Farmland is beginning to revert back to tropical forest in many countries. The NYT reports:
new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.This could be a very positive trend.“There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago,” said Ms. Ortega de Wing, 64, who remembers fields of mango trees and banana plants.
The new forests, the scientists argue, could blunt the effects of rain forest destruction by absorbing carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, one crucial role that rain forests play. They could also, to a lesser extent, provide habitat for endangered species.
The idea has stirred outrage among environmentalists who believe that vigorous efforts to protect native rain forest should remain a top priority. But the notion has gained currency in mainstream organizations like the Smithsonian Institution and the United Nations, which in 2005 concluded that new forests were “increasing dramatically” and “undervalued” for their environmental benefits. The United Nations is undertaking the first global catalog of the new forests, which vary greatly in their stage of growth.
The United States had a very similar experience. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, net forestland declined dramatically, but began to grow back in the earth 20th century. The United States has experienced net forest growth for most of the past century. Whole regions of the country that were largely denuded, including much of the northeastern United States. Areas in the east that are designated "wilderness" actually consist of second-growth forest on lands that had been cleared for farming. The shift of agriculture to the midwest combined with increases in agricultural productivity, along with other factors, including the displacement of draught animals with motorized vehicles and farm equipment, combined to facilitate dramatic forest regeneration with dramatic ecological benefits.
One might ask, since this is a libertarian blog for the most part, whether the regrowth is a good thing, and what may have caused it. Does this result vindicate conservation efforts, or does it demonstrate why we don't need the government to conserve the environment? Are we seeing an inefficient use of forest resources, or are we seeing a more efficient use of labor?
It seems to me (a layman in forestry and botany) that in the regrowth of forest on cultivated land, we are seeing the effects of efficiency in agricultural production. "Heavy" agriculture moved from New England to the Midwest (leaving niche crops, small truck farms and dairy as the main expression of agriculture in NE) because NE farms are generally small, hilly and rocky - not suited for vast acreages of wheat, corn and soybeans. The Midwestern farms in turn became vastly more productive due to improved equipment, seed and fertilizer and thus were able to allow a good portion of their land to lie fallow or rotate between crop and fallow.
Much of the rainforest-area agriculture was of the homesteading sort, and I would imagine that many homesteaders, having hacked a farm out of the forest (very hard work), discovered that what they had was a subsistence agriculture situation; that to get rich at it, they needed more money, equipment and manpower. Competing against farmers who had these advantages, reality set in with a bite, and they went back to the cities and towns to make a better living doing something else....
Just how Darwin said it works.
*spits beer across room*
bwaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha...
I think we should fine forest fires... the fire, I mean, but only if we can't take the legal consequences directly to lightning.
Funny thing about plants- ya cut 'em down, they just start growing again.
The white pine forests of Michigan, post smallpox and pre- Paul Bunyan, were biological deserts. Little grows in white pine forests, which covered most of Michigan when the whites arrived.
I asked a conservancy guy if they were trying to preserve pre-human ecosystems or pre-Columbian ecosystems. He called me a redneck, but in a nice way. He knew I knew, and since the Indians were supposed to be wandering around in a pre-lapsarian idyll, making up environmentalist epigrams for the confounding of the white man, my knowing was dangerous.
But he's family. Smaller than me, too.
Once you decide to get out of bed in the morning, you'll never be the same. Do your professors know that you've become this reactionary?
Old trees are better than new trees?
It is fascinating though in terms of common concepts of human progress. Up above in the hills North of my family home lies the ruins of a resort complex built in the 1880s and abandoned during the great depression. An electric railroad once even ascended the slope. No more.
A similar story plays out through-out the mountains: abandoned roads and bridges lost to time by lack of funding: pristine erections of the 1920s and 30s whose connecting roads are buried under decades of dirt.
Old trees are better than new trees?
No, but most of a rain forest is stuff other than trees. It wouldn't be entirely surprising if some of the ecosystem of an "old" rain forest never reappeared in a "new" one, especially if there weren't any nearby "old" forests from which species could spread.
