yes they're a longer term investment, it would be interesting to know how the relative present values compare. Even if the deciduous ones have a lower PV then the nicer environment they provide should also be considered, ie somewhere wildlife can thrive.
In most of the poor land that is currently afforested Coillte have planted Lodgepole Pine and Sitka Spruce because no other trees could grow commercially. These trees do not harbour much wildlife and they are generally unsuitable for walking through, unlike forests of oak and beech which I believe would be better for animals and humans alike. Therefore I agree with you.
I don't know about Ireland - but some commercial forestry here in Scotland look nothing like that - dark, almost no plants at ground level and very unpleasant to walk through.
Scotland had a problem with the "wrong kind of forest" when someone thought it would be a good idea to plant non-native tree species on enormous blanket bogs of the 'flow country':
Sounds similar to Irish forests. The trees are in artificially straight rows, really dark underneath as no natural copse can form. No wildlife to be heard.
This has been my reaction to most of the criticisms: give it time.
Spruce forests are beautiful and magical places once they are aged. Those rectangular boundaries will smooth out naturally the way flora does. Having grown up in old spruce forest, I would attest that it will be valued greatly in a couple generations. They are great places to play in and really spark the imagination.
One issue with reforesting places is that many people just aren't used to what comes with forests - sight lines are obscured and inconvenient animals (some dangerous) tend to take refuge in them. But that's what comes with forest.
These tree plantations will be clear cut and replanted long before they reach that beautiful and magical state.
We had similar plantations where I grew up in the UK, mostly planted after the war for the paper industry. Nothing like the natural or even managed native forests.
I wish the article spent more time on the preferred types of trees other than the Sitka. The Sitka was chosen for its environmental (sucks up lots of carbon, grows well in Ireland) and economical (quickly produces renewable lumber jobs and products).
But if there are preferred trees, I would like to know more about their differences from Sitka. Do they grow 10% more slowly? Or product 10% less lumber? Or require 10% more maintenance?
I recently visited Ireland and walked through some awesome woods. But the local houndsmaster explained that almost all of the trees are non-native. And that wasn’t a problem.
I don’t think non-native is a self-sustaining reason by itself. I’m sure the Leitrim group has more info on what are better trees for Ireland and I would like to see the climate trade off analysis they did to show how other trees should be used.
It’s foolish to consider such marginal issues for woodland in countries like Ireland. Between modern agriculture and human settlement there is an extremely limited amount of space to maintain ecosystems, and the last thing you want to do is apply the same logic of high intensity agriculture to growing carbon over huge swathes of land. I would not take a 25% greater carbon impact and certainly not a 25% lower maintenance cost if the consequence is creating a green desert for wildlife.
This is one reason why we need to act now on the climate, the Paris deal only achieves its relatively gradual 2050 targets by assuming enormous carbon sequestration from the 2040’s onwards, which unless there is a breakthrough will require us to cover an absurdly large amount of land in these kind of dead plantations.
To halt the current mass extinction we’ll need to keep climate change within reasonable bounds, but also set aside enough land for ecosystems to be able to support themselves. The earlier we act, the less collateral damage we’ll be forced into to keep temperatures below reasonable levels. A few sensible policies on zero carbon heating or transportation now can mean the space to create national parks rather than massive dead plantations in 15 years.
Oak, linden, beech or chesnut. Start burning much slower than any resinous, support a high biodiversity of insects and feed mammals and birds
If you want something that grows faster: poplar, maple, ash, birches and most willows. Willows are bee lifesavers in early spring.
If you really want a pine, use a native species at least. I'm not systematically against using a few Spruce, Cedrus or Sequioa here and there, but if you invest strongly in a monoculture of Spruce you have a high risk to lose all the money of your investors by Cytospora cancer or fire. As I said before, none of this is a secret.
Ireland of all places should have an ancestral memory of the dangers of monocultures, having lost millions of people to starvation and emigration [EDIT: in part] as a result of a blight that clobbered the monoculture potato crops [0].
You’re probably experiencing some downvotes because you’ve made a common mistake. The failure of the potatoes was the proximal cause but there was plenty of food in Ireland that was being expropriated by the English and exported. Its a common mistake, if you read down through the wikipedia article you linked youll find out more about what went on.
One of my grandmothers was first-generation Irish-American; IIRC, her grandparents survived the Famine, and her parents emigrated to America. I heard all about the Famine growing up.
It's an interesting reason to be downvoted. I was writing a quick comment about one of the causes of the Famine that's relevant to this discussion, i.e., monocultures. It wasn't intended to be a treatise exploring all the various other causes of the catastrophe. But I know the rule about not complaining about downvotes.
Let me get this right: Ireland was deforested. Now its a big carbon offender. Trees improve that drastically. So they planted trees, lots of trees, 11% of Ireland now covered by trees (up from 1%).
