The easiest answer is to restore or expand existing forests. This allows for the existing forest floor with fungi, bacteria, algae, plants, roots structure to simply expand. This saves decades of developing the culture that the forest needs to keep the weather patterns and allow growth and suck up a lot of carbon from the air.
But the problem is development, whether recent or long ago, has cleared these areas. (Think of the amazon, clear cutting for beef and agriculture.) And continues to want to move into these areas. It really doesn’t matter why (housing, farming, industry, etc), once taken the land is rarely given back to forest. Gone. Trees may be planted for “landscaping” or other reasons, but the forest (see previous posts) is gone.
An alternate idea
An alternate idea is to take abandoned areas and begin new forests there. An interesting example is Chernobyl. No one is going to go back to this land for perhaps hundreds of years. This leaves it as an area that will not be cut down and can function as a forest. Forests for this use are not needed as parks or places of recreation. We could use numerous abandoned industrial sites. While these areas may in fact be polluted (chemical, radiation, etc) by their previous industrial use, we are not necessarily making these forests as recreational sites. There are better sites for a forest: true. But these sites will remain of little to no other human use and allow a very long period for the forest to grow. Forests need decades to be established. Again we are not setting up hiking trails or wildlife refuges. These are long term parts of the climate of the region.
Another much older example of this alternate use is the Yucatan area in southern Mexico and Central America. While certainly unintended, after the collapse of the Mayan city state culture a large area was reclaimed as forest. Prior to the collapse enormous areas (pretty much the entire region) had been cleared for agricultural use and urban development. While not looking for collapse of civilization, we already have areas that have been abandoned. This might be a part of the solution, a piece of the larger puzzle. Not necessarily the primary piece but it has its advantages, unused land that no one will want for development for decades if not longer, that can become useful and unlikely to be disturbed.
True – There are no large sites like the Yucatan with whole regional abandonment. But perhaps we can begin in areas with sufficient sites that cumulatively become functional as a “region”. Ideally some of these sites might be close to existing forests – that then become simple expansions. In the US this might occur in the abandoned “rust belt” states, near Detroit?
What do you think?
