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Comment by fireattack | Hacker News Reader

The technique is definitely cool, but can it really be called "sustainable"?

Pollarded trees in Great Britain are in many cases several times older than the average life expectancy of those species. It very much depends on the species of tree of course.

I think I once heard that most trees that coppice or pollard well are adapted to beaver predation. We just make a cleaner cut than the beaver.

Why not?

It seems to require a lot more effort than traditional lumber and can't really be mass produced. I doubt the output/input ratio (whatever you consider as the input: man-hour, monetary cost, carbon footprint) is any better either.

In other words, I think it's more like a luxury, and I won't call luxury items "sustainable".

This doesn't seem to be a luxury method of producing general-purpose lumber, but a technique for producing special-purpose lumber. The alternative way to get similar quality lumber would seem to be logging old-growth forests, and in that light this method would certainly appear to be much more sustainable, even if it cannot satisfy all the demand for all kinds of lumber.

> ... It seems ... I doubt ... I think ...

So no real evidence.

> I won't call luxury items "sustainable"

How is wood a "luxury" item. Fruit and nut orchards both require significant man-hour and monetary effort, they would also be considered unsustainable luxuries using these rules.

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