The Planet Now Has More Trees Than It Did 35 Years Ago

https://psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago

by rapnie • 8 years ago

228 81 8 years ago

wpasc• 8 years ago

This seems likes good news from an environmental standpoint, but its a real shame that rainforest cover is being lost. I loved reading articles/stories about rainforests as crazy evolution-based chemistry labs that are ever engulfed in the world war of insects vs plants vs funghi vs bacteria vs viruses vs animals. Rainforests are home to some pretty amazing chemistry (and potential medicinal products, though I see society moving away from medicines being found in this capacity)

sandworm1012• 8 years ago

Unless the extra trees are a symptom of a warming climate and increased CO2 levels.

I'd also hazard that having more trees in the north/south, where light levels are less is not a good trade deforestation near the equator. If a tree's job is to turn CO2 into O2, we want more of them where there is the most sunshine.

btilly5• 8 years ago

This is a common misconception. A mature forest does NOT absorb CO2. It stores a bunch of carbon, but is net neutral.

However when you cut down that forest, it turns into wood and a good chunk of that wood tends to turn into CO2 in one way or another in not too many years.

The real "lungs of the world" are the plankton in the ocean. Endlessly absorbing CO2, sinking, and forming mud. Locking away CO2 released by natural sources such as volcanoes.

caymanjim• 8 years ago

The developed world went through its industrial and agricultural revolutions over 100 years ago, and land use hasn't changed dramatically since then. Developing countries aren't doing anything different; they're just doing it now. Particular examples of this are Brazilian deforestation and Chinese pollution.

Given what we now know about the global impact of these activities, it makes sense that the world pushes back against their development plans. Part of it is "don't make the same mistakes we did," but most of it is "there's a better way," and part of it is a realization that the world collectively needs less pollution and more trees, and since we've already chopped down our trees, we want Brazil to keep theirs for our (global) benefit.

That latter point is selfish. Yes, it's good for the world as a whole, but the cost to Brazil is foregoing the benefits of exploiting their resources the same way other industrialized nations already have. The same applies to China and pollution. They're doing the same thing the US did for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The selfish part is denying these countries the right to exploit their land the way that we already have. If the rest of the world wants Brazil to stop chopping down forests, they should pay them for it.

mjevans• 8 years ago

The impacted ecosystems are different.

A more ideal solution might be to expand 'national parks' like ideas to a global scale and "purchase" the land that we as a species want to set aside as an investment in the continued stability of our ONLY presently viable planet.

zerealshadowban• 8 years ago

Neat. There is also vastly more plankton.

NeedMoreTea• 8 years ago

It seem to be the case that we're losing the biodiversity of rainforests and natural forests, but in their place gaining palm oil plantations, and monoculture "sustainable" forestry in more temperate regions.

So environmentally it's still a loss that's easy to miss, especially if people don't look past the headline numbers. At least the article points this out.

stephengillie2• 8 years ago

Is there no way to win? Despite having more forests and trees, we are still in a worse state than before.

If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.

tempestn• 8 years ago

I'm not following your logic. Even if the planet is in a worse state than it was, despite the increase in forest cover, it doesn't follow that we would be better off having done nothing.

oihoaihsfoiahsf• 8 years ago

If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.

??? "I'm going to die someday, so I might as well subsist on nothing but sugar and alcohol 'til then?"

Anyway, characterizing our efforts as "greatest" is far too generous. They were the efforts we gave. Not the greatest possible efforts that could be given. If biodiversity were the priority, we would have solved this problem.

adamc• 8 years ago

No. This doesn't follow. It's like saying that if cancer treatment only extends your life by 5-10 years, it had no value.

We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. There was never a promise that planting trees would make carbon emissions irrelevant (or plastic in the oceans or...)

mjewkes• 8 years ago

If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure

To date, this may be true.

But human cultivaiton _can_ result in an increase in biodiversity and ecological productivity vs non-intervention.

This generally looks like gardening instead of monoculture agriculture.

It may be the case that the biodiversity and ecological productivity of the amazon rainforest was greatly aided by human cultivation. See:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-...

crispinb• 8 years ago

Is there no way to win?