But, get this, they're not pleasant to walk through! They're the wrong color. They are 'dark and dank'.
Hm. Compared to what? The stripped, blasted landscape they replaced? The ecological disaster that was remediated?
The point it seems they're trying to make is not necessarily avoiding planting trees, but to not introduce non-native species of trees. The article mentions the opponent's claims: "acidic needles and smother wildlife", "saying carbon-soaking bogs were damaged", and "diesel-emitting machines often felled trees prematurely"
Since the article doesn't reference any studies or statistics to back up either claim, it's hard to tell, but a lot of people here agree that Ireland's environment could benefit hugely from cutting down or outright outlawing the harmful practice of bog cutting, and introducing non-native species to an environment can often be harmful.
They introduced pines, a fast-growing tree that can most rapidly remediate Ireland's contribution to global ecological disaster. Which would seem to upstage concerns about the machines that manage the trees, or that other (insufficient) carbon measures were affected (bogs). Such arguments are a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The issue of pine needle acidity shouldn’t be overlooked. Decomposing pine needles raise the acidity of surrounding soil, which could affect the viability of local flora and, in turn, affect the entire local ecosystem.
I haven't hiked in Ireland, but Iceland's even more deforested and this is a sentiment shared by many Icelanders.
Of course it's a matter of taste, but in general I'd much prefer to hike through the non-forested parts of "blasted landscape". You can see where you're going, you're free to pick any arbitrary route without being blocked by trees & foliage.
Hiking in heavily forested places in Scandinavia can seem like a long tour through a tunnel by comparison.
It's absolutely non-trivial. Have you walked through planned pine forests? There is vast swathes of them around where I live in Scotland and there is no bio-diversity there at all. They are planted so close that the canopy coverage allows very little sunlight to the forest floor, and even if it did not much could grow because of the heavy littering of dead needles that cause very acidic soil. At best you will find patches of lichens and ferns and some squirrels and martins / other rodents.
Also working plantations are usually not available for public access for a portion of the year so they're not actually providing much quality of life for local people, which if you're going to go commit to large scale reforestation plans should be a considered part.
> There is vast swathes of them around where I live in Scotland and there is no bio-diversity there at all.
Um, you do know that forests have stages? Right?
Evergreens tend to be one of the first stages. Evergreens generally grow quickly and tolerate fairly crappy soils. "waterlogged soil with high clay content" (from the article) is a REALLY crappy soil for trees. The littering of needles generally helps add some level of nutrients back to depleted soils (an acidic humus is going to be vastly better than completely leached out waterlogged clay) It's why you plant evergreens on strip mined areas to help reclaim them.
After the evergreens, the deciduous trees start coming in from the edges--but this takes decades.
Now, it's possible that Ireland/Scotland don't have enough deciduous trees (or, in the case of Scotland, the climate may simply not be correct--Scotland has a lot of land that's really crappy for growing anything much at all) to start the process and those trees need to be added to their planning. Fair enough.
However, I don't see any discussion or acknowledgement of any of this in the article.
These forests are essentially tree farms. There is no bio diversity and no deciduous trees growing in from the side. The forest will be felled for wood long before a deciduous tree would have time to grow. It's a travesty. Come to Ireland and see for yourself.
> Um, you do know that forests have stages? Right?
Right. From the article, the stages are:
> The trees mature in about 30 years ... and are then felled, making way for a fresh plantation.
> When machines chop down swathes of forest, a controversial process known as clear-felling, the landscape is devastated, said Stewart. “It looks like Hiroshima.”
Is more complicated. Pines are "weak" creatures, always prone to be bullied and displaced by other trees in the lowlands, but they are survivalists. Pines grow in lands forbidden to other trees: high mountains, damp situations, sandy and the poorest soils.
When you had burnt the landscape stripped to the bone, to solid rock. When nothing grows, you put a pine and it will survive. Acid soil is better than no soil at all.
Some of this areas, when left alone, include slowly other species (holly, rowan), and dying pines, make interesting unique landscapes, peat bogs and moors. They host much more biodiversity than it could seem at first glance and a lot of endemisms also.
> There is vast swathes of them around where I live in Scotland and there is no bio-diversity there at all. They are planted so close that the canopy coverage allows very little sunlight to the forest floor, and even if it did not much could grow because of the heavy littering of dead needles that cause very acidic soil.
I mean, there are old spruce forests you can look at and see. Essentially the Boreal forest but with the benefit of your warmer weather in Ireland. Think Oregon coastal forests. People keep talking about a lack of biodiversity and acidity, but did you expect a fully functional old forest to be delivered out of the box?? For it to happen immediately after planting? Trees are a long, long-term investment. Building an entire functional forest will take more than a human lifetime, really a few. You need to wait for the trees to mature, a few generations of birds, animals to move in. Sooner or later other plants will start popping up, as they do in the wild, so you'll get hemlock in there eventually and depending on what else is spreading seed, other underbrush.