That said, this is encouraging news. It surprises me, because the conventional wisdom not long ago was that the soil beneath rain forests was so piss-poor that even the slash-and-burn farmers could get only a season or two's worth of crops out of the land before it became worthless for growing anything at all. Hence the pattern of hacking out a new plot every few years, you see, rather than just continuing to plant the ground you'd already cleared.
Interesting. How old is the bridge in that picture? It looks to be in good condition...
Seems like an econ problem, and I'm not sure these biologists are going to come up with a good answer.
Genetic evolution cannot really be said to be working on the timescales involved since Western civilization came to this continent.
Looking very closely, I see traces on the columns and arches that might be spalling. So maybe or maybe not in good condition.
In her "Trashing The Planet", the late Dixie Lee Ray suggested that the acidification of lakes in New England was due to the increased forest cover and the leaching of acidic moisture from the fallen leaves. IOW, acidified lakes are "natural" and only lost their acid nature when the land was cleared for farming.
She also said that, if you wish to combat the acidification of the lakes, the cheapest thing to do would be to dump a truckload of crushed limestone into it from time to time. She didn't have to say that the greenies' preferred way was to destroy the economy. Went/goes without saying.
The same can be said of all environmentalism. Taking care of the environment may be a necessity in the long term. In the short term, however, the long term is a luxury.
If you want people to refrain from slash and burn farming, the easiest way is to open up other ways for them to feed their children. Those who are motivated will take it, and those who aren't motivated tend to be too lazy for slash and burn anyway.
It is called progress.
How expensive is limestone (a nonrenewable resource).
How many old-growth forests were there ten thousand years ago? Or even three thousand years ago?
Where did this stereotype come from?
Better yet, Hope.
"True" environmentalists know that ecology and climate never change unless humans make them change, and change is always evil, mean nasty and rotten.
Limestone? Don't know. Dr. Ray said it was cheapest, not free.
Recall seeing a subdivision being put in near Allentown. Where I live, you excavate dirt of various clayiness. There, you tore out chunks of limestone to make room for the basement. The spoil has to go someplace, I suppose.
Point is, if you're a committed greenie, doing it the cheapest way is wrong.
Stereotype? You could start with Iron Eyes Cody and his single tear.
Or hear of Indians as the stewards of the land despoiled by white conquerors in various propaganda put out for the chumps.
The one thing that may be different is the absence of large predators. Or at least the non-human large predators. I think there are humans who will be happy to cull the deer population.
Rain forests have not had the same kinds of evolutionary pressures, one sign of which is that they have a much greater biodiversity than temperate forests. I fear some real losses there. On the other hand, I shrink from condemning poor humans in equatorial nations to grinding poverty to preserve some rare subspecies of insect.
It would be interesting to require some environmentalists to swap places with those dirt-poor people, and see what their revealed preferences are.
It's probably a byproduct of the massive shift from away from subsistence agriculture and towards urbanization that's been going on for decades.
Some (too many) seem to think that forests are some static thing. They're constantly changing and for myriad causes. Even back in the 1960s, at the birth of environmentalism, my high school science books were clear that while all things in an ecosystem were connected in some way, they were also subject to change, over longer or shorter periods of time. All without human intervention.
Unless one is willing to except humankind from the ecosystem--something which certain groups are certainly willing to do--then human activity must be seen as 'natural'. Not always smart, not always benign, but part of the system even when disrupting what went before.
Michael Ejercito: The world will not be running out of limestone anytime in the foreseeable future. Unless you happen to be living on granite, it's right beneath your feet, everywhere in the world. Everywhere there was once an ancient sea, you will find limestone, its precursor, or its combination with other minerals.
- Thanks for the good news about regrowth of secondary forests in some parts of the tropics, Jonathan.
- Temperate forests can't hold a candle to the biodiversity in tropical forests, which hold a greater number of species (plant, animal, mibrobe) in a single acre than does the entire expanse of temperate zone forests. This explains the concerns that biologists, enviros and wealthy conservationists around the world have for tropical forests.
