Environment & Energy
Related: About this forum"We'll Just Plant Trees"- How Did Monoculture "Reforestation" Work Out For Canada?
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Cameron, like many Canadians, once spent a summer working for the forestry industry replanting clearcut land with seedling pines. In the early 1990s, I worked as a tree planter in northern Ontario. This was a common if notoriously grueling rite of passage for Canadian university students, since it allowed you to make good money while spending a few months outdoors with other like-minded young people. I was driven in part by the idealistic view that planting a tree was always going to be better than not planting one.
In retrospect, this wasnt true. Forestry experts understand that a monoculture of trees like the black spruce saplings we were planting, six feet apart in neat rows has made wildfires more likely, and much worse when they occur. Planting nothing but one species of tree in a landscape that has been stripped of every other species is not recreating a forest. Its planting a cash crop, no different from plowing up a meadow supporting hundreds of different plants and planting nothing but corn. Youd never mistake a cornfield for a meadow, but its easy to look at a bunch of trees and think youre seeing a forest.
Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them gas on a stick. The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil. In Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, an investigation of the devastating wildfire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, John Vaillant laid out how climate change had turned some forests into combustible time bombs, where drought conditions, noonday heat and a stiff wind can turn a black spruce tree into something closer to a blowtorch.
In a naturally occurring forest, black spruce is often found in a mix with trees like aspen and poplar, which are full of moisture and provide a natural resistance to fire. But as a report by the Forest Practices Board of British Columbia pointed out, Large homogeneous patches of forest are more likely to lead to large and severe wildfires. A forest is not just a bunch of trees. The forestry industry likes to greenwash what it does as being sound stewardship of the land, that it manages forests to keep them healthy. What they actually do is turn a complex ecosystem into a uniform product that can be easily harvested, grown to size in minimum time at minimum expense for maximum profit. Thats not a living forest; its a bio-factory assembly line. A natural forest is a complex interlocking system of different species of plants, animals, and fungi, shaped by factors like soil, water, and climate. Its messy.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/15/2193439/-When-good-intentions-turn-out-badly-Canadian-wildfires-in-the-context-of-planting-bomb-trees
Think. Again.
(15,636 posts)...monoculture is never a good thing.
Diversity is key in a system that depends on...well... diversity.
ms liberty
(9,562 posts)The natural form and progression of forest growth is revealed in the regrowth, and it is really cool. I hate those pine fields, we do have some here, but many of them were planted after Hugo, so they're at the end of their natural life span, if they aren't already gone for other reasons.
When we built here, our 2 acres had been a field with a thick strip of mature pines and brush along the back edge. Over the years, oaks, maples, and a couple of dogwoods came up in the understory and the pines were aging out. After a couple of years of losing one here and one there, we had all the rest (38 in total - not cheap) taken down about three years ago. What we kept were all the oaks, maples, dogwoods, so now we have some nice hardwoods that are all at least 15' tall along the back of our property.
paleotn
(18,770 posts)The regimented, longleaf pine plantations. Ugh. In our part of NC, various pines and black locust were colonizers of open spaces. We cleaned a ton of them out of a brush choked pasture back in the 2000's. One thing I do miss since we moved way north is redbud and dogwood. The harbingers of Spring and Summer.
hatrack
(60,312 posts)That is, just leave something alone and give it time.
TheRickles
(2,285 posts)jaxexpat
(7,428 posts)Long term experiments play out in long timespans. Regarding the humans, their era of supremacy is not indefinite.
Magoo48
(4,990 posts)CCExile
(513 posts)It is wildly expensive and machine, resource, and labor intensive, and not reasonably scalable. Save what'cha got!
mopinko
(71,367 posts)ive had a hard time keeping up w my property since the plague hit. it is absolutely amazing to me to watch the progression- the thistles close the scars, the grasses come in, then the seedlings take hold. clearing a patch now that has been idle for about 5 yrs. has mulberries, cottonwoods, silver maples, tree of heaven. and pokeberry as big as a house. i need my skidsteer to clear it.
instead of planting trees, you just need to curate the 1s that come up on their own. if u stay on top of it, its not hard. takes a couple yrs b4 u even need a shovel.
turn your back, tho
hatrack
(60,312 posts)At that time it was scabby, beat-up land, with post oaks and hickories, hackberries and walnuts about as big around as an adult's thigh, maybe 30' tall.