There are no bad trees, but the context for them just might be! Ireland's semi-state forestry co with just little planning & a healthy minority of native trees, could we have advanced this lovely idea by decades.
However, I do wonder if we're running out of climate runway, to ever seen anything as beautiful as Oregon's spruce forests in Ireland. The day after they clear a commercial forest here is not pretty!
On a related note (not that anyone reading this today will ever get to see its glory days) private individuals in Ireland have planted, far inland, a Redwood grove as a hedge against environmental disaster:
I have mixed feelings about this because I view climate change as an existential threat to civilisation. However the main issue isn't aethetics, its that from an ecological PoV the resultant environment is impoverished - the number of other species that can make a home in the forests - insect, bird and other plants is small. Ideally forestation should bring other ecological benefits with it.
The problem is that this looks suspiciously like a subsidized logging activity.
If nature is tolerated only as raw materials maker, they are doing it wrong. Ireland is a developped country; they have scientists, they should use them. They have natural resources, the government should use them. They have firemen, the government should ask their firemen and police if to put a wall of big highly flammable conifers close to houses is a good or a very stupid idea. It opens the doors to blackmail and make them weaker against terrorism also.
Some delicate balanced ecosystems where created when Ireland forests disapeared. They host unique species that will be extinct in no time if you put a frontier of spika spruces sucking all water and light around. More trees is good, but only conifers from an non-native species just does not feel right to me. Feels like a wasted opportunity, and in some aspect also like a deliberate boycott to nature.
Although this does very much highlight that the forest is a cash crop first, not an environmental project: "The company lost 400 hectares of forest to wild fires in 2018 at a cost of €4m."
Putting a monetary value on something provides context- it's done in news articles of many types of natural disasters. Not many people (that I know at least) can visualize 400 hectares, or put into words a good description of the natural and ecological harm done by such a fire.
Saying that the fire cost 4m euros is at least something anyone can have context for, since even an urbanite who has never seen more than a handful of trees together knows what money is, and roughly how much some things cost.
Of course, most people will never have four million of anything remarkable, let alone moneys, but it's better than nothing.
There are places like that in Alaska, and I heard a forestry guy saying that even though a place get dumped on with rain regularly, a two or three day dry spell negates the preventative effects. A bit of wind and sun dries the trees out quickly, then it's just a matter of lightening, a camp fire, fireworks or an ill-tended burn and the whole thing will go up in flames.
The ecological disaster is that these kinds of forest are green dead zones. no other native plantlife can survivie in this ecosystem, if you can even call it that. Silka Pine should be considered an invasive species, IMO.
For what were the areas used before being turned into wood plantations? The sentiment in this thread seems to be that it was, or could have been, thriving green wildlife, but werent those areas formerly designated for commercial use as well? The article explicitly mentions farmland. Thats not really a functioning ecosystem either.
The trees are there, now, doing their part. How many decades longer would the slow-growing native species have taken? Nobody is mistaking anything for a forest. What you have is, a stand of pine trees remediating an ecological disaster.
That eco-tourism approach is exactly what I was talking about. Moaning about 'but its not the right kind of forest!' when it was an emergency measure to start with.
It seems to me that planting historically native trees would be best for preserving cultural landscapes and identity. Ireland is absolutely beautiful, but the sheer breadth of deforested rocky landscape now being used for sheep pastures is depressing.
Sure if you are willing to invest that much into preserving the cultural landscape and identity. The trees planted there are chosen to be as economically viable as possible. Without that aspect the program might not get implemented.
Just to be clear to everybody who hasn't walked through one of these "forests": five minutes is enough to know that these are literally dead zones. In addition the company that manages all this land and all this planting won't release figures on how much Roundup they're putting in the ground...but a reliable source tells me it has to be measured in units of hundreds of truckloads. And anyone who grows up in the Irish countryside knows the preferred method of a pulling a single weed is to pour a gallon of the stuff on it, rather than lift a hand.
So this doesn't have to be about native vs non-native...what's truly important here is that these forests are about as much part of the ecosystem as a lawn that's being sprayed twice a week.
Is Roundup used for all of the trees' lifetimes or only in the first (maybe second) year in order to prevent it from being overgrown?
My father now owns a little bit of forrest and after new trees had been planted the effort for keeping them growing and not dying under tons of weed is non-trivial. As soon as the trees are big enough the issue becomes a non-issue, of course.