- Degraded tropical forests and secondary growth is similarly poorer in biodiversity (though of course nature never stands still, and some species are adapted toward disturbed areas).
- What tropical forests are general in great need of is practically the same thing that is true temperate zones - owners (private or community), with defendable property rights. Most tropical deforestation takes place on PUBLIC lands, often subsidized by Western-funded roads, dams and other public works projects, for the principal benefit of elites, and without too much concern for sustainability or the rights of natives (who actually do a decent job husbanding their resources where they have title, weapons and access to courts). Governments (and those who control them) are to some degreee (depending on the country) in the business of taking these resources from natives, and looting/liquidating them. A similar phenonmenon can be seen in the bureaucratic mismanagment of US forests and public lands, where the supposed owners - the US citizens end up with none of the revenues but provide a blank check for road building and fire-fighting.
See, I would have called it Change.
Bird poop.
Paging Edmund Burke!
The issue isn't the false dichotomy between human-induced change and "natural" change. The issue is instead rapid change within an ecosystem that we do not properly understand. Tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that devastate natural areas do concern some conservationists but there isn't a whole lot we can do about those.
Instead of playing gotcha, it would be useful to see people who self-identify as conservatives explain why the principles they apply to the political and social realms don't apply to conserving nature.
Environmentalists will burn you at the stake for this:
True environmentalists know that ecology and climate never change unless humans make them change, and change is always evil, mean nasty and rotten.
And your point is what, that therefore we shouldn't bother protecting anything?
pmorem: "Trees are a luxury, reserved for people who don't need to clear the land to feed their babies."
For every tree that is saved, a little fetus is aborted.
All right. I don’t use those terms. [I say] "You’re going to be in a position where you can hand Montana off along to your grandkids in as good or better shape as when we found it." Now that doesn’t sound like a guy whose going to take away your job. And I’m not. In fact, with our restoration economy in Montana, heck, we’re creating jobs like crazy, cleaning up the messes from the past. Making the rivers cleaner, making the fisheries better. Improving the roads that we have in the forests so they don’t increase siltation and kill bull trout. All those are jobs. Heck, there’s as many or more jobs doing that than there was digging the holes or cutting down the trees in the first place.... So it turns out it was all a lie—jobs or the environment. To a large extent, what’s driving Montana’s economy today is people moving here to live in close proximity to those wildlands."
That depends on your answer to my question. Why protect this slice of time but not others? Why artificially and arbitrarily "prefer" the forest as it was at a certain idealized point in time, but not others? The Amazon is hardly untouched, yet remains biodiverse -- despite millennia of human sculpting, deforestation, and regrowth:The Burkean prudence that is premised on mythic thinking is a false prudence, once we realize that humanity has been denuding and regrowing forests for hundreds if not thousands of years. Burkean wisdom counsels the contrary: that we should continue to make use of forests as our forefathers have, given that human forestry and the ebb and rejuvenation of forests have long been part of human practice. The biodiversity that accompanies the present regrowth is no more to be arbitrarily "preferred" than those of previous times. The myth of the pristine forest and pristine biodiversity is just that -- a myth. Anthropogenic forests like the Amazon, often held up as a paragon of biodiversity, support the contrary Burkean argument.
My father was in the occupation forces in Germany in 1946. One day he decided to try his hand at hunting and checked out a bolt action rifle from the base club. Didn't find anything to shoot, no real hunting experience. But he noted that the entire forest he was hunting in had been clear cut a decade or more earlier. And how did he know. If you looked in one direction you saw lots and lots of trees, turn to the right or left and you could look straight down the rows of trees for over a thousand yards. Totally unnatural.
Several decades later the German government went in to a forest like that and took a number of the trees out. Forestry, No, it seems during the Nazi period they planted trees which would take certain shades of color in specific patterns. Thus, when autumn began certain symbols reappeared in the forests. Initially they were not seen, except by air, and so it wasn't until 1992 and German re-unification that they became known.
The joke of the matter is that two decades after a clear-cut the forest looks unnatural. 60 years after a clear-cut you couldn't tell it from virgin land unless something weird was done in the replant.
