Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/02/clear-cut-tropical-forest-revi.html
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This just in: Organic materials makes for good compost!
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Are you taking the pith?
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It also deoderized the area.
For a little while.
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Orange you glad they didn’t say banana peels? Talk about slippery slopes!
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Just look at it.
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Beats pithing info the wind.
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Hmmm. A few things. The third photo doesn’t look like the same location at all. Also I have to wonder how much growth would have occurred anyway in twenty years. Lastly, it’s hardly suprising that compost helps growth.
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Did any oranges grow?
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Nah, just a thousand lotus’
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I go to Costa Rica to escape the cold most winters. As an economy based largely in eco-tourism, the people of the country (one of the world’s oldest democracies, by the way) take their stewardship of the natural environment very seriously. If other countries showed the same respect for ecology that Costa Rica does the world would be well on its way to meeting it climate change goals.
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It mentions that nearby areas without orange waste still had bare patches of ground and rocks whereas this ground was covered in undergrowth.
While not surprising that compost helps, it is surprising that this sort of things isn’t done more often. I wonder how often organic waste is thrown out rather than disposed of usefully.
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Orange peels are an interesting choice. When I was vermicomposting, citrus peels were high on the list of things to never add. They decompose very slowly (although that might be good for this application?) and the citrus oils aren’t great for worms. I’d be very hesitant about dumping that much citrus peel in one place
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Deep mulch is good mkay.
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Are you calling this pulp fiction?
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THIS. If there was a control patch, then maybe i’d be inpressed with a difference in regrowth. in 20 years the jungle can erase all signs of humanity with ease with or without orange peels.
where are the comparison photos? bare ground in a tropical jungle with rocky patches, that doesn’t sound like clear cutting and obviously more was going on to prevent top soil from accumulating in those areas. Sounds super scientific, thought out, observed, tracked, measured, recorded, etc. no wait it wasn’t any of those things.
other then adding decomposing organic matter, aka compost, there is nothing to see here.
sure we should be making better use of organic matter from all food chain and industrial sources, but i fail to see how this even made the local news there, let alone was picked up internationally. Zzzzz…
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It was a decades long project set up to remediate clear cut forest that had been degraded and overtaken by invasive exotic grass species. Multiple universities conducted research on the plots. It was proposed as a case study for the disposal of citrus processing waste that could remediate degraded hillside areas. Similar research has been done in the PNW with deep logging residue mulch. One of the big problems on clear cut hillsides is erosion. That erosion can be bad enough that grass species will dominate the area and not allow for natural succession of woody perennial.
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