Obligatory…
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He’s not wrong!
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Frieze hard?
My plasterer mate does that.
All day & all night!
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Perhaps a solution that is not without its own problems:
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https://twitter.com/scubanick/status/1029697614986399751
ETA:
(because I can’t post more than 2 in a row)
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That Nomad folk strikes me as the sort of person who thinks evolution is fake because it violates the law of thermodynamics which says closed systems will always tend toward disorder.
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Oh, delightful. You get very little environmental good news these days…one of the rare exceptions was in Blue Planet 2, where along with all the examples of ecosystems collapsing, they mentioned sea otter recovery and how they might be helping kelp forests recover. Guess we can’t even have that, because ultimately rich people needing more money is all our society can pay attention to.
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How many canaries have to die before the world wakes up?
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Why wait for the world to wake up?
Grab some friends, pack some lunches, and find a way to plant some trees (and keep them water for their first two years). Time well spent outdoors.
(see also… and with apologies for the long post:)
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My orchard expands every year. Trees are sooo much easier to raise, lower maintenance and more productive per unit area than gardens. So productive that we are usually overwhelmed with the harvest and give a huge amount to food banks and neighbors. Never really thought about it as “reforestation,” but I guess in a way? The phrase “food forest” is kind of a permaculture buzzword, but the number of birds and critters on our property seems to increase every year as well. I will take that!
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Good to hear.
Bravo on food banking your surplus! Sacred work!
Perennial food plants (fruit trees, asparagus, etc.)…
… are certainly feeding humans, bees, sequestering carbon, creating biomass, providing habitat for soil biota, cooling the skin of the planet, destressing human psyches, etc. Orchards are by definition about food production for humans, and all trees provide a huge number of ecological services.
https://donboscogreen.org/trees-ecosystem-services-provided-by-them/
But…
… is IMHO more “whole systems” than a [relatively simple] orchard. Lots of flora and fauna in a healthy living forest simply have little to no direct role in our human diet. No tilling, no inputs, closed loops, astonishing and intact soil-food-webs all are hallmarks of a healthy forest.
Humans have their thumbs on the scale in orchards, even the most biodiverse ones:
As I see it, healthy forests are whole systems of biota in a big web of interdependencies, with as little human intervention as possible.
I admit I may soon have to eat my words about human intervention, about anything, really:
… human intervention is now looking pretty necessary if we are to tissue-bank and gene-bank the survivors enough to have decent genetic diversity for when (yes when dammit) forests can be restarted, ok ok but maybe not even with the same kinds of plants that exist now.
Our available palette of plants and animals we can call our “co-workers in league with a positive future” is a bit limited, and not because of all those we made extinct. In a conversation I had with a PhD geophysicist last weekend, I got the message that even though the CO2 PPM was high in geologic times past (volcanic eruptions, etc.), we simply don’t have the same land area for, nor the same kinds of plants and animals (as, say, in the Jurassic Period) and inputs and rates of those inputs, as we do now.
Handles:
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The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans
Over thousands of years, native people played a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness
/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/73/d3/73d37e8b-2f3b-4abe-8c84-3706c7931270/levis4hr.jpg)
The Amazon rainforest appears wild and untouched by humanity, but people have been shaping its biodiversity for millennia. (Daniel Sabatier / Science)
By Ben Panko
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
MARCH 3, 2017
91037
The way some describe it, you’d think the Amazon was a tangle of wilds, virtually untouched by human hand. “The First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom,” is how Stanwyn Shetler, a Smithsonian botanist, described this region of the world in a 1991 book marking the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World. “The native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world … was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.”
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But was it really? In less-rhapsodical verse, scholars in the past quarter century have shown that this mythical image of untouched nature is just that—a myth. Like humans everywhere, Native Americans shaped their environments to suit them, through burning, pruning, tilling and other practices. And the Amazon is no different: Look closer, and you can see the deep impressions that humans have made on the world’s largest tropical rainforest, scientists reported yesterday in the journal Science .
Despite its vastness—the Amazon stretches more than 2 million square miles, and has an estimated 390 billion trees—this rainforest is hardly the untamable, unstoppable force of nature that the Romantics opined about, says José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter. In fact, humans have inhabited the Amazon for roughly 13,000 years, and have been domesticating plants for at least 8,000 years.
“Recent archaeological studies, especially in the last two decades show that indigenous populations in the past were more numerous, more complex and had a greater impact on the largest and most biodiverse tropical forest in the world [than previously thought],” Iriarte says.
In 2013, community ecologist Hans ter Steege and colleagues were taking inventory of the vast diversity of the Amazon’s trees. The team sampled 1,170 scattered plots far from modern human inhabitants to identify more than 16,000 different species among those 390 billion individual plants. Then they noticed something odd: Despite that broad diversity, over half of the total trees were made up of just over 1 percent (227) of the species.
About 20 of these “hyperdominant” plants were domesticated species such as the Brazil nut, the Amazon tree grape and the ice cream bean tree. That was five times the amount researchers expected if chance were the only factor. “The hypothesis came up that perhaps people might have domesticated these species a lot […] which would have helped their abundance in the Amazon,” says ter Steege says, who is the lead author of the recent study.
I ran across this hypothesis a few years ago, and found it fascinating. The idea that the Amazon rainforest may in fact be essentially a man-made (or at least human-modified) environment is mindblowing.
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Love it! Excellent find.
Yep. Some forests were definitely manipulated by humans, and were de facto the first “food forests.”
Charles C. Mann confirming your post:
Huge fan of Mann’s amazing amazing books. If you have any opportunity to read (or get the audiobooks) for his, I love the heck out of them.
(Perhaps you have already read those? I can imagine totally that these would have been on your list.)
I love it that you’ve come across that “humans were working the Amazon jungles for millennia” angle.
It gives me pause when I consider the massive toll on the many missing inhabitants, including soooooo many humans, gone from us for many reasons, including guns, germs and steel. And colonialism.
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I have read 1491. Not sure if that was were I initially saw this idea, but it has come up in different forms several times. 1493 is on my list, but the list gets longer much faster than it goes down!
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Noooooooooo!
Not chocolate and oranges!
This whole thread…
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