Interesting ... it seems a lot of movements think they are "re-establishing" or "protecting" some kind of old or threatened order. Usually that's because what they have to offer isn't actually very pretty, true, or virtuous in its own right.
Real environmentalism is anti-poison and pro-human. Toxic environmentalism is pro-poisoning-the-humans.
Germans Removing Forest Swastika
Since forests only produce CO2 when the wood decays, not much. The CO2 takeup rate would have increased as the forests grew back.
Question is about the CO2 issue prior to 1492, when the Indians had deforested so much of the Americas.
In Michigan, the rifle season is said to kill about 300,000. Include poachers and the endless car-deer accidents, and the deer population is barely kept in check by being culled at the rate of about 400,000 a year.
If you're not going to fence to an astonishing height, you have no business trying to garden in the country, which could include being two blocks from the business section of a small town.
I've seen more wild turkeys in the last year than in my first forty. Six or seven here, a dozen there.
One suggestion is that agribusiness, while keeping the same amount of land in production, more or less, does away with the farm house every mile, containing a farmer, his family, his dogs, and his guns.
Talked to a conservation officer who said it was worth his job to be quoted talking about cougars. He may be exaggerating, but I suspect you could shoot one without any trouble because they Do Not Exist. Fortunately, I haven't seen any cougar tracks around our place in a couple of years. They were pretty clear before that, for about a year.
Instapundit sometimes refers to "The Beast in The Garden" about large predators coming back and coming close.
When you leave an agricultural field fallow, after a year or two it turns into a meadow with grasses and weeds. The birds and various plant eaters like deer help with the re-seeding process. Slower growing, more durable weeds like blackberry bushes then fill in, along with fast growing trees that have a lot in common with weeds, like sumac and aspen. These short, low density trees reach maturity and crowd out a lot of the weeds; slower growing hardwoods like oak and maple then take advantage of the shade and grow taller. After a while the aspen die off and the taller hardwoods, which make a very dense canopy, blot out all but the tallest of hardwoods, or conifers depending on the soil and where you live. Give it 80 or 100 years and the forest grows back to the extent you wouldn't know it's original; the Adirondacks appear to most observers to be primeval but the area was heavily farmed just a couple hundred years ago, and probably before that by the native Americans. It maybe isn't the aboriginal forest that greeted those who crossed over the Asian land bridge, but the bears and wolves and occasional wild cat wouldn't know the difference.
Wild vines, of course, lay waste to any type of forest if they are left unchecked. They are not picky. I suspect pre-Columbian America, that pastoral idyl, had a lot of untended forests that did little other than provide an arbor for wild grapevines.
Where I hunt in the Texas Hill Country, I have been told that if I see a mountain lion or bobcat, and I don't shoot it, I will never be allowed to hunt that property again. If I am so lucky as to see one, I intend to keep my mouth shut about it.
Interestingly, Old Iron Eyes was not even an Indian. From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Eyes_Cody
"Cody was born Espera de Corti, a son of Antonio de Corti and his wife Francesca Salpietra, immigrants from Sicily. In some of his earliest acting credits Cody was listed as Tony de Corti."
I heard he was Jewish. Oh, well.
I think there was something about Chief Seattle, or maybe it was Chief Portland. Something like that. Anyway, the greenies had him lamenting a hundred years ago that he'd seen his last buffalo. Apparently he hadn't seen his first, there being none in and around Sea-Tac.
Wait! Maybe he'd gone to the zoo.
Hard to keep up.
Yep, our house sits right on the edge of an old abandoned farm. The north side of our house is mature oaks and hickories with sourwood, dogwood understory. The south side, the farmer's old fields is now a mass of loblolly pines, perhaps 30 years old. The pines are starting to shade each other out and die, and they are being replaced by sweetgums and maples. Sadly, the deer density is such oak seedlings are mostly destroyed, so I wonder if the climax forest will actually be mature sweetgums instead of oak/hickory. The deer apparently don't like sweetgum leaves.
The deer are probably a bigger problem than occasional clearcutting if one wants a healthy understory with shrubs and woodland perennials.
