Hacker News Reader

Comment by wikfwikf | Hacker News Reader

Why do you care about the forest supporting other life? Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere?

Ecosystems grow, maintain themselves, and can be better at sequestering carbon.

Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns, pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some. If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest will expand without fundraisers and government programs.

Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in small ways so it can go on to support itself.

In a forest full of large trees, the carbon in the non-tree biomass is a rounding error. If you can pack the trees slightly closer and almost everything else now finds the environment too hostile to survive, it's probably a net win from a carbon point of view.

> Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere?

I disagree. We also want to avoid ecological cascade effects in our ecosystems.

Having huge forests full of trees and barren of much else is great if it allows us to protect other more interesting ecosystems.

And perhaps the best way to create a sustainable ecosystem around the trees is to plant them and see what else develops, rather than try and curate a specific balance of organisms.

You just don't know what ecosystems are. You don't just plant hundreds of trees of the same species and call it an ecosystem, that is just a colony and lacks many characteristics that an ecosystem needs.

The more life a forest supports, generally, the more carbon gets removed and the longer the forest lives.

That's not necessarily true

Reply on news.ycombinator.com