> Not surprisingly, those locals often reacted badly. For example, in northern Malawi, they broke fences and burned a growing forest to get back the common grazing land on which the trees had been planted. In two Nigerian projects, villagers cut all the planted non-fruit trees for firewood, while protecting those that bore fruit.
Recommended reading: "Seeing Like A State" by James Scott. The first section on Scientific Forestry directly applies, and the rest of the book conceptually does too.
In summary, the state seeks to render its resources and populace legible, because local arrangements are very hard to quantify (and tax) from the center. This drive to achieve legibility inevitably distorts the world they are attempting to understand, for example by incentivizing monoculture forestry (easier to count the trees) instead of natural forest growth (providing many communal resources that are impossible to measure such as firewood, foraging, grazing, and so on).
There is a very prevalent idea that "subsistence farmers" know little about the land they work. It's usually the opposite; they tend to have far more practical expertise than the centralized planners.
If instead of planning these projects centrally, they were planned and executed by locals in collaboration with central funding sources, you'd be much more likely to get good results. The local farmers can usually tell you what trees will grow, where they will survive, what the village needs more of, and so on. To be more concrete -- why not provide a centralized program that subsidizes villages to plant trees, but does not specify which trees to plant? If the incentives are high enough you'll get people to plant anything (as the OP shows). But at a lower level of incentive, they will only do the work for something that they actually value. That's the sweet spot.
It's possible that I learned the idea of forest death from it rather than a college class.[1] The German word for it is waldsterben and there seem to be few English language resources about it.[3]
My recollection is that monoculture forests promote forest death. Diversity is critical to a thriving forest.
[1] Or both. I was an Environmental Resource Management major.
"My recollection is that monoculture forests promote forest death."
Quite, and I'll venture that any form of monoculture is generally in an unhealthy state or will eventually cease to function. At best it will be sub-optimal. Diversity must be encouraged.
Whether you look at woods/forests, dogs, people, entire ecosystems, gut bacteria or whatever, you generally see rude health associated with diversity.
English is of course a (somewhat) Germanic language but as far as I know we don't even have a concept of forest-death or anything like it. We'd probably go for something like "dying-forest syndrome" instead. Actually, we'd probably call it something really stupid and contentious like: "German forest disease" or similar nonsense and then rapidly give it a Greek and Latin combo name when the sheer racism of the original name is called out.
Anyway, I recall wandering the forest near to this (1983ish): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermannsdenkmal My Dad was a British Army Officer and he very carefully got us lost via a complex "contouring" maneuver. We escaped eventually but it is said that to get properly lost involves a British Occifer and a map. Give them a compass and you are totally doomed!
Errr, anyway, we are wandering through the woods at Herman's Denk. Lots of trees and a lot of species seen. The woods looked and felt healthy. Any decent sized wood is a pleasant place for good reason - that's where we (humans) should be. We are a species of tree huggers 8)
My company owns a bit of land and we have three huge oaks (40' plus height, at least eight foot girth) on it. I will eventually kick my local council into bestowing "tree preservation orders" (TPO) on them because allowing harm to them will we environmental vandalism.
The concept does come from Germany but there is now an English term for it: "forest dieback" (although "waldsterben" can be used as a loanword as well.)
I note: "The Radiohead song, not the tabloid." from your profile.
I went to Abingdon School in Oxfordshire 1985-89. We had a school band called "On a Friday". I remember sitting cross legged outside the cricket pavillion, near School House at the end of a Summer Term (1988?), being entertained by OaF. Thom was the singer and Ed and co doing their thing. They were quite good.
The USMC has or had a saying that the most dangerous thing in the world is a second lieutenant with a compass. My brother, now retired from the Marines, points out that there never were a lot of field-grade officers out in the bush reading compasses.
It was one of the books I picked up after seeing San Francisco for the first time and feeling incredibly inspired. I stopped in a bookstore on the way home and spent about $300 on kind of a home-cooked urban planning self-study course.
I had traditional urban planning type stuff but also more sociopolitical type stuff.
I also bought a book about The Clemente Course.
Seeing like a state is probably the book that made the biggest impression on me.
You're spot on with your assessment, the only thing I'd change is that the centralized management does more than funding -- it provides a library of possible projects with expert assistance as needed. Locals still get control and ownership of their efforts but they have help when they want it.
Indeed. Given the starting point, and the major shift in world-view required to do this kind of thing, I think of that library as a "phase 2" kind of thing. First get a few successful projects under our belt, then think about how we can add more leverage.
But I strongly agree that the end point to envision is the center acting as a library/facilitator to share knowledge between different groups, rather than The Source of Truth in itself.
Local farmers that succeed in these sort of programs would likely be happy to go share ideas and experiences with other farmers, and the government can certainly provide funding and logistical support to facilitate these small-scale collaborations.
And it's certainly the case that there are some scientific advances that farmers aren't aware of, that "the center" can help to introduce; things like sensors, democratized GM technology, and so on, could all be developed centrally and made available to the periphery. Farmers tend to be quick to adopt new tools and practices that actually help them.