There isn't. Once evolutionary processes churn out a species capable of pullulating, at the cost of other species, essentially without limit, the die is cast. The notion that 'we' can 'decide' to escape this biological heritage is just another case of the old superstition: that humans magically transcend the physical world. Just as some tree species may be stripped and killed by a beetle new to the region, our planet's current ecosystems will be destroyed by Homo sapiens. New ecosystems will develop over millennia. Human history will cease. There will be no lamentations.

btilly5• 8 years ago

Also area is not the same as volume. Second growth forest tends to have less wood than old growth.

I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I remember when you could see a whole row of logging trucks driving by carrying one tree. As in, each section of the tree filled a logging truck. There are trees where that tree was today, but they represent nowhere near the same amount of carbon stored in the form of wood.

The article failed to point this factor out.

weberc2• 8 years ago

But now that carbon lives in buildings, paper, landfills, etc and there is new carbon in the form of the smaller trees. From a carbon sequestration perspective, it would seem that this is strictly better than waiting for trees to get old, right?

privacypoller• 8 years ago

You must have grown up on the coast or the island, because I grew up in the interior and they never had trees like that outside of the temperate zones. The majority of the province has logging but it is not giant, old-growth ancients and never was.

kevin_b_er• 8 years ago

I'm strongly suspecting the # increased, but the volume and/or mass of wood has gone down because the "sustainable" artificial forests seem to have less mass than old growth.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

I'd imagine that on a yearly basis, plantation forests sequester more carbon than old growth forest. Modern pine trees (especially pinus radiata in NZ) are incredibly fast growing. Time from planting to harvest is 25-30 years for pinus radiata.

The old trees that they were cutting down would've been hundreds of years old. The growth rate of trees slows down over time.

MAGZine• 8 years ago

People stopped harvesting redwoods because iirc not only are they protected but they're not a good source of lumber because when you fell redwoods, they shatter unless if you're careful.

kevin_thibedeau• 8 years ago

People in temperate regions largely stopped cutting down trees for fuel. The northeastern US and Japan we're once heavily deforested. Then people changed their priorities and found alternatives to wood.

Sharlin• 8 years ago

I don't think people changed their priorities at all. We just ran out of wood to fuel the advancing industrialization. Then figured out that the black stuff you can mine or pump from the ground burns really well. Which got us to where we are now.

drdeadringer• 8 years ago

I wonder if there are comparable "stone fences" through Japanese new-growth forests as in New England.

What I mean is: You look at paintings from 100, 150 years ago of Western MA and it's farmland ... farmland everywhere. Before and kinda-sorta after, it's woodland. Take a walk through and there's dilapidated stone fences from the farms. Beforehand, of course, pure "virgin forest".

If Japan is at least vaguely similar in terms of de- and re-forestation, are there artifacts running through the re-forestation areas of the de-forestation period?

genericacct• 8 years ago

Not to mention the fact that total world population has likely increased even more than the number of trees. (No idea though, would love to see the numbers)

fucking_tragedy2• 8 years ago

The ecosystems that took hundreds, thousands if not millions of years to develop will not magically spring to life in plantations, either.

bantersaurus• 8 years ago

China seems quite far ahead with their environmental policies.if only we also experienced the same smog to push our politicians into taking environmental politics more seriously

TheSpiceIsLife• 8 years ago

We did. And that’s why we do.

rrmm• 8 years ago

We did (to an extent) which is why we implemented the environmental laws we now have. But living so long without the severe negative environmental impacts leads us to slacken our resolve, because it's easy to think we got to this point for free.

PunchTornado2• 8 years ago

It's good to see Europe, Russia, USA and China doing really well.

But can't we put more pressure on South American? Like tariffs on their goods if they don't sort it out? Not that I like tariffs...

pochamago• 8 years ago

Just buy up the land and pay property taxes on it.

PunchTornado2• 8 years ago

but then you have to hire security and stuff. too expensive.

vinceguidry2• 8 years ago

That's extremely untenable from a sovereignty and foreign policy standpoint. Most countries do not like it when huge fractions of economic segments or asset classes are owned by foreign interests, and will usually start obstructing efforts through law / regulation / straight-up theft.

