It seem to be the case that we're losing the biodiversity of rainforests and natural forests, but in their place gaining palm oil plantations, and monoculture "sustainable" forestry in more temperate regions.
So environmentally it's still a loss that's easy to miss, especially if people don't look past the headline numbers. At least the article points this out.
Also area is not the same as volume. Second growth forest tends to have less wood than old growth.
I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I remember when you could see a whole row of logging trucks driving by carrying one tree. As in, each section of the tree filled a logging truck. There are trees where that tree was today, but they represent nowhere near the same amount of carbon stored in the form of wood.
People in temperate regions largely stopped cutting down trees for fuel. The northeastern US and Japan we're once heavily deforested. Then people changed their priorities and found alternatives to wood.
Not to mention the fact that total world population has likely increased even more than the number of trees. (No idea though, would love to see the numbers)
You wouldn't know it from reading this article. The orthodoxy on environmental research and reporting is that everything must be bad news. Humans are destroying the planet and we're all doomed. The rotten thing is about this orthodox attitude is that it has created tremendous apathy. If nothing we humans do can possibly be good and doom is inevitable, why even try?
Here we have a great example of nature's self-rectifying mechanisms in action. Raise global temperatures and CO2 levels and trees grow bigger in more places than before, lowering CO2 levels. It is a fundamentally good thing to see this in action and we really ought to recognize it as such. It means there's hope. If we change a little nature may pitch in too. i.e. If we can cut down on deforestation in the places where it's the worst we'll be in a situation where a significant number of new trees are growing and soaking up CO2 for several decades.
Good environmental news is possible, and it doesn't have to be interpreted as meaning everything is okay and we need not do anything, as many clearly fear. The "everything is bad" orthodoxy has proven far more crippling.
No, it's not good news. At best, it's clueless. At worst, it's propaganda. Trees are not interchangeable objects to count. What matters is not trees, but ecosystems.
I find the negative reaction to good environmental news indicative of the same mindset we talked about a couple of weeks ago on HN. That there seems to be some kind of deathwish around environmental catastrophe. Any sign that the environment might be able to adapt, or that we're not all doomed, is met with fierce, angry resistance instead of gratitude and relief.
If the article had said that there are less trees now than there were 35 years ago, that would be bad news. So the fact that there are more trees is indisputably good news. It's not the best news. There is undoubtedly better news that could be announced. But it is good news. It is better than the assumption that I think most of us had, that global tree cover is declining.
Can't we just be a little bit happy that it's not all utterly terrible?
In reality, we're replacing trees that you could let 5 people wrap their arms around with 'trees' that you can wrap a size z pants' belt around, replacing biodiversity with monoculture palm trees.
That having been said, I agree with the sentiment. There is actually a lot of great news that we don't report on, like child mortality or severe poverty dropping very sharply. Ourworldindata.org is a great place to start.
But in terms of this story, it's not part of the set of good news stories.
Seems more like a mix of good and bad news. If trees are growing where there should be snow, the suns rays are absorbed and not reflected back out to space
I'll give an example of an unexpected improvement:
I volunteered at Audubon for a group that was trying to save wetlands, and by extension the wild salmon. At the time, we didn't have the science to actually mitigate wetlands. So all of our efforts were on conservation. (That didn't go very well.) Now we have more options. So we could, if we wanted to, increase habitat.
Agree with your sentiment here. And it's amazing to me the number of people who will make a statement like that ("Humans are destroying the planet and we're all doomed."), or at least agree with it, without realizing that it potentially represents a form of psychosis!
This seems likes good news from an environmental standpoint, but its a real shame that rainforest cover is being lost. I loved reading articles/stories about rainforests as crazy evolution-based chemistry labs that are ever engulfed in the world war of insects vs plants vs funghi vs bacteria vs viruses vs animals. Rainforests are home to some pretty amazing chemistry (and potential medicinal products, though I see society moving away from medicines being found in this capacity)
The developed world went through its industrial and agricultural revolutions over 100 years ago, and land use hasn't changed dramatically since then. Developing countries aren't doing anything different; they're just doing it now. Particular examples of this are Brazilian deforestation and Chinese pollution.
Given what we now know about the global impact of these activities, it makes sense that the world pushes back against their development plans. Part of it is "don't make the same mistakes we did," but most of it is "there's a better way," and part of it is a realization that the world collectively needs less pollution and more trees, and since we've already chopped down our trees, we want Brazil to keep theirs for our (global) benefit.