The problems start when each empowered locality starts demanding exemptions to laws that must be enforced consistently to be credible, or even viable.
It's a very difficult problem to resolve as coordination problems get exponentially costly as the number of parties grow.
In organizational terms, once there's two or more layers of middle management, delegating decision making to frontline managers create wicked problems.
Thats the problem with all these projects though, they are situation brittle, depending on a situation not changing for the worse and a constant economic drip keeping them alive. The actual solution would be to saturate humans need for firewood and material - by drone planting the only plant that could keep up, survive and thrive, with it - Variations of genetically modified Bamboo.The past is gone, it cant be restored, but the danger can be contained with no constant costs and outside of the containment vessels, something like the past one day might return.
"The actual solution would be to saturate humans need for firewood and material - by drone planting the only plant that could keep up, survive and thrive, with it - Variations of genetically modified Bamboo"
Bamboo needs lots of water, and I am unaware of a modified version that does not, so is not really suitable in many areas. How about low tech solar cookers instead?
Which provide a meal in the midst of the day, while its custom to eat in the cooler evenings. Concept failed. Sorry, my uncle tried to convince people of that in africa. Also watched those funny conflicts between nomads and farmers..
The problem is with the incentives. We reward organizations for planting trees when we should be rewarding them for growing trees.
Anecdotally, paper mills don't seem to have a problem successfully growing monocrop forests on their own properties because they actually have a reason to care about the success of replanting their own land.
This is great insight that I haven't considered. IN parts of the US you can plainly see miles of monoculture forests in all directions thriving (in an industrial sense) because they are actively managed. Look around Panama City, FL, (link below) for a good example.
The western half of the US has many monoculture forests where forestry companies manage them with thinning, herbicides and selective planting.
Natural forests in the west are diverse and contain many species of trees. They are different trees than you see in the east, and many of the coniferous species appear similar.
Industrial corporations in the EU can offset their carbon emissions (and the associated taxes) by sponsoring the plantation of trees. The calculation of this carbon offset is based on the expected carbon capture of a tree over several decades, even if at the moment it is just a sapling.
This summer a Dutch tree-planting company accidentally started a fire in Spain that burnt a much wider surface of forest than what they had planted. As a local major put it: "they were going to plant 200 hectares and ended up burning 1,000 hectares covered with 50-year old pine trees".
I wouldn't be surprised if, from the point of view of carbon taxes, the saplings that were burnt in the fire were accounted as having offset carbon emissions just as much if they had lived a full life. Presumably, the new saplings that will be planted on their ashes will be accounted by the same amount.
> corporations in the EU can offset their carbon emissions (and the associated taxes) by sponsoring the plantation of trees
The carbon offset market is deep with scams [1]. Most have no fix. The problem you mention does: issue offsets for trees buried, i.e. carbon sequestered, not planted.
I have plenty of incentive to keep the trees in my own yard from dying, yet I lack the expertise. So they die. I need an arborist. Unfortunately the arborists in my town are incentivized to get me to pay their company to cut my trees down and replace them with new ones every 10-15 years or so.
We really just need more foresters, with a broader mission that extends beyond simply government-owned park land, who can help individual landowners to plant the right kinds of trees in the right ways.
>I have plenty of incentive to keep the trees in my own yard from dying, yet I lack the expertise. So they die. I need an arborist.
I don't mean to be rude, but how brown is your green thumb? I get killing house plants, but killing a tree growing outdoors seems like something you'd actively have to do. The most common "mistake" I've seen are lack of care with lawn equipment like weed whackers. Are they just not being planted correctly so they don't have a chance?
I suspect the developer selected trees not for their suitability to the environment, but rather for their appearance in order to sell more houses. Perhaps if I knew more I could make them live but that didn't happen. So as they die and I replace them, I ask for trees that are native to the area so they can survive on their own. These new trees are still alive, but this situation has happened to most of the trees in the neighborhood, not just mine. Many people don't bother replacing trees at all so they just never get replaced. So my idea is that the government should encourage builders to plant trees that are native, and make sure the expertise is available to recommend better trees that builders could plant in an area that would survive and are better for the environment.
In Florida, builders understandably plant a lot of palm trees. But the palm trees they plant aren't native to Florida. Palm trees grow wild in Florida, but they don't plant these because maybe they're not pretty enough or they produce fruit which attracts wildlife, so instead we get palm trees from Australia or other places. It's really insane.
Some great advice that I got: Buy a five gallon bucket, drill an 1/8" hole in the side. That way the water can soak into the ground without having to stand there with a hose for five minutes. Plus you can measure how much water you're giving the tree—I was told one bucket twice a week for the first year, but I'm sure YMMV depending on the tree and your climate.
I'm no expert gardener but I can't help but wonder if it could be animals/pests eating the leaves before the tree is tall enough? Or gnawing all the bark, etc.
Also trees might not be a good match for the soil, there's clay the roots can't penetrate, etc.
I get planting the wrong tree in the wrong area. That's part of what I meant by not being planted correctly. Not treating the root ball properly is another.
