Of course it's both John: let the forests grow, AND get off the fossil hydrocarbons kick - Archived Message
Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on August 2, 2019, 12:03 pm, in reply to "Re: Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' - sorry, not really. "
There's a good chance that both are going to happen anyway. Peak SLEG-crude is already well past; much of what's left is never going to be raised and burnt, because both EROEI and EROCI (c for capital) insist that it can't be done. And EROEI in particular has the mailed fist to enforce its ban, whatever we think. [SLEG = sweet, light, easy-get] The forests are likely to get their come-back chance too - again, whatever we think and choose to do. The global disruptions into which we're racing right now are setting up conditions which will mean a) a drastic drop in our overall consumption, willy-nilly; and b) a natural waning of the current population overshoot. This sort of slapping down of local populations has happened before in various parts of the world. And in at least one case, it seems to have affected the climate - quite quickly too: the case, with which I daresay you're familiar John, of the sudden steep cull of Native American societies as a result of unprepared contact with Eurasian epidemic illnesses; the sudden widespread cessation of farming which this brought on; the spontaneous return of the cleared forests which followed; and the Little Ice Age which that seems to have triggered, starting within about a century. If that sequence is correct, then it seems to knock on the head the objection that reforestation can only do moderate good. The American instance only concerned re-forestation of a quite modest area of the global land surface; and yet see what it did... It will be good if we can muster the sense to help the forests to return quickly. Forest permaculture offers an excellent win-win for us and the Earth, and can be as productive as any agriculture we've ever devised; it would be a great benefit to us to embrace it: going with the inexorable Gaian flow instead of trying, futilely, to beat it into obedience to our weird naivety over tillage agriculture. But the forests will be back anyway, whether we help or not, as the chaos that we've precipitated swats us down severely for our hubris.
|
|