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by colechristensen 947 days ago
For multiple reasons we need actual foresters to build ecosystems, not just plant a bunch of trees. They also need to be built to maintain themselves, not be reliant on continued investment. Bonus points for building ecosystems that support a small amount of logging.
3 comments

Fully agree with this. Continued investment with forest ecosystem maintainers in place is best solution.
Best solution is reducing drastically our footprint, our consumption, instead of helping to grow forests, subsidizing gree businesses, why not heavily tax plane & car industry/usage, incentivize low-footprint lifestyles, educate?
No, because this solution to environmental problems is "our impact on the environment is going to cause a global depression and catastrophe due to changing climate! we must try to stop this by causing a global depression and catastrophe ourselves by drastically reducing consumption!"

Consumption that dumps carbon in the air needs to be replaced by consumption that doesn't. Power needs to be solar/wind/nuclear, cars need to be electric, things which are done cheaply with hydrocarbon sources need to be replaced with more expensive things with sustainable sources.

Trying to make people significantly lower their standard of living with fear of future consequences will not work. It just won't. In two ways... one: a lot of what's happened has already happened and is inevitable, there's no turning back from a few degrees of warming, oceans rising, and climate patterns changing; two: people won't do it.

Trying to chase the line of solving environmental problems with consumption reduction is pissing into the wind. You have to try to do things which will actually have effects instead of trying the impossible.

It's very easy to divide by 2 one's footprint, without a loss in "comfort", my lifestyle is even 1/20 of the average, and I'm totally fine, but definitely not asking average people to go that far, it's just to show it's possible

If that's done large scale, it's as if the world population were divided by 2 instantly

Reducing our footprint would help a lot tree to grow (they don't really like pollution and climate changes), but obviously we should still help forest to grow and migrate north (in north hemisphere), it's just not where the big win is currently

You're not gonna win if you only work one way.

We can both reduce our carbon footprint AND plant trees.

Trees grow by themselves above all if we reduce our footprint (and stop nonsense things like swimming pools, oversized houses, tennis courts, concrete everywhere, ..), Focusing on reducing footprint has such a big impact, it's easy to cut by half one's footprint, and if that's done largescale, it's basically as if the world population is divided by 2 instantly
Maybe "the world" needs to pay to countries with large forests (like Brazil) to maintain them, instead of paying them for cutting them down (lumber, agro, resources)
The opposite, "the world" needs to put trade sanctions and large tariffs on countries which have exports which are cheaper because they abuse the environment (deforestation, fossil fuel powered, etc.) and while they're at it: labor (wage slaves, child labor, unsafe practices, actual slavery).

Don't pay corrupt countries to be less corrupt, charge them a fee that makes bad practices more expensive than good ones.

This is a game. Dictators and developing economies are good at taking incentive payments and pocketing them.

Regulatory capture. Too much of the population of “foresters” is bought and paid for by the tree farming industry.

Asking foxes to grow more chickens definitely gets you more chickens but you don’t get the benefits, they do.