However, I have pecan/oak trees in my area. Every spring, I get free saplings from the nuts that actually germinated and sprouted in a lot of my pots that I use for my container garden. If I were to actually try to get one of these nuts to grow, it would never take. Yet every spring, Mother Nature gives me freebies that I feel guilty about plucking when it comes time to prep for the next round of veggies instead. I have an almost perfect spot to let another tree grow to full size. If it weren't for the remaining stump from where the shitty developer planted Bradford Pears, I'd transplant some of the Live Oaks saplings in their place.
It's just a a poster being dramatic. Arborists don't intentionally push to chop down tree that aren't overgrown relative to the space available to them.
The problem is that people like big trees and big houses, and they aren't compatible long term.
There's no substitute for self learning here, sadly. As soon as you want "nonstandard" garden you're on your own, with plenty of trial and error. With that in mind, maybe there's local gardening group?
If you’re in the US, contact your local extension office for help. Though I’m also unsure why your trees would keep dying; I haven’t seen a lot of people with that issue.
To extend that, there was an article here a while back about how many of the people growing these monoculture pine forests for paper production have stopped cutting them because gathering the pinestraw and selling it for landscaping purposes is much more lucrative.
"Modern principles of economics" start with great anecdote how British Government changing payment from £/prisoner boarded to £/prisoner delivered reduced death rate on Australia convict ships from ~30% to less than 1%.
The Miyawaki method [1], which I'm sure has been on HN before, is a very different approach to these projects. When I first read about it, it seemed like a kind of too-good-to-be-true miracle approach, but reading further it's really just a lot of hard work.
Site preparation is a huge part of it. This photo gallery [2] gives some sense. It starts with soil testing and soil amendment, I doubt they ever consider the soil "good enough" at the outset. I'm not sure if they also do any hydrological changes? Then they plant a dense and diverse set of trees. I'm not clear how many trees ultimately survive. There's theories about the set of trees you'd use, but I can only imagine some of the process is just natural selection, and a belief that early density is positive to later growth.
Bringing it back to technology, I do wonder what tools could support this kind of higher-effort higher-impact forestation. It seems like there's work to be done performing soil tests and understand the results and recommended amendments, including some decision trees around tests and results. There's general guidance on the choice of trees, but it requires matching that guidance against local conditions and local plants.
In some ways the process is simpler than landscaping a house: you aren't trying to get a perfect set of plants, and you aren't imposing other requirements. You're really trying to build a mini ecosystem, and the ecosystem is there to do a lot of the work on its own.
I am less sure how this approach translates to more marginal locations. It's a bit easier to rapidly create a lush and vibrant forest in India than at the edge of a desert. Most of the examples are in tropical locations.
Hmm. Pleasantly surprised to find Kerala being mentioned in this context - I wasn't aware of this.
But on a related note, the south west of India has a rich tradition of "Sarpa Kavus", literally, "Serpent Shrine", but which are in reality, sacred groves in some corner of the yard of many traditional homes (see [1] for a typical example) - these are mostly left to themselves for most of the year, except for a couple of festival days. In practice, it is almost a biome within the yard.
Some of these notions of building a forest have parallels in the still developing field of probiotics versus prebiotics. Setting the dominoes instead of trying and failing to set the scene.
It turns out that building a healthy forest is a long difficult process that can span multiple administrations and in some cases lifetimes. Building the conditions for a second growth successional forest is something most of us can watch in real time.
These things are quality over quantity, which requires some cleverness in order to leverage. Forests (vs tree farms) spread by mycelium, by root, by seed, and by wing, and pretty much in that order. You'll get more success planting the entire perimeter of an intact forest than planting a rectangular area next to it, and more success planting a rectangular area next to an intact forest than planting a random hill in the middle of a clearcut. I have a hypothesis that planting rich islands within line of sight of each other and then letting nature in-fill between them also works better, but I have seen no research supporting or refuting that hypothesis. Nature corridors seem to be pretty close to this model and those have been proven.
One thing I'd like to see us do is move away from square and rectangular clearcuts toward more linear ones. Perhaps on contour, and leaving support species instead of nuking everything before replanting. See also research by Suzanne Simard and her peers on the soil food web.
I did a fun experiment in my yard, I took a small mixture of grass seeds (store bought bird seed) and planted them in various places in the yard (after sprouting). It was amazing to see what did and did not thrive in various places due to sun, water and soil.
One place supported all 4 kinds, the other three only supported 1 or 2 kinds of grasses.
I would think reforesting a barren land might have to take multiple phases of growth to prepare the soil, ability to hold water, fungal colonies to extract nutrients, etc.
The Miyawaki model is incredibly labor intensive and requires far more sophistication in monitoring and planting methods than developing countries are usually willing to commit to mass planting projects.
90%+ of these mass planting "1 million trees in 30 seconds" projects is usually little more than putting sticks in the ground, hoping some of them make it, with little regard for survivability, usefulness, tree species nativity, etc.
