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by linguistbreaker 651 days ago
I feel designated wilderness areas (at least in my state, CO) could benefit from MORE regulation because they are trammeled to hell by cattle. Additional protections only improve these areas.

Also, I did not realize the Wilderness designation had anything to do with indigenous Americans. Is that a thing?
1 comments
sbierwagen 651 days ago
A forest turns solar energy into wood, locking up that energy in an inedible form. Grass, on the other hand, can be eaten by grazing animals and turned into meat. If you're living off the land but not farming, then you'd prefer it to be covered in grass instead of trees.

Grazing animals can prevent grassland from reforesting by eating the tree shoots, but they can't knock down mature trees. There is some evidence paleoindians would burn down forests to expand grasslands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_bison_belt

Thus, in some parts of the US, you can stand on a hill, look out at miles of apparently untouched land without a single permanent structure, but is as artificial and manmande as a golf course, crafted from thousands of years of invisible labor.

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pvaldes 650 days ago
> A forest turns solar energy into wood, locking up that energy in an inedible form. Grass, on the other hand, can be eaten by grazing animals and turned into meat. If you're living off the land but not farming, then you'd prefer it to be covered in grass instead of trees.

Hem, not. This is not how it works. A very old, well cared apple tree can produce 800 Kg of apples a year. You can't breed a cow just using the grass growing in the same surface. It needs more space. A lot of animals eat leaves, twigs, fruits, and flowers of trees. The thicker the "layer alive" that can sustain animals the better. Trees are like the fat of the land. Rocky areas are like the skeleton of the land. Grasslands left unregulated enter very fast into a tragedy of the commons spiral by being invaded by cattle, sheeps and goats turning into rocky areas.

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sbierwagen 650 days ago
How many apple trees are visible in this photo of an Idaho forest? https://www.planetware.com/wpimages/2020/08/idaho-best-natio...

Ceteris paribus, normal trees will always outcompete fruit trees because they don't have to waste any energy on fruit, and use that instead on trunk height, putting fruit trees in their shade and, eventually, starving them to death.

You can, of course, maintain an orchard of fruit trees, manually removing competitor species, but then we're talking about stationary farming, a technology that Plains Indians did not have ten thousand years ago.

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pvaldes 649 days ago
> normal trees will always outcompete fruit trees

Not. Not always. This is a too simplistic point of view.

Is like asking "how many penguins can be seen in this photo of the sahara?" If the conclusion is that penguins can't compete with camels, is a deceptive one.

This forest is a conifer forest. Put the same conifer in a place suitable for growing walnuts, figs, or hazelnuts and we will see who kills who.

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