Comment by anthonypasq
6 hours ago
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.
would you trade the old growth forests for Seattle? I would. I quite like people and cities. But it feels like all these arguments end up running towards some misanthropic dead end about how humans are a blight on the planet.
We tolerate extracting resources from the biosphere because it supports a higher human population. Barring actions that will lead to extinction events, I think we should continue to extract resources from the planet that support human flourishing.
I sort of agree, but there is a balance. Destroying a small portion of old growth to develop humans? Great!
Destroying millions of acres of old growth for cattle farming, which is essentially a luxury for human food, meh.. maybe we’re better off growing cattle in other places that are more suited to it, and eating less beef so that nature in those forests can continue nourishing those parts of the earth.
Some uses of the earth are good for both humans and their environment, and some are good for humans in the short term but at the cost of long-term sustainability.
And if we do things that aren’t sustainable then we use up valuable resources, when doing things in a more balanced way could support and benefit humans indefinitely.
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
I think this perspective is too generous. We obviously can't prevent unforeseen consequences, but we should learn from them and change our behavior.
Instead, we're depleting resources faster and faster primarily because the people directing most of the world's economic resources want to accumulate even more money even faster. They just don't give a damn about what comes after.