It seems like some of the most successful reforestation projects are driven by a few very committed individuals who live on the land and want to see the forest return. Like the case of India's "Forest Man"
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/26/572421590/...
Trees are living organisms that need care and help adapting to a changing environment, so I'm not surprised.
The old and magnificent trees we see today in streets and neighborhoods suffer from extreme survivor bias. Many tree species aren't even that large/long-lived as people tend to think about average trees.
There's also a strong correlation between speed of growth and longevity.
Going for the quantity approach that many of these low-effort projects do is little more than just tossing seeds out of a bag onto the ground. In the end you'll get more trees than you had before, but probably not by much, and with varying success.
> I do wonder what tools could support this kind of higher-effort higher-impact forestation
What's neat is that the tools already exist. Much of modern farming is a data problem- knowing soil conditions and nutrient levels across a large area and which plants would work best where. They often make use of satellite data, watershed simulation, weather and climate models.
I wonder if anyone has documented using those tools for this purpose.
Trees tend to fail spectacularly, even for seasoned growers. The site that I bulk purchase seedlings from estimates a failure rate as high as 70% for evergreen plugs if you do everything right. As you move up from seedlings to 3 year old plants, the failure rate drops to 10%, but my real failure rate is probably closer to 30%. The number one reason is too much/too little moisture, with some pests/disease thrown in.
Furthermore, trees need organic material. A lot of it. A tree planted in "dirt" will be about the same size 3 years later. A (young) tree planted in rich compost can double in size in a year. You can't stick a tree in the ground anywhere and expect it to grow without a good amount of help.
> Furthermore, trees need organic material. A lot of it. A tree planted in "dirt" will be about the same size 3 years later.
As someone who has a green thumb, was fascinated of trees since a kid and is working a considerable amount of forrest partly with his own tools: It's not like that.
There are trees which fall into the category of early succession. They shy away of compost, their seeds do not even germinate in such an environment. They need bare soil.
Other trees prefer poor soil as they perform symbiosis with fungi (mykhoriza), essentially producing the type of soil they need (partly).
And then there are the trees which prefer rich soil.
The later category are trees where the lawn owner is to impatient to wait (how can I make my tree grow faster) or the aggroforrestry is dependent on highest yield in shortest growth time.
yes, LA has a program to give away trees for planting in yards and parkways, and my read of the program is that, while it's goal is laudable, the implementation is lacking. earlier this year, a partner non-profit planted 2 trees for us and i planted an additional 2 trees that another org gave us, and i learned that it's not a set-it-and-forget-it type of endeavor. walking around my neighborhood, many of these trees, even though most are native species adapted to the environment, will end up dying because of the lack of care and the lack of education that comes with the trees. beyond enriching the soil when planting, it apparently takes ~5 years for the trees to establish themselves, and so requires constant watering for at least that amount of time.
ours sprouted quickly when first planted but then stagnated through the hottest parts of the summer. now we're entering the winter season and i'm wondering what we need to do to revitalize the soil again to help them grow in the spring.
Also, even native plants aren’t adapted to what many people consider ‘native soil’ - if there is no existing native vegetation, the soil itself is far different from what a typical seed would deal with from that same plant natively.
And when you think about it, it’s normal - you’d never end up with a giant 100% consistent group of plants in a native area anyway. You’d have variable concentrations all over the place, with some devoid of one species, others overpopulated with it, all based on suitability of the local env. and and variations in the soil, water, shade, and competing plants nearby.
As humans, we just think we can point to a spot and it should comply and grow amazingly I guess, and we get flustered if that isn’t what happens.
Also, even in nature most saplings don't make it. It's easy to forget that trees release hundreds or thousands of seeds every year and only a small handful will even germinate, and few of those will make it to maturity. Most every plant takes a quantity over quality approach. Exceptions may include stonefruit trees, but even those produce a lot of fruit, but only dozens instead of thousands.
yah, good soil is an ecosystem of living things, not an inert medium. urban soil tends to be more depleted and polluted than average, so needs even more attention to get trees to grow. i'm not really a gardener type, but i do love me some trees and shade!
In Seattle, we have a similar program. The tree comes with a donut-shaped water bag for twice weekly watering during the dry summer, and instructions for tree care for those first 5 years. The main takeaways I got were: don't bury the trunk (the top of the root system should just barely be above the dirt line) and amend the tree maybe once a year with coarse wood or bark mulch, leaving a couple inches of space around the trunk. Three years in, my tree seems to be flourishing.
> A tree planted in "dirt" will be about the same size 3 years later. A (young) tree planted in rich compost can double in size in a year
Rapid growth is not actually good for the longevity of a tree. A tree which grows rapidly (presumably to take advantage of a resource surplus) will be structurally weaker and die at a younger age to wind, pests, etc.
So it's true that planting in compost can accelerate the tree, but there's nothing wrong with planting a tree in "dirt" from a natural perspective (assuming it doesn't outright die from pH balance or lack of water etc).
What sort of evergreens are you planting? Are they native? I replanted a clearcut a year or so ago and even with an abnormally hot summer and a dry fall I'm looking at 30%, tops.