I know that this is a serious article, but there's something very funny about something that is:
a.) combatting climate change effectively
b.) generating wealth
and
c.) creating a degree of variety and beauty
being shot down because a bunch of Irishmen think the forests are spooky and depressing. If my googling of these forests is accurate, they're actually pleasant looking forests.
They're not forests. They are monocultural tree farms. Better than nothing, assuming the harvested carbon is used sustainably, but they're nothing like a natural forest, spruce or not.
Claiming tree planting is a effective strategy for Ireland is just hogwash! Tree planting is primarily about managing the current carbon excess, of course it does noting to reduce our excessive emissions. It seems Ireland in particular is especially bad at actually combatting emissions, so the tree planting is supposed to provide the fig leaf to hide behind; funny that they go with spruce.
But yeah, looks like pretty bog standard spruce forest, though it seems these are actually tree plantations and not forests.
I agree with you 100%, ralusek. This sounds like a particularly infantile form of nimbyism to me. Apologies to the folks living there that the forests suck, but with the fate of the planet at stake you get very little of my sympathy. Yes, in the long run, let's plant something more pleasant, but we are dealing with an immediate climate crisis and your concern about the view and local walkability are just not important compared to that.
If these shitty trees do the best job of quickly soaking up carbon, then that's what should be planted. It's not about you.
The unsympathetic tone of your argument makes me want to take a position against you, regardless of your rationale. I don't think that provoking opposition is your intention -- so consider this as constructive feedback on your rhetorical style.
Covering every square inch of ireland with trees will have no noticeable effect on global climate. It's just not that much land.
OTOH, having native forests back would be appreciated by many of the irish, who while sympathetic to the Church of Climate Catastrophe are perhaps less willing to wear the hair-shirt of Sitka treefarms across the land.
(The Irish would have to purchase the spruce climate indulgence so that bangladeshis + nigerians can add that carbon to the atmosphere by buying cars w/ ac...)
Too often, the thinking goes:
1. Something Must be Done
2. This is Something
3. Therefore, we must do This.
This topic is relevant in South Africa as well. More than 100 years ago, many of the indigenous forest were deforested to make way for pine and eucalyptus plantations. The former is less than ideal, but the latter is even worse.
The water use issue of eucalyptus far outweighs its carbon sequestration and the other problem is that after its cycle of 7 to 25 years (depending on use) a lot of that carbon ends up in the atmosphere anyway, for instance through burning for silicon mining.
The other important factor is the plant matter that composes the top soil and how this decomposes or otherwise interacts with the soil. A major part of CO2 release is through decomposition of plant matter. In fact, the recent article [1] that I read (on HN?) made me realise that a plant can be carbon neutral (rather than carbon negative). In the article, there is actually no difference between having a plant in that bottle or just having charcoal in the bottle—it's a completely closed system. This invites a question about afforestation and how important carbon capture via plantation is vs. re-establishing indigenous forest and on the other hand simply subterranean C02 sequestration.
Portugal has the same problem with the eucalyptus[1]; it's a dreadful choice for a dry country like ours. There was brave popular resistance[2], but it wasn't enough.
A viable alternative (if you don't have qualms with this instead) is avocado farming. Depending on climate (i.e., such as colder regions) the net water use can actually be similar (or say 2:1) when switching from eucalyptus to avocados; there still needs to be some amount of research done on this.
EDIT: To be clear, in warmer microclimates the irrigation is more water intensive because your loss of water due to irrigation is high. Some advances such as drip irrigation can mitigate this, and in theory things like mulching and super absorbent materials can get the water use down even further.
One of the most common native trees in Ireland the Ash tree is shortly due to be hit hard by the Ash dieback fungal pathogen.
The Horse Chestnut (non native but in place for several hundred years at lease and beautiful) is under threat too I believe.
This coming not so long after the catastrophe that the Elm tree population suffered with Dutch Elm disease
The sitka spruce forests are an abomination, nothing grows in them except sitka spruce, not even grass.
They are also planted in rectangles that look jarring to the eye on hillsides, nothing natural looking about them at all.
Ireland was deforested by the British, who needed wood for ships and wood to burn (industrial revolution before coal). It was also deforested in an attempt to quell the Irish attempts at independence. With no forests to hide in, it's harder to fight against an army. Prior to this, Ireland was heavily forested.
With no wood, Irish began to burn peat (their own soil) for heat and cooking. Eventually there was famine and a mass exodus.
The soil is now markedly different, and requires trees that can tolerate the ph.
That depends on who/what you consider "British" and what you consider "arrival."
Is it the first time Viking/Germanic/scandi lowlanders permanently migrated, the first time normans take control of those settlements or the first time "English" lords displaced Gaelic speaking ones outside of cities and trade centres.
Not sure strongbow was (a) British or (b) responsible for land use outside of his east coast enclaves.
