wolfyvegan

“Let’s not do the old plant-and-pray” method, said Hurteau. “Let’s plant where we know that their chance of survival is quite high.”

Forest Service rules generally require planting the same species at the same elevations as before a fire, but the agency will “need to be flexible moving forward,” said Jason Sieg, acting supervisor of the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests & Pawnee National Grassland.

This is important. Finding suitable places to plant the trees can make a big difference in the survival rate. Trying to force plants to grow in a pre-determined location, regardless of current environmental conditions, is basically what industrial agriculture is doing (and using huge quantities of water and fertiliser in order to sustain).

For now, that might mean replanting at different elevations or collecting seeds from another location. Eventually, researchers say it could require planting species not found in an area originally — an option many have resisted.

“I’ve seen people go from saying, ‘Absolutely, we cannot move trees around’ to, ‘Well, maybe let’s try it at least, and do a few experiments to see if this will work,’” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, interim director at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.

“We need to start being creative if we want trees on our landscapes,” she said. “We’re in a place of such drastic climate change that we are not talking about whether or not some of these places will be a different kind of forest, but whether or not they will be forests at all.”

In desperate situations, when the goal is simply to get some type of forest growing back in a particular location, then it's important to choose "the best trees for the job" regardless of where they come from. Usually those will be native species, but not necessarily, especially in very disturbed ecosystems and those severely affected by climate change. If foreign trees aren't likely to pose a threat, then we mustn't discriminate against them; that would be the plant equivalent of speciesism and xenophobia. (If farmers discriminated in such a way, then there would be no peaches in North America, no tomatoes in Europe, no watermelons in Asia, and so on.)

Thank you for taking the time!

Lychee can grow at tropical latitudes, but it needs hot (rainier) summers and (drier) winters w/ 50-150 hours at 0-12°C in order to fruit well, so it's more of a subtropical fruit.

!fruit@slrpnk.net welcomes you!

Capitalism on track to destroy the climate, warns top scientist

general background info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cycle

Thank you for sharing such beautiful words of wisdom in these troubled times.

Even if you cover the whole planet in forests, there is a finite amount of fossil fuels you can burn before it is negated.

I think that this is the crux of the matter, and of course you're right. The total amount of carbon stored in fossil fuels is (presumably, without searching for the numbers) much greater than the amount currently stored in living organisms, so there is a finite amount of fossil fuels that can be burnt before the carbon emissions exceed the capacity of forests/vegetation to capture it. Do you know what that "finite amount of fossil fuels" would be? From what I have seen, it is quite large, though humanity is rapidly approaching it. What's needed is for the rate of emissions to be reduced below the rate of capture, and so a reduction in fossil fuel use is urgently needed, but I wouldn't say that completely eliminating fossil fuel use is more important than protecting forests. All that's needed in the long term is for carbon capture to at least equal carbon emissions. In the short term, the planet is already close enough to the "point of no return" that reforestation is necessary in order to bring down levels of carbon dioxide, regardless of how quickly fossil use ceases. It has to be both. Burning fossil fuels is not a sustainable way to meet the energy needs of 8 billion+ humans. Cutting down forests for biofuel is not a sustainable way to meet the energy needs of 8 billion+ humans. Deforestation for biofuel would be sustainable for a much larger population than would burning fossil fuels (due to the extremely slow renewal rate of fossil fuels), but we're past that point. There's not enough land. Either energy consumption needs to drastically decrease, or non-combustion sources of energy are needed.

I get the impression that we are essentially "on the same side" and just quibbling over details. You make an excellent case against fossil fuels! Looking at it in terms of the broader carbon cycle makes the necessity of ending fossil fuel use very obvious even ignoring any concerns about pollution, destructive extraction practices, or other harmful effects.

I understand what you're getting at, but I don't see it as being so simple.

Fossil fuels are essentially just ancient soil carbon, so in a way, we're talking about the same thing on different time-scales. My point was/is that the combination of deforestation and burning of the cut biomass actually reduces the amount of carbon that can be stored in the soil on a given area of land, not just releasing it once and then recycling it. To capture the same amount of carbon again would require a greater area under management than the area originally cut. On a finite planet, there is a limit to how much this deforestation for biomass production could be scaled up without net-positive emissions. (I'm tired, so this may not be the most articulate.)

The world's forests capture a substantial amount of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans, and extensive reforestation could capture even more. By reducing the carbon capture potential of forests, that's less carbon dioxide absorbed year after year. Over a very long period of time, "releasing it one time" is what burning fossil fuels does: it releases stored carbon once, and then trees and other plants recycle it. Deforestation reduces the recycling.

Even though mature forests can store more total carbon, it seems that young forests, with more small trees, may actually be able to absorb more methane, so there can definitely be some advantage to managing trees for wood production on a short cycle. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so this is one way in which the overall situation is complicated.

Of course, avoiding both deforestation and fossil fuels is even better.

I'm glad that we agree on this point. It doesn't need to be one or the other. The most effective approach to addressing climate change would involve reforestation and eliminating dependence on fossil fuels by developing clean energy technologies.

Ultimately, carbon capture just needs to match carbon emissions (plus a bit extra at first to compensate for current overshoot), and realistically, it will take both reforestation and a reduction in emissions to achieve that. Ending animal agriculture makes the most progress toward both.

One more reason to grow your own food.