If you haven't yet, you may want to hire a professional forester. At 70% loss they'd likely pay for themselves many times over and save a lot of headache.
These are seedling trees, less than a foot high. They're expected to fail at a pretty high rate. In the future I'll be updating to 2nd year trees which seem to have a better cost/survival rate.
Much of the Earth's surface is not suitable for growing trees, either because it's too dry, to wet, to cold, poor soil or lack of soil, etc. The article gives examples of planting in places where trees don't typically grow, on coastlines and in deserts, so it's not at all surprising that the trees planted there died. This is why I've always been skeptical of tree planting initiatives. In areas where they can survive, trees will just naturally appear on unused land, there's no need to plant them. If this isn't happening on it's own, it's probably because the conditions there aren't right for them.
Some would argue that where conditions for trees aren't suitable, the solution is to build a forest there. Forests themselves are the best terraforming tool, if you can get them started by supplying the necessary nutrients, energy, and water.
I don't know how feasible it is, but using trees to transform parched landscapes is the mission of a company I interviewed at a while back called Terraformation, founded by the former CEO of Reddit.
To add reference to the claim that, "forests themselves are the best terraforming tool", one can take the example of Ascension Island. With the introduction of outside trees that formed an ecological foothold, they started cooling humid air and reinforcing the soil so that other plants and trees can flourish.
Looking at the satellite photos, a lot of the Island is still quite barren.
Strangely enough, the Google maps satellite imagery is almost useless. Use Apple maps instead. If not on an Apple device, you can access Apple maps via https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascension+island (note: satellite imagery is not available this way on my iDevice).
Here is another BBC article, which I think is far more balanced and talks about the negative issues of the biological cost of the planting: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36076411
The last volcanic eruption was 1508 or so. I did a quick Google to find some information on how long takes it generally takes for vegetative regeneration after volcanic eruptions. Looks like it depends on type of eruption and rainfall: “Mount Kelud in East Java has erupted on a 15–37-years cycle for the past centuries [snip] Within 3 years of the eruption, stem diameters were 3–10 cm. [snip] being able to establish itself rapidly in the extreme conditions that prevail after a recent ash deposition event (given the short return period of eruptions), but by enriching the ash deposits with nitrogen, paves the way for grasses to take over, which in turn delay succession to other woody vegetation” (not sure if the landscape was purely volcanically virgin). Obviously it can also takes centuries in the example of Ascension. A study in Hawaii looked at the order that types of vegetation took hold: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/science/5/chap8...
> trees will just naturally appear on unused land, there's no need to plant them. If this isn't happening on it's own, it's probably because the conditions there aren't right for them.
That is only true if the seeds can travel to get there! Moving many miles or uphill via seed dispersal is a slow process. The climate gradients and habitat pressures are moving much faster. While I agree that land suitable for forests will eventually reforest itself, if we want to do it on human timescales, we may need to kick-start the process with a seed transfer program.
There absolutely is. In my country, logging companies release statements complaining bitterly about effects to industry when new areas of land are protected from logging by the government. They equally are quite happy to quietly log ancient trees when allowed. Just because people don't march around with their agenda printed on a badge doesn't mean they don't exist.
If you add the slight qualifier "there is no anti-tree-planting lobby" then it works... those logging companies will also enthusiastically support planting trees
There's no lobby, but you count me as part of an anti-tree-planting group. There's a specific reason why, and it's because of how it's done. The reason that they plant trees, is to grow specific kinds of trees that are good for logging companies. So they spray areas that are logged with glycosphate to prevent other plants from reclaiming the logged areas, and then plant round-up ready GMO trees in the area. It leads to these massive mono-culture forests that are prime for huge forest fires. The trees they want are fire-promoting trees (like pines), and the trees they don't (like aspen) are fire break species. They then blame the bigger forest fires entirely on climate change.
Trees are not 100% carbon. Logging worsens soil conditions when no effort is made to preserve it. "Just keep planting lol" is not sustainable. Algae sequester carbon better.
What logging does is create an economic incentive to plant the trees and let them grow. The problem with algae is that it doesn't have economic value currently. People dream about turning it into food or biofuels but that's not currently viable.
Although if you were only interested in sequestering carbon (which currently has close to 0 economic incentive) you could grow algae, filter them out of the water, and then pump them deep underground into old gas/oil wells. It's still a lot of energy but possibly more viable than most carbon capture proposals. Over millions of years that algae will probably turn back into coal/oil.
Also, farming algae in natural waterways tends to have its own environmental impacts.
> Needless to say, the logging industry was not happy about The Lorax. The book was banned from many schools and libraries near thriving timber communities. Timber industry groups even sponsored a rebuttal book, called The Truax, which helped kids understand the necessity of harvesting timber.
As the article points out, the problem is our obsession with "trees planted" instead of "trees survived" after n years (n=20? not sure, but at least 10).
It's a reason why those "we plant a tree every time you buy X" marketing claims are mostly BS.