60 years later, after pretty much leaving it alone except for harvesting fallen trees for firewood, and an aggressive KILL THE HONEYSUCKLE campaign I've been waging for about five years now, it's just amazing. Not climax forest (not yet) but beautiful and home to many critters, mushrooms, wildflowers and more.
We'll have to sell the property and the house that sits on it someday. TBH, I'll regret selling the land more than the house - it's beautiful and a lesson brought to life about the power of leaving things alone..
mopinko
(71,367 posts)next time i get hassled about weeds, i shd make a nice arrangement and deliver to the alders office.
have a friend who has a flower booth at a great weekly farmers market. every now and then i pick him a couple buckets of lovely. always sells out.
mopinko
(71,367 posts)1 was insect diversity, early on in the project. grad student put yellow stickies in lawns, gardens, community gardens and urban farms. urban farms came out on top, inc mine.
i touched off a whole universe, it seems. yes critters, so many garter snakes, about 2 doz fungi, and clouds of pollinators.
and about 20 semi loads of topsoil, made of dead trees. all sequestered for a couple decades. the kind of soil that makes me want to make a pie. (yes, i was that kid.)
honeysuckle 😖. We never planted it, it smells nice, but so invasive. Seems like the more we try to get rid of it, even more comes back.
hatrack
(60,312 posts)Main problem here is Amur (shrub) honeysuckle. Dense-packed enough to totally block the understory.
The good news is that it's easy to spot, easy to pull out when young, and burns well when cut and dried.
RandomNumbers
(18,059 posts)that want what they want, and have just enough brain capacity to screw up the rest of the world while they get it, but not enough to figure out this planet won't support that many of them doing all that?
Edit to add: not to detract from the importance of the original post. Followed to logical conclusions, it simply comes back to too many people, being too destructive, and not knowing or not caring what they do.
BlueIn_W_Pa
(842 posts)that's why my efforts are moving to what I can do locally, and we'll need to adapt to the changing climate - more for some than others
No one in the US can control the emissions from the whole world, so concentrate on pollution, reducing consumption and bringing back nature
This just came across my desk this morning:
https://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2023/09/16/usda-grant-tree-planting-pittsburgh-allegheny-county/stories/202309150099
This unprecedented infusion of money to grow the tree canopy comes from the Federal Inflation Reduction Act and is the largest climate investment in history, according to the USDA announcement Thursday.
Nationally, more than $1 billion will pay to plant and maintain trees in disadvantaged communities to protect against extreme heat and climate change and improve access to nature.
RandomNumbers
(18,059 posts)At this point it won't be enough on its own, but it would reduce the suffering and delay the inevitable catastrophe for humans. The catastrophe for the rest of the biosphere is well underway, but who knows, maybe someday enough people with enough power will get a clue and find some way to slow it down and eventually stop it.
4lbs
(7,196 posts)plants, trees, and shrubs. That isn't including the grass, or all the insects that live in or near them.
If a fire were to ever hit my area, one can't simply re-plant some grass, a few tree saplings, and call it a day.
It would need to be recreated as closely as possible to the original ecosystem balance (that was achieved over a few decades). Otherwise, some necessary insects that only thrive with certain plant types, won't return.
Think about a larger area, like a park, and how many different types of plants and trees exist in it. Now, if it were wiped out, and one needed to try to recreate that, it would be a time-consuming complex process.
PatrickforB
(14,946 posts)This is yet another reason we need to change the rules of corporate governance so they hold the interests of workers, consumers and all life on the planet of equal value to shareholder profits.
