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by Retric 958 days ago
Many resources go away when you extract them. A forest has wood, an empty field that used to be a forest doesn’t.

Disturbed land can still be valuable, but it’s much faster to turn a forest into a field than the reverse.

2 comments

That's a fun example. Both forests and fields are known for being.highly renewable resources. With a right cutting and seeding policy, a forest can keep giving wood for ventures, and likely indefinitely. A field can keep bringing yields for a very long tome, too, given correct fallowing and rotation of crops.

Mineral resources, such as ore deposits, are very unlike that.

Primary unfarmed biodiverse forests are not easy to recreate.
Interestingly, terms used by developers and builders tend to have a positive bias, for example when roads and buildings are also referred to as resources and "improvements to the land". I am fascinated by how different contexts and mental lenses or framing can bias the perspective on a thing like a road or building or other "disturbance".
Maybe human disturbance would help you frame it better?
In the article a point is made that not all "disturbance" is of human origin, referencing natural storms and floods as examples.

To consider another perspective, if one's preferred aesthetic is grassland plains, than the natural emergence of trees might be considered a disturbance.

In common lexicon, the term disturbed is also used in reference to a 'disturbed person', as in a mentally disturbed person -- generally also a negative or undesirable status, so in that context I would agree these negative or positive predispositions tend to be psychological phenomenon driven by conscious or unconscious perspectives.

Or if you view humans as part of nature: human contribution