It's more than that. Even if planting gigantic monoculture "works" it's not exactly a healthy forest. Ignoring what the locals need/want will also just bring it to status quo sooner than later.
One of my favorite anecdotes on this problem is Guatemala. The laws on the books are pretty decent, incentives for farmers to reforest land where there used to be trees, with the government paying for the initial seedlings and then yearly payments (with verification of tree growth) over 7-15 years as the trees mature.
However, farmers quickly found a loophole where they could find a plot of virgin forest, clear cut the hardwood for lumber and then use the bare land to sign up for the program. They would plant a fast growing monocrop of pine and tend it (and collect payments) for 7 years until they would harvest it for lumber. All fully paid for by the government.
While that is obviously rorting the system, isn't it kind of ideal from a carbon capture perspective? One of the big problems with planting forests for carbon capture is that they often burn down, and even when they don't, the natural cycle of the forest trees dying or falling and breaking down releases the captured carbon too. Harvesting the trees and using them as a building material seems like a better way to ensure that the captured carbon stays stored for longer. As long as they aren't used for firewood...
Carbon capture is a tiny piece of the environmental benefit a virgin tropical forest provides. Additionally, while the trunks of the planted pines are used for lumber, the rest of the tree is used for firewood.
Great comments about monoculture and poor incentives.
Natural forests have a complexity that doesn't seem worthwhile to brute-force by massive tree planting. There's an obvious spatial complexity for different plant phyla patterns (see a bunch of links below).. a kind of blending between meadows to underbrush to trees, mosses and lichen in rocky areas, mangroves holding onto rivers. And there's plenty of fungus and animal participation to consider as well.
I like to listen to permaculture people and their approaches.. thinking of the water tables, clay and soil types. I think there's probably also some new thinking to be done about how functional water cycles differ from arid areas and developing long-term plans to coax water back up with strong cloud-seeders, from coastlines and river basins towards inland deserts.
That all leads to healthier rivers and tidal estuaries, which are keystones for many maritime ecosystems, due to feeding and breeding migrations e.g. of salmon, crab, eels.
I guess I'm saying we're missing the forests for the trees :)
I just finished Suzanne Simard's book, which if you ignore the timelines (early 90's) of when she thought about these things, reads like your kid discovering a love of your favorite hobby and breathlessly explaining each new discovery as they happen.
The new idea I encountered in the book was one of deep rooted trees hydrating the soil by reaching into the water table and pulling it up to the surface. Particularly at night when evaporation rates drop off. I'd read years ago that some African cultures ascribe this power to fig trees (possibly from Wangari Maathai), but I've never seen anything but anecdotal evidence of this happening anywhere else. She anthropomorphized these things but I suspect that some of the activities she saw could more boringly be ascribed to osmotic pressure. Sugars and water are going to leak out across a gradient at some rate even if you try to stop it. Especially across a barrier that is designed to pass water in the opposite direction.
I love her work :) The co2 isotope-based tracing is genius.
Also reminds me of the nutrient chain in PacNW connects the salmon spawn to becoming tree fertilizer via the bear fishing and discarding partly eaten carcases; they just eat the fatty skin. Deep ecology.
I think the author is incorrect about no one hating trees, because developers seem to hate trees. The most conspicuous detail in a new development is the absence of trees.
I think trees need a forest. The best place for a tree to grow is under a mature tree of its own species. But even trees of different species help prevent damage to each other from winds and storms. Perhaps instead of trying to plant a new forest, we should be jealously conserving and expanding what forest remains. Harvesting timber by clear-cutting should be illegal, and while the logging industry has adjusted somewhat to conservation, wealthy landowners still do it all the time.
a quick read of this -- it appears to be a list of badly executed projects by struggling governments, more than anything ecosystem-oriented; coinciding with "constant topic of conversation in political circles" .. Second in failure rate only to "protecting healthy forests that exist now" ?
From a distance it appears as if those organizations are doing those tree planting stunts to tick boxes on ESG compliance forms required to receive international aid they need for embezzlement income. How else do useless third world bureaucrats fund their escapades? Look no further than the recent history of Nauru to see how leadership has zero qualms stealing the future of a whole country then converting it into a literal prison for hire for $27 million a year.
As mentioned in one of the other comments here, we have come to the realization that the last-mile growers are not incentivized enough, sometimes not at all, to "maintain" the trees till they can sustain themselves.
The government and public authorities will sign a plan; then it goes down to multiple intermediaries, and by the time it reaches those planting the trees get little to care. It is rampant with corruption and fraud. If I have to put in numbers, here is an idea -- if there is $1 available for every tree to be planted, anyone in direct benefit at the final step gets less than 10¢. Those organizations and people "shouting" about planting trees goes on to the next plantation project, and it goes on.
I have been involved with and have invested in nurturing an ecosystem in a remote corner of India. I have got the involvement of the locals, and they know what trees/plants to grow that will benefit not just in sucking in CO2 but bears fruit that the locals can leverage. The idea is to have a tangible outcome from the trees that we can create a circular economy and treat the Climate actions as a good side-effect. The locales have no clue and don't even have enough to survive to care about Climate Change.
