Comment by comrade1234
10 hours ago
I think what happened to the cod fishery off North America is really interesting. They overfished the cod then decided to regulate the fishery to let the population come back. But it never recovered - the cod population is stable but at a much lower number. Other 'stuff' (other fish species, jellyfish, etc) had moved into the environmental niche that the cod were in.
There are often other factors too, than just the direct fishing, that keep a population low.
In the west of North America, like most places, almost all of the old growth forest was logged.
Some places where the soil and subsoil was particularly vulnerable to erosion and landsliding or just didn't have a lot of water capacity in the first place like on dry mountains, after these trees were removed and most of the soil washed away from rain, the forest simply has not come back a hundred years later. There are little trees gradaually getting started, and lots of mostly bare soil or rock still where erosion from rain is able to outpace the vegetation growth. It will likely take many thousand years for trees to get to the size they were before, and to build up the capacity for holding water like it had been.
In more abundant forests, trees regrow faster. But even there, a hundred years later, the total biomass per acre is often 10% of what it was as old growth forest, and the capacity for holding water on the land similarly much reduced. The old growth forests were the result of nature doing its thing often with help from humans for thousands of years and continually becoming richer. Eventually a major disturbance sets it back, but this might only happen ever 5 or 10 thousand years. This time humans did it.
Due to our very short lifespan, "thousands of years" seems like a big deal to us, but it's quite a short time to the earth. Forest recovery in a couple of thousand years would be "bouncing back" in that perspective.
But it only matters to us. The Earth is a hunk of iron in a carbon candy shell that has no particular affection for the state it is in now.
Even if the Earth has emotions, who are we to assume it would prefer to be covered in throbbing life rather than to have a surface that was burnt to a cinder? Maybe we itch. What we're doing when we talk about a long-term forest recovery is projecting our fantasies about how we would feel if we were the Earth. If we destroy it for ourselves, we've simply destroyed it. We were the ones who assigned value to it.
This is us burning our own house down. The ground that the house is on does not care that we are obviously suicidal.
Sure, from a deep time perspective it's maybe no big deal, but the loss of the forest affects all of us including future generations significantly in the meantime.
Yes but people seem to expect recovery around the order of decades, not millennia.
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What exactly was the benefit of old growth forest to humans? I understand completely what happened, i just struggle with the downstream moral implication these sorts of stories are supposed to tug at.
Is the point that people moving into the American west should have froze to death rather than chop down trees for fire and shelter? The trees had much more utility to humans as fuel than it did as a forest at that moment, and unless you think biomass is an intrinsic good regardless of whether it helps humans, i dont see anything wrong with what happened.
Old growth forest continually grows becoming richer and richer, until one of those major setbacks which often are many thousand years in between.
Old growth forest creates more wood per year per acre than second or third growth after the old growth is cut. It also produces more food for humans and habitat for wildlife. It literally stabilizes the weather and pumps moisture inland by storing water and then releasing it. It holds water in the ground so that streams don't go dry and can support fish. It is much more resilient to wildfire.
In the redwood forest for example, 95% of it was clear cut, for a short term benefit. 90% of this wood that had been accumulated by the forest over thousands of years has now burned or rotted away within 100 years, and is gone.
What we're doing now is rapidly consuming everything, and these resources are steadily declining, and will run out and the human population will crash.
But yes, I do think more abundance and diversity of life is an intrinsic good, both for its own sake and for the long term thriving of humans on earth. Like any population of animals, if we consume everything that we live on and undermine the capacity of earth to support us, we will collapse.
That said humans can figure out how to help ecosystems recover and be more abundant. So it's not all over. But clearing the old growth forest is one of the worst things we do - up there with reckless mining that contaminates water.
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A simple thing would be: those areas can no longer produce lumber. So what should have been a renewable resource was depleted after a single use.
The parent comment is constructed in a way that maximises moral provocation while minimising engagement with the all possible environmental arguments.
Move on...
The takeaway for me is that reality and systems in general are incredibly complex, and often doing something has second or third order effects that are almost impossible to know about ahead of time
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From an ecological standpoint how is logging different than a naturally occurring forest fire? Or perhaps the forest fires never get strong enough to burn the old growth trees since they would happen more frequently via lightning strikes or natives clearing the brush/hunting?
Forest fires don't replace America's forests with ecologically dead pasture, for one. Forest fires don't usually strip out the roots preventing the erosion, and they naturally lead to succession from plants which opportunize these events. There are even entire bird species which are dependent on these reliable forest fires like Kirtland's Warbler. The real issue is the scale. 99% of America's old growth forest was logged, and much of it was replaced with farm and pasture. We could more effectively encourage mass rewilding if we had collective action to rewild pasture and replace the lost nutrition with plant foods, which require a dramatically smaller land and water footprint.
Exactly, forest fires usually don't kill most of the trees in an old growth forest. The trees are much bigger, hold a lot more water, and have much thicker fire-resistant bark. This is why you usually see charred parts on the bottom of living old growth trees - they survived fire.
Because the old growth was logged, the fires we have now are often able to kill 100% of the trees in an area because the trees are all small and young and vulnerable. And this is self perpetuating, because after such a fire the soil often erodes, and sun hits the ground directly keeping it dry - it takes a really long time to recover from in some places.
Each cycle of logging removes even more soil and makes the landscape drier, and resets the timer on how long it will be before the forest is able to survive a wildfire. It's a short term thing.
I'm not saying no one should ever cut a tree or use wood - and it can be done in better and worse ways, it's really complex. But in general, the repeated clearcutting of the pacific northwest is steadily degrading that landscape the same way repeated intensive till farming of the prairies is degrading that landscape - it's a relatively short term thing with diminishing returns.
That is a story about nature bouncing back. Just not the way the people doing it thought it would as it turned out other 'stuff' was a lot bouncier than the Cod were.
Example regarding clams: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pearl-buttons-muscatin...
They never actually stopped fishing it though. It's regulated at a level to prevent 100% collapse, there was never political support to let it truly recover by banning fishing for a decade or two.
You don't even have to ban fishing entirely, just reduce the fishing to a point where fish populations increase. It might mean that fishing has to be at half the level it is now which still isn't great for the people impacted but you don't have to go 100% outright ban.
I wish us humans adapted quicker to the realization that our food systems aren't sustainable for the planet.