_rpd2• 8 years ago

Reference to actual paper ...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9.epdf?refer...

_rpd2• 8 years ago

Suggest changing link to original article ...

https://news.mongabay.com/2018/08/earth-has-more-trees-now-t...

In particular, the psmag.com article introduces an error in the tree canopy loss/gain graphs that swaps gross gain and net change.

Kadin2• 8 years ago

I wondered if that was PSMag or the original paper doing that. It took me a while of staring at the charts to finally decide that I'm not going crazy, the legend was just wrong.

savanaly• 8 years ago

Is it fair to say we never had much to worry about when it comes to preserving the aspects of the environment over which property rights can be doled out? e.g. Forests, to some degree, fish in the oceans. Because once the environment can become private property the owner has all the incentive in the world to utilize it efficiently and won't over harvest it except through foolishness or lack of knowledge.

But unfortunately this is not the reality when it comes to climate change, unless we gave ownership of the Earth to a despot and made it his personal property.

Kadin2• 8 years ago

I don't think that's fair to say at all. Deforestation is a real problem, and this study doesn't suggest that it's not. There are still large areas of tropical forest being clear-cut, and the areas that are being reforested are not nearly as biodiverse. The property owners have no incentive to preserve biodiversity; quite the opposite. The economic incentive is to clear-cut them for lumber, then plant single-species cash crops.

Fisheries are being depleted in a totally unsustainable way, and the areas and species that are well managed are in the minority. There have been some successes, e.g. North Atlantic lobster (although I don't think the uptick in lobster populations is necessarily well enough understood to be attributed to harvest limits), but the growing demand for deepwater fish and the increase in trawling is doing terrible damage to offshore ecosystems, and there is no management scheme in place for them.

beloch• 8 years ago

This is good news.

You wouldn't know it from reading this article. The orthodoxy on environmental research and reporting is that everything must be bad news. Humans are destroying the planet and we're all doomed. The rotten thing is about this orthodox attitude is that it has created tremendous apathy. If nothing we humans do can possibly be good and doom is inevitable, why even try?

Here we have a great example of nature's self-rectifying mechanisms in action. Raise global temperatures and CO2 levels and trees grow bigger in more places than before, lowering CO2 levels. It is a fundamentally good thing to see this in action and we really ought to recognize it as such. It means there's hope. If we change a little nature may pitch in too. i.e. If we can cut down on deforestation in the places where it's the worst we'll be in a situation where a significant number of new trees are growing and soaking up CO2 for several decades.

Good environmental news is possible, and it doesn't have to be interpreted as meaning everything is okay and we need not do anything, as many clearly fear. The "everything is bad" orthodoxy has proven far more crippling.

clumsysmurf• 8 years ago

Seems more like a mix of good and bad news. If trees are growing where there should be snow, the suns rays are absorbed and not reflected back out to space

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shift-northern-fo...

southern_cross7• 8 years ago

OK, how about this idea then? "Global warming over the recent past [reference favorite timeline here] may be largely due to the extensive regrowth of previously deforested areas."

mirimir• 8 years ago

No, it's not good news. At best, it's clueless. At worst, it's propaganda. Trees are not interchangeable objects to count. What matters is not trees, but ecosystems.

specialist2• 8 years ago

The value of the good news is to keep hope alive.

I'll give an example of an unexpected improvement:

I volunteered at Audubon for a group that was trying to save wetlands, and by extension the wild salmon. At the time, we didn't have the science to actually mitigate wetlands. So all of our efforts were on conservation. (That didn't go very well.) Now we have more options. So we could, if we wanted to, increase habitat.

That's kinda cool.

Another example is a guy claiming that he has a way to restore grasslands (reverse desertification) by using ranching to simulate migratory herds. https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

If true, that's also kinda awesome.

