I’ve long been bemused, wondering why there isn’t an aggressive forestation policy the world over. They took great care in teaching me as a child in national school that trees and forests are the lungs of the earth. We have a serious problem with an over abundance of carbon dioxide and bad quality air and we’re not trying to make the lungs we have bigger and more efficient? I’ve been assuming that I was seeing things as exactly that, a child in national school. There has to be complexities I’m just not aware of, not being even remotely an expert in the field, right? I have been blithely assuming that when people start talking about forestry in terms of carbon sinks and transactions I’m just not getting the whole picture. I fervently believe we need a better attitude towards forestry for all the other good benefits, but I’ve been assuming it isn’t clear cut enough to be a “this should be the back bone of our Green policy”, the way I’ve felt it should be. After my last largely more optimistic post about forestry in Ireland I came across this post on the Irish Times site that knocked that optimism back a bit https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/ireland-s-native-woodlands-are-quietly-disappearing-1.3529317
I’m really only starting out with paying attention to the larger environmental issues we’re facing again. I’ve been buried for many years in a complacency and a residual sort of depressed hopelessness. For an optimistic person generally, I am quite definite in my pessimism about how little we are doing to fix oncoming disaster, and how late we’re even looking at the gathering storm clouds. (If this is something you think about, by the by, you might be interested in this newsletter called Gentle Decline, which contains “Intermittent thinking concerning anthropogenic disaster, and our possible responses to it.”) I think I just hoped we’d have *done* something by now while at the same time rather uselessly allowing my frustration to paralyze me. Frustration with the notion that I, as a single, not at all wealthy and pretty much useless human, am asked to “Save the Planet!” with the various recommendations we hear about in the media (occasionally, as and when they have a slow news day) while the governments that are supposed to be representing us make no changes at the high levels that those changes desperately need to be made at. I am a very ordinary person, I have a job in an unrelated field (IT), a mortgage, kids and have been quite spectacularly boring and under extended for some great amount of time. I don’t *know* anything and I think it’s about time I start trying to remedy that and not just avoid it because the bad news that seems to pour from environmental arenas depresses me.
So I’ve decided to start researching and building up information occasionally while I’m learning the cool names of fungi and wittering on about forests in my area. This post is about a little bit of that preliminary research because this is as good a spot as any for it. I’ve recently stumbled upon some of the work of Abigail Swann and the Ecoclimate lab in the Univerity of Washington, having come across an interesting article in The Atlantic. She maintains and has built her career on the idea that plants the world over *themselves* influence climate, and massively so.
For decades, most atmospheric scientists had focused their weather and climate models on wind, rain, and other physical phenomena. But with powerful computer models that can simulate how plants move water, carbon dioxide, and other chemicals between ground and air, Swann has found that vegetation can control weather patterns across huge distances. The destruction or expansion of forests on one continent might boost rainfall or cause a drought halfway around the world.
Plants are actually powerful change agents on the planet’s surface. They pump water from the ground through their tissues to the air, and they move carbon in the opposite direction, from air to tissue to ground. All the while, leaves split water, harvest and manipulate solar energy, and stitch together hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon to produce sugars and starches—the sources of virtually all food for Earth’s life.
And in a study published in May, she investigated how U.S. forest die-offs would affect forests elsewhere in the country. In her models, she killed off forests in 13 heavily forested regions that the National Science Foundation has identified as being ecologically distinct. The results were dramatic. When she wiped out trees in the Pacific Southwest, forests in the Midwest and eastern United States suffered. In recent years, the Pacific Southwest has, in fact, lost an estimated 100 million trees, mostly to droughts and voracious insects.
dryadzen.com 