"If you've seen one libertarian, you've seen them all."
Can you sneak in a breeding pair of wolves? That would keep the neighbors amused.
Or a couple of cougars?
I gather the Yellowstone ecosystems have benefited greatly from the wolves culling the elk.
I am also in the Bastrop area, and our periodic neighborhood news letter continues to have mention of large cat spottings and warnings to keep small animals indoors or otherwise safe from large predators. The local park rangers will also confirm the presence of large cats with habitat on the various parks. Of course, the cats don't seem to care much for park boundaries. Deer are sufficiently plentiful that at certain hours, you must be as cautious of them on the roadway as children playing in the streets.
For those unfamiliar with Batrop's history, in part as a source of lumber for downtown Austin Texas, I've provided a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastrop,_Texas
Others,
I have had the opportunity to backpack large parts of the Appalachians, the "Florida Trail", and other forests in the SE United States. Many areas once logged are now indistinguishable from "pristine" lands. In some areas, the logging methods used appear to have increased biodiversity by providing new habitats and/or by using methods that resulted in forest regrowth over an extended period of time - the meadow field next to the weed field next to the soft woods next to the harder woods example provided above. ("Fields" here being used to mean plots of many square miles).
On the other hand, if the Bio-diversity crowd wants to pick a species as damaging as humans (in my opinion) on those same forests, might I respectfully suggest "kudzu"? If you prefer the lakes and rivers, "Nile Perch/Tilapia". Here in Texas, the "pine bark beetle" is definitely an issue right now. The first two, of course, are non-native species... A consideration that needs a place in the biodiversity equation.
Wolves or cougars might try to cull our kids as they toddle out to the sandbox, and we don't breed as rapidly as white-tails. I much prefer that large predators be re-introduced in someone else's backyard!
I have fenced off about an acre with 7.5' high mesh stapled to tree trunks. It will be interesting to see if there are any noticeable differences between the fenced and unfenced area in five or 10 years.
I had that concern about our now-gone cougar.
I found tracks where it had been dancing with a deer. Looked like the deer had been doing a mad polka. Not a drop of blood, from which I presumed it was an escaped pet without a clue. Rabbits are too fast and, even if you catch them, it's hardly worth the effort. I figured a four-year old would be just about right.
The current overabundance of deer makes that impossible - deer selectively graze tastier seedling trees so only non-favored species have a chance in the succession race for sunlight. If we want climax forests, we will need to do something about deer-caused environmental damage (if you want to be a self-flagellating human, one can say that the deer damage is indirect human damage - since we have removed deer predators from the food chain). A major critique of the current mentality of tree-hugging environmentalism is that it precludes the managed hunting necessary not that we have so drastically upset the balance.
Pollan's "Second Nature" has a few chapters on this.
My wife and I visited Mount St. Helens Park last summer. We had just driven past the "Entering Blast Zone" sign when it became obvious we weren't in Kansas anymore.
The surrounding hills changed from normal forest to weird green fractals. What had happened was that the 1980 eruption blast had leveled all the existing trees and vegetation. A few years later the Weyerhauser forest products company owning that land replanted the blast zone with a single species of tree whose branches grow almost precisely at a horizontal to gravity.
So about 24-25 years after the reseeding, all the hills were covered with identical trees of almost exactly the same height, and all with seemingly precision-engineered identically horizontal branches.
It looked like a bad computer graphic.
I urge everyone here to visit Mount St. Helens in Washington state. You'll have a wonderful time.
If it's lumber you're looking for, normal forest progression isn't going to get it.
Oren. Michigan is said to have three quarters of a million hunters each year, more than the number of riflemen on the Eastern Front. There was a report a couple of years ago that two of them had been found to be sober, but I never believed it.
It appears that there is such a massive amount of protein in the woods that large-scale commercial poaching operations thrive in addition to hunting season. So they say. See Heywood's "Woods Cop" series of novels. I've talked to him. He works with conservation officers and claims it's so.
Michigan and other states are so confused between "sustainable" and "managed" that they are occasionally sued by farm groups for the damage deer do to crops. Two-hundred pound rats.
