Old, wrong argument. And it says nothing about the sheep. [Sheep? Yes really!] - Archived Message
Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on October 5, 2019, 5:47 pm, in reply to "Why Planting Trees Won't Save the Planet"
Forests, grasslands, any place where large amounts of soil, plus the above-ground aerial components of the life-web, are formed from the community of growing things - whether individual things within this mass are currently alive or dead - all of these ecological communities are vast stores of carbon, and they remain so, as long as they're protected from degradation. Not temporary at all, but as long-lived as the biome is allowed to stay intact, un-destroyed. The individual life-forms that die don't instantly re-release all their stored carbon. This is an old, daft chestnut! Virtually all of it is re-absorbed by the other life-forms which live on the corpses of the dead in the soil. And at the same time that this extreme conservation goes on, the living green component of the forest./grassland - the photosynthetic aerial component - is also busy re-capturing further atmospheric carbon, much of which is then distributed into the soil as sugars, contributed to the subterranean life-forms by the above-ground members of the community, in return for what they get from the soil - particularly from the fungal nets which form such a huge tonnage of soils everywhere; the soil's communication (sic! See for example lifelong forester Peter Wohlleben's 'the Hidden Life of Trees') and food/water-circulation network. Allan Savory also points out - and demonstrates impressively on the hoof, so to speak - that grazing herds, properly holisitically managed, can be induced to reproduce the natural action of the wild herds of herbivores which - when not hindered - wander spontaneously over vast areas, automatically doing natural conservation of those zones of the overall global land area where rainfall is too limited to support forests, but where grasslands thrive healthily. To a lesser extent, even semi-desert - again, when properly protected from human ravishment - performs the same carbon sequestration function too. All of this happens very quickly with newly-re-forested/re-grassed lands, before the much slower natural burying process which leads to the formation of long-term fossil hydrocarbons also; a further sequestered-carbon store. (aka Mam Gaia actively managing her planetary environment with her global homoeostasis processes - heavily plural, btw). Cautious, non-bumptious management of the Earth's entire surface, land and sea, with due reverence and with due respect for the processes of ecological reality, allows in fact a generous margin of serious effect on climate. The generation of the Little Ice Age by the rather restricted - sic! - spontaneous reforestation of the Americas, caused in turn by the die-off of Native Americans when they first contacted Eurasian diseases for which they had no resistance, demonstrates how powerful re-forestation - or perhaps that should be re-wilding more generally - can be as a climate influencer. And - note well - all without any requirement for humans to try to hurry up the natural geological subduction and sequestration processes by deep-mine burying of masses of trees. Leave the bleedin' trees where they are, in the goddamned forests, doing multiple good, whether alive or dead! (I dunno! Ivorytoweristas who've never had their hands - and their eyes - in the woods long-term, pontificating about natural processes...!) But as Allan points out, attempting re-forestation in lands which, climatically, can only sustain grasslands will fail, and indeed has failed in some places where inappropriate re-forestation has been tried. In many of those drier lands, what's needed is the return of the global Serengeti, using sheep, goats, cattle, horses, bison, wild ungulates of all kinds, and so on. But - properly managed, by mimicking the natural, spontaneous movement of these grazing/browsing life-masses, when not constrained by too much human pressure. The vast Serengeti herds do soil-conservation - and therefore active carbon management - without even thinking about it, just like the forests - when we bleedin'well let 'em.
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Message Thread: | This response ↓
- Why Planting Trees Won't Save the Planet - scrabb October 5, 2019, 2:25 pm
- Yeah, but the planet doesn't neeed 'saving', that would be *us* - mack October 5, 2019, 5:09 pm
- Old, wrong argument. And it says nothing about the sheep. [Sheep? Yes really!] - - Rhisiart Gwilym October 5, 2019, 5:47 pm
- Um, its a steady state even without burying ... - Shyaku October 5, 2019, 7:49 pm
- Apologies to all, but I agree with Dr Gray. Forests are a temporary repository.. - David Macilwain October 6, 2019, 2:07 am
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