That latter point is selfish. Yes, it's good for the world as a whole, but the cost to Brazil is foregoing the benefits of exploiting their resources the same way other industrialized nations already have. The same applies to China and pollution. They're doing the same thing the US did for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The selfish part is denying these countries the right to exploit their land the way that we already have. If the rest of the world wants Brazil to stop chopping down forests, they should pay them for it.
Unless the extra trees are a symptom of a warming climate and increased CO2 levels.
I'd also hazard that having more trees in the north/south, where light levels are less is not a good trade deforestation near the equator. If a tree's job is to turn CO2 into O2, we want more of them where there is the most sunshine.
There is some interesting research* showing that deforested soils take more than a thousand years to rebuild their carbon sequestering ability. So even if there are more trees, we may have done long term damage to the environment:
The first thing that popped into my head when I read about the Maya thing was "Those poor folks - if only they'd made good use of fossil fuels!" And it's my understanding that the now "recovered" forest probably bears little resemblance to what was there originally.
I wondered if that was PSMag or the original paper doing that. It took me a while of staring at the charts to finally decide that I'm not going crazy, the legend was just wrong.
Tree-number-wise, feels good. But in the very last paragraph: "the study confirms that some of [Earth's] most productive and biodiverse biomes—especially tropical forests and savannas—are significantly more damaged and degraded...
Is it fair to say we never had much to worry about when it comes to preserving the aspects of the environment over which property rights can be doled out? e.g. Forests, to some degree, fish in the oceans. Because once the environment can become private property the owner has all the incentive in the world to utilize it efficiently and won't over harvest it except through foolishness or lack of knowledge.
But unfortunately this is not the reality when it comes to climate change, unless we gave ownership of the Earth to a despot and made it his personal property.
I don't think that's fair to say at all. Deforestation is a real problem, and this study doesn't suggest that it's not. There are still large areas of tropical forest being clear-cut, and the areas that are being reforested are not nearly as biodiverse. The property owners have no incentive to preserve biodiversity; quite the opposite. The economic incentive is to clear-cut them for lumber, then plant single-species cash crops.
Fisheries are being depleted in a totally unsustainable way, and the areas and species that are well managed are in the minority. There have been some successes, e.g. North Atlantic lobster (although I don't think the uptick in lobster populations is necessarily well enough understood to be attributed to harvest limits), but the growing demand for deepwater fish and the increase in trawling is doing terrible damage to offshore ecosystems, and there is no management scheme in place for them.
Some of this has to be a result of higher levels of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere and it is a known effect. It's essentially plant-food in the air. Plants are growing to be bigger (fatter!) and in higher numbers. At least something good (maybe less diverse) coming out of all that CO2.
China seems quite far ahead with their environmental policies.if only we also experienced the same smog to push our politicians into taking environmental politics more seriously
We did (to an extent) which is why we implemented the environmental laws we now have. But living so long without the severe negative environmental impacts leads us to slacken our resolve, because it's easy to think we got to this point for free.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|7 years ago|reply
So environmentally it's still a loss that's easy to miss, especially if people don't look past the headline numbers. At least the article points this out.
[+] [-] btilly|7 years ago|reply
I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I remember when you could see a whole row of logging trucks driving by carrying one tree. As in, each section of the tree filled a logging truck. There are trees where that tree was today, but they represent nowhere near the same amount of carbon stored in the form of wood.
The article failed to point this factor out.
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genericacct|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fucking_tragedy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephengillie|7 years ago|reply
If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.
[+] [-] beloch|7 years ago|reply
You wouldn't know it from reading this article. The orthodoxy on environmental research and reporting is that everything must be bad news. Humans are destroying the planet and we're all doomed. The rotten thing is about this orthodox attitude is that it has created tremendous apathy. If nothing we humans do can possibly be good and doom is inevitable, why even try?
Here we have a great example of nature's self-rectifying mechanisms in action. Raise global temperatures and CO2 levels and trees grow bigger in more places than before, lowering CO2 levels. It is a fundamentally good thing to see this in action and we really ought to recognize it as such. It means there's hope. If we change a little nature may pitch in too. i.e. If we can cut down on deforestation in the places where it's the worst we'll be in a situation where a significant number of new trees are growing and soaking up CO2 for several decades.