I don't know if we could find more hunters. I think what we need is longer hunting seasons and a much largerkill limit, including anterless deer permits. Still, there's only so much appetite for venison.
In the city of Grand Haven, there was a move to cull the deer in the cemetery. Activists drove around blowing their horns and driving off the deer, temporarily. You can imagine the result if the state started a massive deer kill program.
In terms of other species with an effect on biodiversity similar to human effects: those Nile perch didn't pick up those kudzu seedlings and swim'em across the Atlantic on their own. . .
A better example of how this works is Yellowstone. Remember when it burned in 1988 and even the naturalist wanted it to burn. Some types of trees only propagate during a fire (like the Lodgepole pine), while others need a fire to clear out the forest floor. Within two years of the fire Aspens had become the dominate tree in the burn areas, even though they had been scarce before the fire. Conifers however are still growing and are expected to replace the Aspens in a short time. Lodgepole was expected to go crazy after the fire, but studies show that the highest propagation is in areas with a strong ground fire. Thus, nature actually likes a clearing of the land at intervals
Because the indigenous peoples have an inalienable right to live a Stone Age existence with a 30-year life span.
Visiting that area can be a blast.
So long as the regulators aren't captured by the industry, I see no problem with this. Of course, regulators ought not to be captured by bug-eyed environmentalists either, but I trust you won't object on that front.
They certainly do.
If the Amazonian tribes were not a greenie theme park, minus the visitors, of course, their miserable, bug-infested, inbred way of life would be a reproach to all who consider themselves civilized.
Paul Theroux wrote about a trip he'd taken decades ago on a tramp steamer which went a surprising way up the Amazon. One tribe he heard about thought the gods had taken away their cleverness and given it to the white people. The whites found this convenient.
According to Mann, these people are the relicts of a huge, successful agricultural civilization destroyed by disease.
He discusses how the first white guys down the Amazon and Mississippi reported prosperous farming villages cheek by jowl. On both rivers, the next white guy was half a century later. Found practically nobody.
There was a documentary about a tribe which did a bit of tree clearing to get some light for gardening. Trees grow fast, so the guys have to do a lot of chopping. They use ax heads they've found lying around. Never thought of trying to sharpen them. Or make their own. So they're using a previous culture's seconds. One interfering outsider gave a local a steel ax and the poor guy, recalling a life time of chopping at trees with a dull rock poorly hafted onto a stick practically cried.
Yeah. Best thing to do is leave these folks stuck there.
we don't have buffalo, but we have geoducks.
my wife recently climbed it. the videos and pictures are spectacular.
In fact, the conservationist movement was originally a right-wing movement.
19th century conservatives opposed development and supported protecting wilderness areas to maintain the status quo.
Liberals of that time were supporters of industrialization because they see it as a vehicle to empower the common man. (Unions need industry to exist, and 19th century American factory workers were much better off than medieval European serfs.)
Yes, nature is resilient, but the rapidity and scale on which we are converting the Amazon to monoculture soybeans certainly does constitute a stress.
As I noted before, one of the chief dynamics of the problem is that governments "own" most of the tropical forests (and indigenous peoples have little enforceable rights), so those who value them as they are (including wealthy conservationists and enviros) have limited abilities to effectively express their preferences by buying and holding land. Instead, as the government doesn't protect its "title", the forests are a public resource that can be freely consumed. Not surprisingly, local elites are the chief beneficiaries.
If you have a comment about spelling, typos, or format errors, please e-mail the poster directly rather than posting a comment.
Comment Policy: We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and in extreme cases to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil (and, especially, free of name-calling). We think of comment threads like dinner parties at our homes. If you make the party unpleasant for us or for others, we'd rather you went elsewhere. We're happy to see a wide range of viewpoints, but we want all of them to be expressed as politely as possible.
We realize that such a comment policy can never be evenly enforced, because we can't possibly monitor every comment equally well. Hundreds of comments are posted every day here, and we don't read them all. Those we read, we read with different degrees of attention, and in different moods. We try to be fair, but we make no promises.
And remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.