Generally, the trends are pretty bleak, and awareness is a curse. So people like me need good news just to get out of bed every day.

southern_cross7• 8 years ago

Are you aware of the research which suggests that much of what we consider wetlands today may only exist because of prior deforestation in those areas? And that reforestation may naturally then lead to these wetlands shrinking dramatically in size?

thereare5lights• 8 years ago

The confirmation bias here is astounding.

southern_cross7• 8 years ago

Care to expound on that?

southern_cross7• 8 years ago

Agree with your sentiment here. And it's amazing to me the number of people who will make a statement like that ("Humans are destroying the planet and we're all doomed."), or at least agree with it, without realizing that it potentially represents a form of psychosis!

fucking_tragedy2• 8 years ago

While it might be good news, the amount of trees is still nowhere near the amount that existed before the Industrial Revolution.

IkmoIkmo• 8 years ago

If a tree was fungible, it'd be great news.

In reality, we're replacing trees that you could let 5 people wrap their arms around with 'trees' that you can wrap a size z pants' belt around, replacing biodiversity with monoculture palm trees.

That having been said, I agree with the sentiment. There is actually a lot of great news that we don't report on, like child mortality or severe poverty dropping very sharply. Ourworldindata.org is a great place to start.

But in terms of this story, it's not part of the set of good news stories.

marcus_holmes3• 8 years ago

I find the negative reaction to good environmental news indicative of the same mindset we talked about a couple of weeks ago on HN. That there seems to be some kind of deathwish around environmental catastrophe. Any sign that the environment might be able to adapt, or that we're not all doomed, is met with fierce, angry resistance instead of gratitude and relief.

If the article had said that there are less trees now than there were 35 years ago, that would be bad news. So the fact that there are more trees is indisputably good news. It's not the best news. There is undoubtedly better news that could be announced. But it is good news. It is better than the assumption that I think most of us had, that global tree cover is declining.

Can't we just be a little bit happy that it's not all utterly terrible?

birksherty• 8 years ago

Nobody is wishing death. People just want pure truth, not sugar coating like this headline implies.

The biodiversity has been lost, rainforest lost. One tree contains a whole environment. Various insects, birds, animals depend on it. So all of that is lost when the tree is cut.

Now some people planted industrial timber plantations, because of money. None of that is same as what was before. The trees that are planted are not even the same type.

Suppose a bank takes away a family's home with all objects in it. After that the bank gives them a plastic chair. There is some positivity in it because they gained one chair. People are asking why they are not happy about the chair. Why they bring the home into discussion every time we talk about the chair? They probably just want to hear sad things and hate the good news.

3x2• 8 years ago

We're in the middle of a mass extinction, what more indication do you need that this in not going to go well? The immediacy and stern tone of environmental news reporting is totally appropriate as climate change compares only to nuclear war as a probable doomsday scenario. The environment is not going to "adapt" toward any state that is either pleasant for humans or conducive to our collective progress.

mikehines• 8 years ago

Finally that’s some good news

conorh• 8 years ago

There is some interesting research* showing that deforested soils take more than a thousand years to rebuild their carbon sequestering ability. So even if there are more trees, we may have done long term damage to the environment:

https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/users/169969-peter-...

Paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0192-7.epdf

* I should disclose that I know the person doing this research!

southern_cross7• 8 years ago

The first thing that popped into my head when I read about the Maya thing was "Those poor folks - if only they'd made good use of fossil fuels!" And it's my understanding that the now "recovered" forest probably bears little resemblance to what was there originally.

code4tee• 8 years ago

This is broadly a good thing—certainly where clearcut areas have been allowed to return to forest.

warmfuzzykitten• 8 years ago

Really, all we have to do is stop killing them. Much of New England, now heavily forested, was cleared by early farmers.

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

Tree-number-wise, feels good. But in the very last paragraph: "the study confirms that some of [Earth's] most productive and biodiverse biomes—especially tropical forests and savannas—are significantly more damaged and degraded...

Reforestation isn't a quick fix: "Forest soil may take centuries to recover carbon sinks damaged by deforestation." (says this report on Nature article:) https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/carbon-impact-of-anc...

diedyesterday• 8 years ago

Some of this has to be a result of higher levels of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere and it is a known effect. It's essentially plant-food in the air. Plants are growing to be bigger (fatter!) and in higher numbers. At least something good (maybe less diverse) coming out of all that CO2.

The Planet Now Has More Trees Than It Did 35 Years Ago

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