Good environmental news is possible, and it doesn't have to be interpreted as meaning everything is okay and we need not do anything, as many clearly fear. The "everything is bad" orthodoxy has proven far more crippling.
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|7 years ago|reply
If the article had said that there are less trees now than there were 35 years ago, that would be bad news. So the fact that there are more trees is indisputably good news. It's not the best news. There is undoubtedly better news that could be announced. But it is good news. It is better than the assumption that I think most of us had, that global tree cover is declining.
Can't we just be a little bit happy that it's not all utterly terrible?
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|7 years ago|reply
In reality, we're replacing trees that you could let 5 people wrap their arms around with 'trees' that you can wrap a size z pants' belt around, replacing biodiversity with monoculture palm trees.
That having been said, I agree with the sentiment. There is actually a lot of great news that we don't report on, like child mortality or severe poverty dropping very sharply. Ourworldindata.org is a great place to start.
But in terms of this story, it's not part of the set of good news stories.
[+] [-] clumsysmurf|7 years ago|reply
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shift-northern-fo...
[+] [-] specialist|7 years ago|reply
I'll give an example of an unexpected improvement:
I volunteered at Audubon for a group that was trying to save wetlands, and by extension the wild salmon. At the time, we didn't have the science to actually mitigate wetlands. So all of our efforts were on conservation. (That didn't go very well.) Now we have more options. So we could, if we wanted to, increase habitat.
That's kinda cool.
Another example is a guy claiming that he has a way to restore grasslands (reverse desertification) by using ranching to simulate migratory herds. https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...
If true, that's also kinda awesome.
Generally, the trends are pretty bleak, and awareness is a curse. So people like me need good news just to get out of bed every day.
[+] [-] southern_cross|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fucking_tragedy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thereare5lights|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpasc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caymanjim|7 years ago|reply
Given what we now know about the global impact of these activities, it makes sense that the world pushes back against their development plans. Part of it is "don't make the same mistakes we did," but most of it is "there's a better way," and part of it is a realization that the world collectively needs less pollution and more trees, and since we've already chopped down our trees, we want Brazil to keep theirs for our (global) benefit.
That latter point is selfish. Yes, it's good for the world as a whole, but the cost to Brazil is foregoing the benefits of exploiting their resources the same way other industrialized nations already have. The same applies to China and pollution. They're doing the same thing the US did for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The selfish part is denying these countries the right to exploit their land the way that we already have. If the rest of the world wants Brazil to stop chopping down forests, they should pay them for it.
[+] [-] sandworm101|7 years ago|reply
I'd also hazard that having more trees in the north/south, where light levels are less is not a good trade deforestation near the equator. If a tree's job is to turn CO2 into O2, we want more of them where there is the most sunshine.
[+] [-] conorh|7 years ago|reply
https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/users/169969-peter-...
Paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0192-7.epdf
* I should disclose that I know the person doing this research!
[+] [-] southern_cross|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _rpd|7 years ago|reply
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/08/earth-has-more-trees-now-t...
In particular, the psmag.com article introduces an error in the tree canopy loss/gain graphs that swaps gross gain and net change.
[+] [-] Kadin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _rpd|7 years ago|reply
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9.epdf?refer...
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|7 years ago|reply
Reforestation isn't a quick fix: "Forest soil may take centuries to recover carbon sinks damaged by deforestation." (says this report on Nature article:) https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/carbon-impact-of-anc...
[+] [-] zerealshadowban|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savanaly|7 years ago|reply
But unfortunately this is not the reality when it comes to climate change, unless we gave ownership of the Earth to a despot and made it his personal property.
[+] [-] Kadin|7 years ago|reply
Fisheries are being depleted in a totally unsustainable way, and the areas and species that are well managed are in the minority. There have been some successes, e.g. North Atlantic lobster (although I don't think the uptick in lobster populations is necessarily well enough understood to be attributed to harvest limits), but the growing demand for deepwater fish and the increase in trawling is doing terrible damage to offshore ecosystems, and there is no management scheme in place for them.
[+] [-] code4tee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diedyesterday|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warmfuzzykitten|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PunchTornado|7 years ago|reply
But can't we put more pressure on South American? Like tariffs on their goods if they don't sort it out? Not that I like tariffs...
[+] [-] pochamago|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikehines|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bantersaurus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrmm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|7 years ago|reply