[Terrapreta] if yer not forest...

[Sean K. Barry]

Hi David,

Your quest to support the re-growth of the natural world is laudable and Nature should love you for it.  But, there is not enough land to grow enough oak trees to supply enough acorns to feed 6 billion people.  Is there?  We cannot get enough sustenance from forests alone.  I think even the indigenous people would admit this.  This is why agriculture for food crops even exists.  Starting maybe twenty five centuries ago and continuing until only 500 years ago, the Amazonian people did not turn an area the size of France into Terra Preta soils to support the growth of the tropical rainforest.  They did it to feed many 100s of thousands of people.
When the tropical rainforest returned, those people had vanished.  Do you support that fate for humans now?

When fossil fuel supplies are exhausted (and God help us, the mining interests are really going to completely exhaust them before they stop digging them up), then this world may have even more than 6 billion people (maybe, maybe not?).  That kind of hunger for food and energy is incredibly demanding on global resources.  Can managed forests supply both all the food we will need and all of the energy?  The energy interests will be the ones who push for fast growing loblolly pine plantations (and maybe Yule Gibbons ancestors).
But humans will not survive on acorns alone.

Survival of forests and of the human population together is an almost intractable problem.   It will not be flowery words or illegal "stump" speeches, that hearken to the days when the world was covered in ancient forest that will solve this, I don't believe.

In 1750 the world population is estimated at having been 791 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population>).  In 1620 it was probably closer to only 500 million.  Do you honestly believe that we could re-growth enough "full-featured" forests and still be able to feed and provide for the energy needs of 12-18 times more people (6-9 billion)?

Humans have a way that we think we can rest control of nature, to serve our purposes only.  Unfortunate in this belief is the more likely scenario that Nature, with all of its other diverse life forms, will probably win out in the end.  Nature probably has something completely different in store for us.  Your wish for forests over people may well come true.  But I doubt that it will be at the hands of men.

I once again, find this kind of discussion terribly disheartening...


Regards,

SKB


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Yarrow<mailto:dyarrow at nycap.rr.com> 
  To: terrapreta at bioenergylists.org<mailto:terrapreta at bioenergylists.org> 
  Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 12:47 AM
  Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] if yer not forest...


    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Sean K. Barry<mailto:sean.barry at juno.com> 
    Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 10:23 PM
    Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] CO2 rising

    I've been thinking this way of late , too.  carbon fixing in living organisms; tree trunks, grass roots, or what ever, is by its very nature going to die and decompose in short order, short by comparison to being fossilized into a hydrocarbon fuel for many millions of years, and out of the "Living Biosphere" for the whole time.

    I think that in order to lower the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, we have to get the carbon out of the "Biosphere", not just stuck somewhere in it for maybe a century (in a 100 year old tree trunk).  The atmosphere is part of the "Living Biosphere".  All the gases rotate in and out of the atmosphere from and to the organics on the ground and in the soil.

    Regards, SKB
  i see little wrong with recommending reforestation as a key and essential part of a greenhouse gas remediation and removal strategy.  the reality is that most of the planet has been severely deforested in the last few centuries, and the planet's entire oxygen-carbon recycling system is damaged, defective and malfunctioning.

  trees and forest are the lungs of the earth.  the recent centuries of deforestation amounts to a planetary diagnosis of lung cancer -- the degeneration of the essential tissues required for respiration.  and while logging and burning are major causes for forest loss, today the destruction of soil is havinfg a sustained impact to degrade forests and prevent their regeneration.

  the shrinkage of ancient forests in the USA in 400 years has been catastrophic.  in the eastern US, only 1/4 of 1% of ancient forests  are left, and most of the one-forested lands are now barely covered scraggly, chaotic scrubby growths of stunted trees in disorderly families of species.  worse yet, depleted soils acid rain and shifting climate is stressing the surviving trees so that they are not thriving and growing wel, or reproducing well, if nor in serious and advanced decline.

  and what is alarming isn't the devastated state of american forests, but the fact that nobody much notices, hardly anyone recognizes the critical significance of these declining and dying trees, and almost no one has any commitment to take action about this warning sign that the web of life is unraveling.

  while forests may not sequester all that much carbon compared to geological or biochar forms, nor sequester that carbon for very many decades, nonetheless, forests are critical for a multitude of biosphere and biodiversity maintenance functions.  

  repairing the earth's photosynthetic driven carbon sequestration systems requires expanding and enhancing the earth's landbase of forests.  not just planting fast growing tree plantations to grow pulpwood and biomass for biofuel, but regenerating stable, complex communities of elder trees, vegetation, microbes, insects, and animals.  