Well I don't consider the Norman invaders of Britain and Ireland either British or English (or Irish!). That necessarily comes later. It took 300 years for the ruling class to even share the same language, sticking to Norman French.... English were the subjugated who were tending the field and cow for producing the ruler's french beef (bœuf). They still thought themselves French until the wars of succession.
Danish adventures don't really count either, even with the Danelaw in parts of Britain.
So we have to get to the time of the early English adventures around the 1600s for it to make a lot of sense, though it certainly does before British being a concept with the Scottish Act of Union uniting Britain.
The Sitka spruce problem has been an ongoing issue for at least the past 30 years (probably longer). The main problem is the acidification of the soil, resulting in a barren carpet of dead needles on the forest floor and a vastly diminished ecosystem. There’s a world of difference between a native deciduous forest and one of Coillte’s plantations. One of the most publicised hiking routes in Ireland, the Wicklow Way covers some beautiful countryside but a large proportion of it is marred by long, monotonous treks through fire-roads in between lines of Sitka.
Coillte have a remit for recreational use of Ireland’s woodlands but historically, they have always prioritised the commercial aspect over all other considerations. For a private enterprise, this would make sense as the income from tourism doesn’t appear on their balance sheets – but having a broader mission is one of the reasons why Coillte are a semi-state company.
It is more important that large volumes of biomass be grown to soak up CO2 than it is to build the idyllic fairey glens of old. The countries with air forces should think seriously about destroying thermal coal/oil/gas plants all over the globe that make electricity. Going forward we will need nuclear(preferably thorium based) or fusion(if we ever figure it out?) along with solar/wind/wave to save humanities collective ass
The stupidity of that new coal mine in Australia.....
Wilderness is simply a concept that doesn't quite exist in Ireland. We didn't have any of it, and the closest equivalent, forestry, dates to earlier 20th century land reforms.
Effectively forestry is agriculture, not wilderness.. in terms of the ideal. Even agriculture has ecological standards, but preserving hedges for wildlife is not the same as preserving an arboreal ecosystems.
I would absolutely love to see as much forestry land as possible converted (conceptually) to "wilderness." That doesn't mean it can't produce wood pulp or other commercial products. But, it does mean that wood pulp is not the goal. Native species are the goal. Recreation is the goal. ..And the long term future is the goal.
Some of the spruce & pine patches dotted around the country have occasional hardwood "groves." Walking in from the dark & inaccessible pack of spruce into the the magical space created by as few as a dozen matures oaks and chestnuts... you can almost imagine the Ireland of fairy stories and legends. An acre of oak feels like a place, something that should have a name and a story. Those don't happen on short term timescales, but we can and should plant them as a gift to our grandchildren.
We need a paradigm shift. Some of this island should be dedicated to non-agricultural use... and timber mono-cropping doesn't count. It should be accessible to us. I would love for us to adopt Scottish "rambling rights," at least for forestry land). It should probably be not-for-profit, reinvesting any income into improvements and land acquisition.
*Personal: my Grandfather grew up on land that was "agriculturally unproductive." The land was acquired by the state for forestry in the early 50s and the people encouraged to migrate. That's the origin of much/most forestry land. It belongs to the public, morally (and technically, mostly).
We are wealthy enough as a nation that we can afford to use some of our least productive ($-p-acre) land for recreational, ecological and spiritual purposes. Planting an oak grove is spiritual, imo, especially in ireland. Timber plantations are not that.
"magical space created by as few as a dozen mature oaks..." Absolutely this! I can tell right there you understand the magic of trees. Imagine the magic of a whole Island full of Atlantic Oakwood Rainforests.
So, monoculture or not these trees are going to sequester carbon. Preserving natural forests is ideal, but these are areas that weren’t forested before this project. Obviously if they’re cleared and / or burned, a lot of that carbon will go back into the atmosphere. Therefore, creating systems people will be happy maintaining and living with for centuries isn’t a superficial concern. For an idea of what that might look like, think of the olive tree agroforestry hillsides of Italy that have existed for centuries.
The tropical “homegarden” — similar to the permaculture idea of a “food forest” — shows enormous promise for high annual and lifetime carbon sequestration potential. They can be beautiful, productive systems that have the added benefit of producing food and sustenance.
I would assume the intention is to clear them once they mature - you get the most carbon sequestration if you cut the trees down once they mature and use them to build things and then replant.
Obviously burning is counterproductive, but once you turn the trees into houses the carbon will be out of the atmosphere for a very long time.
Trees are great, but when it is timber and other _avoid-carbon-tax_ interests driving it, you can be sure it’s being done with the priority of corporate profit rather than environment.
And generally speaking, it is safe to assume that mass monoculture systems are flawed, even if it takes 50 years for us to prove and illustrate those flaws.
