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Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

They already destroyed all of their forest natural resources a long time ago. Maybe they are trying to warn north america of their own mistakes.

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This breaks my heart about Ireland. I concede it's not possible to reforest the entire Ireland and have a competitive dairy and beef industry but restoring some of our wetlands and forests should be a goal that's taken seriously. We're at the point of getting 'cheap' talk from politicians.

Ireland has the climate to support the entire island covered in Atlantic rain-forests. People already agree Ireland is a pretty country, can you imagine how glorious it would be to have rolling hills covered in trees.

We stopped deforesting the US in 1920. We have more forest here than we did 100 years ago.

We do in terms of acreage. A lot of that is reclaimed farmland. Old-growth hardwoods are still down overall, and will remain so; that can take multiple hundreds of years to recover, since cleared forests regrow in phases.

Right. And tree coverage is not the be-all-end-all. My family visited the plantation where a few of our ancestors were enslaved; it had been turned into a state-run forest preserve (partly as a bid for the prior owners to hide the extent of the operation). Unfortunately, the farming practices employed back then have scarred the land; near where one of the slave cabins had stood, we were shown a large anthropogenic ravine that had been created by farming-related soil erosion. These places aren't quite the same forests as they were before European settling.

There's also the case of the near-loss of the American Chestnut.

Actual facts on the ground do not fit neatly into a one-liner, especially stable forests; this sentence is meant as a one-liner to win bar arguments.

source: current graduate research papers in forestry

Could you maybe give us the 4-5 liner version then?

Certainly that's not how the Europeans started out interacting with north America's natural resource. Mostly they treated it like the US does oil deposits now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Arrow_Policy

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss

Are you trying to argue that Europe hasn't decimated their forests?

Europe's tree cover is increasing.

https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...

Tree cover != forests. That is movement in the right direction though!

Ah, the No True Scotch Pine argument.

Northern Europe has been completely reforested, and has a forest cover which is larger than ever before. Because of the switch from wood heating to electric heating. Forest products remain one of the largest exports.

As for central Europe, yes they need to reforest their own countries before they go flying all around the world screaming about the Amazon, while drinking the finest champagne.

Didn't that already happen in the middle ages?

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