  besides, even humans find spiritual inspiration, peace and connectedness by walking in the shelter and shade of ancient trees and their community of living things.  that's why we refer to such activities as re-creation, although modern america with SUVs, RVs, ATVs, and all other energy guzzling, pollution belching contraptions have corrupted it into "wreck-creation."

  in recent discussions (debates?) about forests and carbon, a fundamental fatal error is consistently made to reduce forests to trees.  a forest is a community, within which trees form the superstructures of the habitat, and are the senior community members.  but the forest is habitat for some of the most complex agregations of species on earth.  only the seas consistently rate a higher level of biodiversity.

  tragically, science really knows very little about the complex relations and dynamics of forests.  and rather than investing major research money into studying the shrinking and vanishing ancient forests to grasp the principles and processes to preserve and regenerate them, we are accelerating the industrial processes that are destroying them.

  in the southeast US, in the last 20 years, vast acres of mixed diversity of hardwood forests have been converted into pine plantation monocultures for pulpwood production.  the recommended forestry practice from virginia to mississippi is to clear cut the remaining struggling hardwoods left on old, wornout farms and plantations, burn the land to destroy the seeds and understory, then plant orderly rows of loblolly and other non-native pines.  in the interim before the new trees cover the land, the topsoil runs off, impoverishing the land and degrading the aquatic ecosystems.  

  in 20 to 25 years, the landowner can harvest the pine by another destructive round of clearcuts and take the money to the bank.  and because all this is done with large scale, heavy equipment operated by men who have no regard for or connection to the land or the trees, most often these operations are butchery that are better termed rape than management.  in 20 years, in some areas, this ecological devastation has been visited on over half the land.  in the extreme southeast, former cotton and peanut plantations that can no longer make money grows crops are now covered by these pine plantations

  when global warming sweeps in, i expect these pine monocultures will die off from heat, drought and insects, and become tinderboxes of high-resin skeletons, ready to torch off in massive fast burning fires like the far west id currently beginning to experience.  at any rate, it will take centuries to re-establish a healthy, stable biodiversity of hardwood trees species again, and all the lesser inhabitants that support, stabilize ad sustain the tees and their communities. of course, the first step in any such regeneratio must be to restore the soil minerals and trace elements, then the micro-organisms.

  to read some on this list, the best that is offered is to add biochar and biofuel to pulpwood as the list of products offered as rationalizations for this massive land devastation and ecological suicide.  my father taught forestry for 27 years, and did this to his own land in western virginia.  before he died, however, he regretted this.

  one of my future projects is to develop a market for acorns -- oak nuts.  in many indigenous cultures worldwide (including the ancient druids of britain), acorns were a major food source.  a particular process was used to process acorns into meal that was used to make everything from gruel to bread.

  effort should be made today to introduce cooking with acorn meal as a new natural food, complete with recipes and ready-made, ready-to-eat products.  if a new market is educated and cultivated for this ancient traditional forest food, it will provide a significant new outlet for forest owners to make a living from their trees besides cutting them down for timber, firewood and biochar.  and it will likely prove be a tremendous nutritional benefit, too.

  but the ultimate reason to promote acorns as a new natural food in the emerging organic marketplace is because it encourages land to be retained as forest, and managed for biodiversity, rather than regularly butchered for timber or pulpwood or biofiuel.  only by restoring soil and regenerating forests can the broken biocycle of the planet be put in working order again.  to me, that's the ultimate purpose of terra preta -- not merely to increase agricultural productivity, or produce more biofuel to wean us off fossil fuel, or even merely to sequester carbon.  

  rather, ultimately, it's about restoring the soil to re-establish a balanced biocycle that maintains optimum oxygen-carbon cycling on the planet.  within that biocycle, constrained by realistic limits of growth and carrying capacity, not outside of or from it, humanity must obtain its reasonable measure of food, fiber and fuel.  and even timber for lumber.

  my native indigenous friends insist that everything we need is provided here on earth by the creator and mother earth.  if we take care of it all and use it wisely. we've seen little of either in several centuries -- least of all in the 20th century.

  i can't believe i just sat here and typed all this with three fingers.  damn.  maybe its an outline for a new webpage.  back to work.

  David Yarrow
  "If yer not forest, yer against us."
  Turtle EyeLand Sanctuary
  44 Gilligan Road, East Greenbush, NY 12061
  dyarrow at nycap.rr.com<mailto:dyarrow at nycap.rr.com>
  www.championtrees.org<http://www.championtrees.org/>
  www.OnondagaLakePeaceFestival.org<http://www.onondagalakepeacefestival.org/>
  www.citizenre.com/dyarrow/<http://www.citizenre.com/dyarrow/>
  www.farmandfood.org<http://www.farmandfood.org/>
  www.SeaAgri.com<http://www.seaagri.com/>
   
  "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, 
  if one only remembers to turn on the light."  
  -Albus Dumbledore
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