This is an all negative perspective. There are many that succeed too (Caveat: No, I'm not a forest expert but I do travel). I have seen at least 3 examples of Miyawaki forests that have succeeded close to where I live. I've seen some fairly large and successful afforestation efforts too.
While yes, an extremely unbalanced perspective helps us focus on a rather important issue, I do wish the article were a mite more balanced.
This is one of the "earnest environmentslist thinks we can do better" articles that are so popular with the "see, it was a hoax all along" crowd.
Within the intended audience, this is a call for stricter standards to ensure this is done well and achieves its aims. Outside, for people who just read the headline, it's taken as further evidence that it's all BS. A fake solution to a fake problem, both pushed by evil people.
I'm not sure what you can do about this, climate change deniers are not famous for their appreciation of nuance, but we should probably take note of it anyway, otherwise you end up with people with very different opinions thinking they are agreeing when they say "this is terrible!". And nerds seem extra vulnerable to being sold this kind of know-it-all, "well, actually", cynicism for some reason.
I’m not sure what climate change skepticism has to do with reforestation efforts or environmentalism, more broadly. Generalizing those with different opinions than you as lacking nuance doesn’t seem particularly nuanced to me either.
As a climate change skeptic I’m very much in favor of having more trees around, having less pollution in general, and don’t really care for the idea of covering up vast swaths of native grasslands with solar panels. Reforestation seems like a pretty good way to take advantage of higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The thing is we do not live in ordinary times. Last summer temperatures made many established trees in the cities close to getting killed. Anything with less developed root system and without regular, generous watering probably fared worse.
Farmers hardly abandon their crops or are clueless about agriculture, but in many regions this growing season was a disaster.
From large scale, low initial investment and high yield tree planting: pick one. Any even the most amateur gardener can figure out that growing things successfully requires checking many boxes.
Last but not least: in climatic emergency maybe instead of as we can see a pipe dream of low cost, no maintenance, native species only eco-forest we may start to think about planting almost anything that grows successfully and does not burn too easily.
All you need to do is stop cutting the plant life. If a forest can grow there, it will. Planting trees is extremely dumb, they are already optimized to spread themselves! Also, you can't really plant mature forests; pioneer species need to grow there first.
Some practical steps might include staging (eg. first reduce topsoil loss and create windbreaks with native grasses and ground covers, then start shrubs, then move on to trees, finally seed additional biome), always interplanting a range of species, placing protective rocks or other features for initial microclimate (moisture channeling, moisture retention, part wind protection, shade), and ensuring that all species planted are regionally endemic (greater capability to thrive in location conditions). Things to avoid are plants that depend on artificial irrigation, fertilizer, or pathogen protection.
This reminded me of this biodegradable plant box a company makes to support tree plantings which will not have future water and nutrients supplied. A Shell oil project used the boxes in an Argentina arid steppe. Was interesting to me in their 2018 write-up. They have not yet updated the results. https://www.groasis.com/en/projects/argentina-the-unconventi...
Maybe the gauge of success isn’t 100% but much lower - a 15% success rate doesn’t seem terrible, as was quoted for several projects. Maybe we better custodianship you can make that better, but I’ve seen quotes elsewhere that even with the most aggressive stewardship up to 70% of planted trees in afforestation efforts die. Maybe carpet bombing with seedlings and being happy with the residual survival is the game and we should be happy? Careful stewardship may not be scaleable, but mass planting is. That 15% delta might be dwarfed by the scale of effort possible.
Carbon credits from tree planting? Similar to the famous bounties on rats in old France. Rat plantations made a few rich. Similarly, institutions can claim credit for planting 'forests' that are pointless and failures.
Sure planting trees is generally a low-yield operations, with <50% survival rate typical. But these referenced projects were abysmally low, egregiously low, around a percent or two. Low enough to see that no honest effort was made.
Growing a forest is as much an effort as it is to plant it.
Of course, wherever the forests have ever been present, those places were being controlled by nature automatically. Nothing has ever changed, except for the fact that we have cut down a good majority of those.
To replicate a forest means to replicate the entire mechanics and settings that forests thrive in, not just replicating the presence of plants/trees alone.
~10 trees have been planted on my street (in London) over the past few years. Each cost hundreds of pounds and took months to arrange. Every one died this summer.
The folly of monoculture forest planting forms the basis for a subplot in The Overstory.
I can't give a wholehearted reccomendation for The Overstory since it was a bit melodramatic for my taste. The narrative cadence of the book goes something like: tragedy, pointless tragedy, ridiculous tragedy, unrealistic tragedy and so forth until the end... with a dash of interesting ecology and history sprinkled throughout. I suppose it should be read as magical realism with "rage against the machine" vibes.
History is gone. Also it is likely, that there were times when those Savanne areas were covered with trees.
There is no shortage of grasslands that are close of becoming desserts with one serious draught, but there is shortage of forests, that hold the moisture and prevent further desertification.