On the other hand, it is great I think, when economic interests produce mass planting of trees. It is not realistic to assume, that we will let agricultural land become wasteland for the nature to recapture it.
It is the same principle with the hunting of e.g. rhinos. Licenses for killing rhinos are given out for money (sometimes quite a lot) and that money is put into sustaining the population. Without that economic incentive, poachers will kill the animals, but nobody will try to sustain them.
Portgual is an example of why this is a bad idea. The timber industry introduced and mass planted eucalyptus trees in that country many years ago, and those invasive, rapidly growing, highly flammable trees have become a huge problem.
Huge forest fires are common and deadly to humans (60 killed in one fire in 2017). Had these been native and diverse trees, the fires would not spread as far and as rapidly as they do now.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadScotland had a problem with the "wrong kind of forest" when someone thought it would be a good idea to plant non-native tree species on enormous blanket bogs of the 'flow country':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_Country
https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/news/our-pick-scotlands-nati...
We had similar plantations where I grew up in the UK, mostly planted after the war for the paper industry. Nothing like the natural or even managed native forests.
But if there are preferred trees, I would like to know more about their differences from Sitka. Do they grow 10% more slowly? Or product 10% less lumber? Or require 10% more maintenance?
I recently visited Ireland and walked through some awesome woods. But the local houndsmaster explained that almost all of the trees are non-native. And that wasn’t a problem.
I don’t think non-native is a self-sustaining reason by itself. I’m sure the Leitrim group has more info on what are better trees for Ireland and I would like to see the climate trade off analysis they did to show how other trees should be used.
This is one reason why we need to act now on the climate, the Paris deal only achieves its relatively gradual 2050 targets by assuming enormous carbon sequestration from the 2040’s onwards, which unless there is a breakthrough will require us to cover an absurdly large amount of land in these kind of dead plantations.
To halt the current mass extinction we’ll need to keep climate change within reasonable bounds, but also set aside enough land for ecosystems to be able to support themselves. The earlier we act, the less collateral damage we’ll be forced into to keep temperatures below reasonable levels. A few sensible policies on zero carbon heating or transportation now can mean the space to create national parks rather than massive dead plantations in 15 years.
Oak, linden, beech or chesnut. Start burning much slower than any resinous, support a high biodiversity of insects and feed mammals and birds
If you want something that grows faster: poplar, maple, ash, birches and most willows. Willows are bee lifesavers in early spring.
If you really want a pine, use a native species at least. I'm not systematically against using a few Spruce, Cedrus or Sequioa here and there, but if you invest strongly in a monoculture of Spruce you have a high risk to lose all the money of your investors by Cytospora cancer or fire. As I said before, none of this is a secret.
There are many solutions more simple and obvious.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
It's an interesting reason to be downvoted. I was writing a quick comment about one of the causes of the Famine that's relevant to this discussion, i.e., monocultures. It wasn't intended to be a treatise exploring all the various other causes of the catastrophe. But I know the rule about not complaining about downvotes.
But, get this, they're not pleasant to walk through! They're the wrong color. They are 'dark and dank'.
Hm. Compared to what? The stripped, blasted landscape they replaced? The ecological disaster that was remediated?
This seems a trivial, silly article.
Since the article doesn't reference any studies or statistics to back up either claim, it's hard to tell, but a lot of people here agree that Ireland's environment could benefit hugely from cutting down or outright outlawing the harmful practice of bog cutting, and introducing non-native species to an environment can often be harmful.
Of course it's a matter of taste, but in general I'd much prefer to hike through the non-forested parts of "blasted landscape". You can see where you're going, you're free to pick any arbitrary route without being blocked by trees & foliage.
Hiking in heavily forested places in Scandinavia can seem like a long tour through a tunnel by comparison.
But global climate change wants a rapid response.
my bet is that a rich diverse ecosystem will suck up far more carbon in long run.
Also working plantations are usually not available for public access for a portion of the year so they're not actually providing much quality of life for local people, which if you're going to go commit to large scale reforestation plans should be a considered part.
Um, you do know that forests have stages? Right?
Evergreens tend to be one of the first stages. Evergreens generally grow quickly and tolerate fairly crappy soils. "waterlogged soil with high clay content" (from the article) is a REALLY crappy soil for trees. The littering of needles generally helps add some level of nutrients back to depleted soils (an acidic humus is going to be vastly better than completely leached out waterlogged clay) It's why you plant evergreens on strip mined areas to help reclaim them.
After the evergreens, the deciduous trees start coming in from the edges--but this takes decades.
Now, it's possible that Ireland/Scotland don't have enough deciduous trees (or, in the case of Scotland, the climate may simply not be correct--Scotland has a lot of land that's really crappy for growing anything much at all) to start the process and those trees need to be added to their planning. Fair enough.
