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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

A stable biome feels like sustained growth to me, via destruction and recycling. The jungle is always growing, even as plants die and rot.

Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.

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A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it grew from an original small size to its current size, and it will occasionally experience waxing and waning as the climate and other geographical features change).

By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.

It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.

> jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows

Jungles today are fantastically more complicated than they were a billion years ago.

Earth’s biosphere’s energy flux is higher today than it was hundreds of billions of years ago [1]. This is due to various metabolic “innovations.” It also occurred because life directly altered Earth’s atmosphere and at least surface geology that made it more conducive to more life [2].

> By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed

This is not how this fucking paper defines growth. Nor is gross consumption how most models define growth—the word production is right there in GDP.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10288578/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-020-00116-w

On a desertifying planet trapped in climate extinction, the jungle is only shrinking.

Look up reforestation work. It is a light in dark times.

We're inside the first animal created mass desertification project. Reforestation is nonsense.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...

We lose 10 million sq miles of forests a year and have lost 1/3 of forest areas since 1000Ad, so "reforesting" isn't a viable reversal project.

And reforestation is poorly understood as "reforesting" is pursued on land already lost to forest capability.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59799-8

"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"

Wikipedia says "Globally, planted forests increased from 4.1% to 7.0% of the total forest area between 1990 and 2015." And the Green Wall in China is arguably doing cool things.

Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."

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