> History is gone. Also it is likely, that there were times when those Savanne areas were covered with trees.
> There is no shortage of grasslands that are close of becoming desserts with one serious draught, but there is shortage of forests, that hold the moisture and prevent further desertification.
Well said. It makes one wonder how the Midwest Great Plains shelter belt and other regions like it will handle this current dry spell we're in globally.
i love forests too. i don't know where you live, but you might learn something about grasslands from the southern grasslands institute: https://www.segrasslands.org/
re: "history isn't gone," that's a reductive position. it will certainly be very different millions of years from now, but it won't be as drastic within our lifetime. the ecological history of a place tells us where plants thrive and don't thrive. site selection is a fact of plant success. certain types of trees grow in grasslands but they aren't the dominate plant life — fossil records would indicate this.
i'm no ecologist or scientist, but i've read that grasslands can hold water too. just google "do grasslands store water"
"i'm no ecologist or scientist, but i've read that grasslands can hold water too. just google "do grasslands store water""
Well, I am also not a formal educated ecologist, but I am friends with some (including regular heated discussions) and have had a strong interest in the subject since years.
So yes, grasslands do hold water. But afaik it is a really tiny amount compared to trees. Also just compare how deep the roots of trees reach, compared with grass.
(even though the savannah grass is of course a special breed and way better equipped against droughts than the common gras on a lawn)
"the ecological history of a place tells us where plants thrive and don't thrive. site selection is a fact of plant success."
I agree that it is stupid to ignore that.
But we humans changed so much on the earth already, that the conditions in many places also changed. Winds, rain, temperature, .. including the soil but usually for the worse (acid rain and co, but also fertilizers). This is what I meant with history is gone.
So my point is, I would not not plant a forest, just because 100 years ago, there also wasn't a forest there.
(Also humans have had cattle for a long time and overgrazing is likely the number one reason for desertification or plain grasslands.)
I rather would just look at the current data. How is the soil. PH. Salt level. How much rainfall. What is the temperature, etc.
And then start with the right shrubs and bushes. And then trees.
A forest will grow on its own with the right conditions. We can help with those conditions.
i agree that humans have changed a lot. and i also agree that you should look at the current data. you should also look at the failures of reforesting areas that weren't historically forests. what is the data of reforestation failure vs success in those areas?
How many of these tree planting projects are funded by carbon credits/offsets?
Tree planting seems the be the simplest/cheapest project to do that ostensibly removes CO2.
Basically, the carbon offsets serve as a conscience salve for rich people to continue their lifestyle, and then these tree projects exist as a way to say that you are at least trying to do something. Nobody really cares if they are effective or not.
Monocultures of any kind are always fragile, you need diversity to have a resilient ecosystem. These projects should benefit from an understanding of permaculture, which is a discipline that aims to create the right conditions for healthy systems. Everything from succession (pioneer leguminous species that can fix nitrogen and improve soil, slowly replaced by other species), trying to slow down and catch water where it falls to prevent soil erosion and runoff and much more. I've heard (unsubstantiated) claims that initiatives in China have already started to take these into account and have succeeded where other monoculture forests failed.
A side effect is that you can end up with productive species. Imagine forests where many trees bear fruits, others have acorns that pigs can feed on, fruit vines and understory herbs that animals can graze on, large lakes with edible fish. This is the future I'd be excited for and it's all currently possible with the right policies.
Monoculture of very fast growing trees let’s them maximize the value per acre when sold as carbon indulgences. Actual impact is much lower, but by then they have moved to the next project.
That said, in areas that got deforested having any tree cover can make the area much more habitable for other trees. Thus single digit survival rates can still result in new forest over a few decades.
Would it really be so hard to plant a mix of seeds? I can see a monoculture if the intention is to harvest the wood or fruit later, but if you're only planting to capture carbon or restore a forest then a mix of trees seems like a healthier option and shouldn't be any more effort. You don't need to be precise with the mix either, a just random chance should be fine.
Recommended reading: "Seeing Like A State" by James Scott. The first section on Scientific Forestry directly applies, and the rest of the book conceptually does too.
In summary, the state seeks to render its resources and populace legible, because local arrangements are very hard to quantify (and tax) from the center. This drive to achieve legibility inevitably distorts the world they are attempting to understand, for example by incentivizing monoculture forestry (easier to count the trees) instead of natural forest growth (providing many communal resources that are impossible to measure such as firewood, foraging, grazing, and so on).
There is a very prevalent idea that "subsistence farmers" know little about the land they work. It's usually the opposite; they tend to have far more practical expertise than the centralized planners.
If instead of planning these projects centrally, they were planned and executed by locals in collaboration with central funding sources, you'd be much more likely to get good results. The local farmers can usually tell you what trees will grow, where they will survive, what the village needs more of, and so on. To be more concrete -- why not provide a centralized program that subsidizes villages to plant trees, but does not specify which trees to plant? If the incentives are high enough you'll get people to plant anything (as the OP shows). But at a lower level of incentive, they will only do the work for something that they actually value. That's the sweet spot.