However, I don't see any discussion or acknowledgement of any of this in the article.
Calling you out for the needlessly confrontational tone here. It turns what could be an informative post into an agressive one.
Then the real problem is that this really isn't "afforestation" at all and what trees are being planted is irrelevant.
Right. From the article, the stages are:
> The trees mature in about 30 years ... and are then felled, making way for a fresh plantation.
> When machines chop down swathes of forest, a controversial process known as clear-felling, the landscape is devastated, said Stewart. “It looks like Hiroshima.”
https://www.jimmalcolm.com/music/sconeward/#BARREN
Last verse:
Slow return to native timber
So they plant the sitka spruce
Only fit to wipe your bottom
No damn good to build a hoose
When you had burnt the landscape stripped to the bone, to solid rock. When nothing grows, you put a pine and it will survive. Acid soil is better than no soil at all.
Some of this areas, when left alone, include slowly other species (holly, rowan), and dying pines, make interesting unique landscapes, peat bogs and moors. They host much more biodiversity than it could seem at first glance and a lot of endemisms also.
Be patient. Give it 80 years.
https://beautifuloregon.com/sitka-spruce-siuslaw-national-fo...
However, I do wonder if we're running out of climate runway, to ever seen anything as beautiful as Oregon's spruce forests in Ireland. The day after they clear a commercial forest here is not pretty!
On a related note (not that anyone reading this today will ever get to see its glory days) private individuals in Ireland have planted, far inland, a Redwood grove as a hedge against environmental disaster:
https://www.giantsgrove.ie/giant-redwoods/
edit: erroneous apostrophe
If nature is tolerated only as raw materials maker, they are doing it wrong. Ireland is a developped country; they have scientists, they should use them. They have natural resources, the government should use them. They have firemen, the government should ask their firemen and police if to put a wall of big highly flammable conifers close to houses is a good or a very stupid idea. It opens the doors to blackmail and make them weaker against terrorism also.
Some delicate balanced ecosystems where created when Ireland forests disapeared. They host unique species that will be extinct in no time if you put a frontier of spika spruces sucking all water and light around. More trees is good, but only conifers from an non-native species just does not feel right to me. Feels like a wasted opportunity, and in some aspect also like a deliberate boycott to nature.
Although this does very much highlight that the forest is a cash crop first, not an environmental project: "The company lost 400 hectares of forest to wild fires in 2018 at a cost of €4m."
Saying that the fire cost 4m euros is at least something anyone can have context for, since even an urbanite who has never seen more than a handful of trees together knows what money is, and roughly how much some things cost.
Of course, most people will never have four million of anything remarkable, let alone moneys, but it's better than nothing.
That eco-tourism approach is exactly what I was talking about. Moaning about 'but its not the right kind of forest!' when it was an emergency measure to start with.
So this doesn't have to be about native vs non-native...what's truly important here is that these forests are about as much part of the ecosystem as a lawn that's being sprayed twice a week.
Having traveled through Sweden I never heard a sound in their forests; no bird song at all.
My father now owns a little bit of forrest and after new trees had been planted the effort for keeping them growing and not dying under tons of weed is non-trivial. As soon as the trees are big enough the issue becomes a non-issue, of course.
a.) combatting climate change effectively
b.) generating wealth
and
c.) creating a degree of variety and beauty
being shot down because a bunch of Irishmen think the forests are spooky and depressing. If my googling of these forests is accurate, they're actually pleasant looking forests.
But yeah, looks like pretty bog standard spruce forest, though it seems these are actually tree plantations and not forests.
Watch those snide remarks please.
The people who live near these plantations want forestry to be done right.
If these shitty trees do the best job of quickly soaking up carbon, then that's what should be planted. It's not about you.
OTOH, having native forests back would be appreciated by many of the irish, who while sympathetic to the Church of Climate Catastrophe are perhaps less willing to wear the hair-shirt of Sitka treefarms across the land.
(The Irish would have to purchase the spruce climate indulgence so that bangladeshis + nigerians can add that carbon to the atmosphere by buying cars w/ ac...)
Too often, the thinking goes: 1. Something Must be Done 2. This is Something 3. Therefore, we must do This.
The water use issue of eucalyptus far outweighs its carbon sequestration and the other problem is that after its cycle of 7 to 25 years (depending on use) a lot of that carbon ends up in the atmosphere anyway, for instance through burning for silicon mining.
The other important factor is the plant matter that composes the top soil and how this decomposes or otherwise interacts with the soil. A major part of CO2 release is through decomposition of plant matter. In fact, the recent article [1] that I read (on HN?) made me realise that a plant can be carbon neutral (rather than carbon negative). In the article, there is actually no difference between having a plant in that bottle or just having charcoal in the bottle—it's a completely closed system. This invites a question about afforestation and how important carbon capture via plantation is vs. re-establishing indigenous forest and on the other hand simply subterranean C02 sequestration.