I don't know if you saw the CNN vid of the GM CEO, but this woman makes $30 million a year - 362 times what her companies median employee makes and she has no fucking clue why the UAW wants to go on strike.
Just one example, but in these corporations, everything they do is looked at through the lens of shareholder profits. Planting these spruce trees in neat rows allows the timber company to pay lip service to 'managing the forests,' but the reality is cash crop, just like the post says.
Shareholder primacy capitalism is literally destroying the habitability of this planet.
Snackshack
(2,541 posts)More hubris on our part to think that a Forest is so simple all we need to do is replant trees to replace the other trees we have gobbled up for fire and infrastructure over the last 1000s of years and it will be fine. Its seems like it would be fairly obvious
if you grow a forest like you build a campfire that would not be optimal nor using all on the same tree, because that tree had value to us
not really the Forest beyond being a Tree.
Same hubris that makes us think sinking a warship when we are done with it is a good thing. Like we are giving back some of what we have taken. We now know micro plastic have invaded every Ocean on the planets and we found this almost by mistake. Because we had no inkling that micro plastics were even a thing until recently. Odds that there is more we dont know but think we do are astoundingly high.
We are learning now that the Flora in Flora & Fauna is every bit as interactive and interconnected as the Fauna is. There are plant organism just under the surface that are the size of some states. A show on PBS about Fractals that I found amazing showed that there is a social network in a Forest. There are no narcissists Trees that try to take all the resources. Even though seed placing is random every tree has almost the amount of small, med, large branches. There is some form of communication that goes on in all plants and trees. There is a video on you tube of a 30 day time lapse of a 4 or 5 shelf unit with 4- 5 plants on each shelf. Watching it is amazing how the plants spin around looking for something to attached and spread to. It is beautiful to see. I use think that trees lost their leaves in Winter because it was just the way it is. But the tree in a way decides when this happens by shutting off the water to its leaves and Photosynthesis is simply a process that one should stand back in sheer appreciation for. We struggle to find clean energy processes the Flora on this Earth has it as a by product of existence.
Time will tell if we are really as smart as we think we are or if Nature is right now winding up to drop a weather hammer on us like we have never seen. I am confident that we are about to get the Hammer
we are never as smart as we think we are.
NoMoreRepugs
(10,231 posts)Our level of stupid could be catching.
Martin68
(24,056 posts)when I went on a seaplane fight over the same territory and saw the hundreds of thousands of acres were clearcut within 200 yards of the lakes and streams we were traveling. All to be replanted in a pine mono-culture or left to regenerate on its own.
https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/cutting-it-close-logging-canadas-boreal-report.pdf
VGNonly
(7,618 posts)because we regard it as a commodity. When we see land as a community of which we belong, we may begin to use with love and respect-Aldo Leopold
BobTheSubgenius
(11,724 posts)If any trees survive a wildfire, it will be Douglas fir; on a mature specimen, the bark is inches thick, and doesn't burn like heartwood. They are relatively fast-growing trees, and will crowd out other species by blocking the sunlight and making water hard to come by for them.
They also have branches that begin spreading out from the trunk very high off the ground. An exemplar near my former home on Vancouver Island had its first branch 55 feet off the ground. Douglas fir often ends up creating a monoculture of its own.
All of that is not to say that intentional monoculture forests are a good idea, and are often poorly executed.
Fun Fact: The name "Douglas fir" has nothing at all to do with "Pouch of Douglas."
VGNonly
(7,618 posts)entire webs of life. Even weather and rainfall patterns develop, such as fog and dew in redwoods. I was recently in the Hoh River rainforest in WA. If that forest were cutdown, it would take many centuries if not a thousand years to spring back, if it grows back at all.
BobTheSubgenius
(11,724 posts)How did people not see this decades ago?
VGNonly
(7,618 posts)But who has time to worry about it...
BobTheSubgenius
(11,724 posts)My core is tight, and I think that's really good.