try something else when all the trees were cut down and my grandfather was perfectly happy spending his life as a plumber.
We're basically discussing incentives at this point. Carrot, stick, subsidy, penalty, it's all incentives. Incentives and externalization. Milton Friedman argued that if people actually gave a shit about the environment then environmental laws would be a lot harder to circumvent; they aren't, ergo decent capitalists owe their shareholders their absolute best efforts to extract as much value from the environment as possible, future generations be damned. The problem is when your law and your incentive don't line up. Sure - you can make it illegal to use water destined for Texas to irrigate your patch of beans (I think it was green beans, as opposed to pintos, for my grampa) but if you can make a feel-good movie about how awesome it is to steal water rights from unscrupulous land developers, you're not going to get much in the way of enforcement. And when the interior of Brazil thinks that Bolonsaro is giving the double fingers to American globalists by encouraging Brazilian cattle-ranching, Brazilian cattle-ranching will continue. This, I think, is why the Green New Deal is a step in the right direction: Chinese solar panels dominate the market because the Chinese subsidized the ever-living fuck out of solar panel development and sales. America didn't because Coal and Oil. Our modern farm subsidy landscape belongs to Pearl Harbor and the Cold War, neither of which are relevant, and reorganizing our subsidy structure would go a long way towards improving the world. Reorganizing the world's subsidy structure would go a long way towards improving the world. All we need is the right carrots and sticks.
Is there something that needs to happen after the tree dies to move it out of the carbon cycle? Lots of work to bury them, but if they just pile up until a first fire comes through it wouldn't effectively sequester much.
I haven't looked into how much of the carbon stays in the soil and how much is recycled into other organisms as they decompose. I'm just remembering how fire makes carbon & other nutrients available again in some ecosystems and wondering if there are fungus and bacteria that do the same in ecosystems without fire. If I'm remembering right, most fossil fuels started in bogs or other aquatic places where plant matter was buried before the usual decomposition happened.
Right. But the carbon still had to be in the deposit. At this point I'm speculating that if the trees in a forest [no fires] sequester X tons per year for Y years [longer than lifetime of trees], the Total Sequestered Carbon << X×Y, unless something is done to prevent typical decay. I think most of the carbon cycles and not much is sequestered once the forest is mature. Though now I'm realizing that the zero-to-maturity sequestration is probably more important than the post-forest-maturity sequestration.
Not a mycologist, but I've heard some speak, and fungus is a major component in breaking down biomass, especially wood.fungus
I remember reading somewhere that planting trees above a certain latitude is counter-productive because the dark green of trees absorb sunlight, effectively warming the earth vs reflecting the sunlight back into space if it was bare ground. Something called the albedo effect. But I truly don’t know enough about ecology to judge if it’s total BS or an actual concern about being more mindful of re-forestation efforts and do it right.
quick somebody get cornell university on the line