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Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

26 billion trees are currently being burned down every year while only 15 billion are replanted.

Glad to see we're replanting a substantial amount of trees taken down every year, this gap looks closable. I had in my mind much closer to 5% or 10%...

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While it's better than nothing, the newly planted trees actually cannot replace the old trees. You can read about the reasons why for example here http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/... (I'd do a TL;DR but it's actually pretty complicated, as ancient ecosystems tend to be).

It depends what you mean by "replace". It can be anywhere on the spectrum from an exact clone of each tree, to the same count of trees. You're looking at a narrow part of spectrum of the meaning of "replace" where you consider the ecosystems affected by the removal of trees. Another narrow spectrum of the meaning could be restoring the absorption rate of carbon dioxide. I'm pretty sure firing seeds from the air constitutes replacing the rough count of trees.

Did you read the article?

The US and Europe is more forested now than it was 100 years ago, on average. Wood is no longer needed for fuel and ship building. Most commercial logging now goes on in managed 'tree farms' rather than virgin woodlands.

Around here it is actually consider a problem: Areas that has been cultivated for hundreds of years are now filling up with bushes and trees because small scale farming is declining quickly and the larger ones don't send livestock out to grass in these areas.

where is your here?

Late but I'm in Norway, at least for now.

Why is that a problem? If we don't need to use the land for farming or grazing, what's the harm in letting it fill up with bushes and trees?

You lose an ecosysem and some of the plants and animals adapted to that ecosystem.

I'd be interested to know if there's much difference between managed and unmanaged mini wilderness -- can you just leave a few fields to go wild and it'll turn out okay or do humans need to steer it for the first few years?

From what I've heard from farmers, fields left to the wild are hard to clear and it's more difficult to return to agriculture after a few years. As a matter of real-estate the value goes down.

"The US and Europe is more forested now than it was 100 years ago"

source? (hope it's not your ass)

Regarding Europe: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04...

Regarding the US

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/storie...

A Google earth search of Cape Breton would like to have a word with you.

"On average".

Mind you, that's because 100 years ago a lot of it had been razed to the ground to fuel the Industrial Revolution. "More forested than 100 years ago" really means "slowly recovering from the damage we did."

I recall, about 20 years ago, my father driving us through the forests of West Virginia to visit family, and pointing out that not one of the trees was more than, say, 18 inches across (in my young memory, at least). There was plenty of forest, but it was all young forest. The old growth had been utterly exterminated.

In Europe we started razing the forest long before the industrial revolution. Norway used to have substantial oak forests that still haven't recovered from a steady decline that may have started as early as with viking age ship building, but that seriously started no later than the 1600's to satisfy demand for more and larger ships throughout Europe.

North America was inhabited for thousands of years by the time Europeans arrived and land tended to be managed as a matter of living on it. The thick forests early European colonists encountered were the result of massive depopulation of people and not 'natural' in that sense.

The idea of setting aside land for unmanaged old-growth forests is a modern one and we're likely seeing it again for the first time since early colonial times; back then it was inadvertent.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.htm...

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