[1]
[1] https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/june/1370181600/mic...
[2] https://wrm.org.uy/articles-from-the-wrm-bulletin/section1/p...
EDIT: To be clear, in warmer microclimates the irrigation is more water intensive because your loss of water due to irrigation is high. Some advances such as drip irrigation can mitigate this, and in theory things like mulching and super absorbent materials can get the water use down even further.
Also, I believe the eucalyptus is used for pulpwood not fruit-nuts like avocado’s. What would replace Portugal’s pulpwood farms?
IMHO, Avocado’s in Europe are terrible and have no taste. Hass from California and Mexico are the best.
The Horse Chestnut (non native but in place for several hundred years at lease and beautiful) is under threat too I believe.
This coming not so long after the catastrophe that the Elm tree population suffered with Dutch Elm disease
The sitka spruce forests are an abomination, nothing grows in them except sitka spruce, not even grass. They are also planted in rectangles that look jarring to the eye on hillsides, nothing natural looking about them at all.
With no wood, Irish began to burn peat (their own soil) for heat and cooking. Eventually there was famine and a mass exodus.
The soil is now markedly different, and requires trees that can tolerate the ph.
Is it the first time Viking/Germanic/scandi lowlanders permanently migrated, the first time normans take control of those settlements or the first time "English" lords displaced Gaelic speaking ones outside of cities and trade centres.
Not sure strongbow was (a) British or (b) responsible for land use outside of his east coast enclaves.
Danish adventures don't really count either, even with the Danelaw in parts of Britain.
So we have to get to the time of the early English adventures around the 1600s for it to make a lot of sense, though it certainly does before British being a concept with the Scottish Act of Union uniting Britain.
TL;DR it's complicated. :)
Coillte have a remit for recreational use of Ireland’s woodlands but historically, they have always prioritised the commercial aspect over all other considerations. For a private enterprise, this would make sense as the income from tourism doesn’t appear on their balance sheets – but having a broader mission is one of the reasons why Coillte are a semi-state company.
Wilderness is simply a concept that doesn't quite exist in Ireland. We didn't have any of it, and the closest equivalent, forestry, dates to earlier 20th century land reforms.
Effectively forestry is agriculture, not wilderness.. in terms of the ideal. Even agriculture has ecological standards, but preserving hedges for wildlife is not the same as preserving an arboreal ecosystems.
I would absolutely love to see as much forestry land as possible converted (conceptually) to "wilderness." That doesn't mean it can't produce wood pulp or other commercial products. But, it does mean that wood pulp is not the goal. Native species are the goal. Recreation is the goal. ..And the long term future is the goal.
Some of the spruce & pine patches dotted around the country have occasional hardwood "groves." Walking in from the dark & inaccessible pack of spruce into the the magical space created by as few as a dozen matures oaks and chestnuts... you can almost imagine the Ireland of fairy stories and legends. An acre of oak feels like a place, something that should have a name and a story. Those don't happen on short term timescales, but we can and should plant them as a gift to our grandchildren.
We need a paradigm shift. Some of this island should be dedicated to non-agricultural use... and timber mono-cropping doesn't count. It should be accessible to us. I would love for us to adopt Scottish "rambling rights," at least for forestry land). It should probably be not-for-profit, reinvesting any income into improvements and land acquisition.
*Personal: my Grandfather grew up on land that was "agriculturally unproductive." The land was acquired by the state for forestry in the early 50s and the people encouraged to migrate. That's the origin of much/most forestry land. It belongs to the public, morally (and technically, mostly).
We are wealthy enough as a nation that we can afford to use some of our least productive ($-p-acre) land for recreational, ecological and spiritual purposes. Planting an oak grove is spiritual, imo, especially in ireland. Timber plantations are not that.
The tropical “homegarden” — similar to the permaculture idea of a “food forest” — shows enormous promise for high annual and lifetime carbon sequestration potential. They can be beautiful, productive systems that have the added benefit of producing food and sustenance.
Obviously burning is counterproductive, but once you turn the trees into houses the carbon will be out of the atmosphere for a very long time.
And generally speaking, it is safe to assume that mass monoculture systems are flawed, even if it takes 50 years for us to prove and illustrate those flaws.
It is the same principle with the hunting of e.g. rhinos. Licenses for killing rhinos are given out for money (sometimes quite a lot) and that money is put into sustaining the population. Without that economic incentive, poachers will kill the animals, but nobody will try to sustain them.
Huge forest fires are common and deadly to humans (60 killed in one fire in 2017). Had these been native and diverse trees, the fires would not spread as far and as rapidly as they do now.