8 Comments

Chris, this is so important to be understood. Decimating existing ecosystems for tree plantations is absurd. It's all part of corporate greenwashing to say, "Hey, look what we did," and BS legislation to encourage this. Apart from replacing grasslands with forests, it's equally absurd from the 6th extinction standpoint. As a person whose best days were spent hiking real nature, why I would want to walk in neatly aligned plantations of trees? Nothing to see. It's planet robbing and soul robbing of all the people connected to those lands, and similar to other disturbingly sanctioned situations all over the globe.

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Thank you, Geoffrey, great comment! Never has any human attempt to tamper with Nature been positive. Some wise person once said that grasslands hold this planet together. They develop the soil and store carbon below ground as complex sugars etc. Years ago someone tried to restore the oak savannas near Chicago, but some critical species was missing so the project could not work. It is almost impossible to restore a damaged ecosystem, so best to Do Not Touch in the first place. And the notion that you can "clear land" and plant something else, a mainstay of human agriculture for millennia, is bogus because most of the good mineral content of that ecosystem is tied up in the (now missing) trees and you will never be able to restore that nutrient level.

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There is also an increasing trend of wood biomass, and Indonesia has a big plan to develop it as Energy Wood Plantation https://trendasia.org/en/the-looming-deforestation-threat-from-energy-wood-plantation/ which is going to be burn together with coal in coal power plants (co-firing) or full firing of wood based biomass/wood pellet

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I'm sure Chris appreciates this link, as do I, writing about the #ClimateEmergency as well. It's difficult to find much optimism ahead of COP28, which will likely be the same as the past ones. Speaking of trees, the Amazon may have tipped. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/04/south-american-monsoon-heading-towards-tipping-point-likely-to-cause-amazon-dieback

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Thanks Geoffrey - I've got a post in the pipeline about the Amazon tipping point. I'm not sure when I'll get round to it though....

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It may come up in my next piece, although probably not the primary focus. I think it's time to talk about climate refugees.

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thanks for the link

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Besides the reduction of biodiversity from planting monocultures of trees for the small amount of carbon offsets, they are planting nonnative and invasive trees, such as eucalypti. And replacing grasslands with trees not only destroys viable ecosystems, destroys the carbon sequestration of the grasslands, many of which store more carbon than forests.

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