pstarr wrote:Your guys are right, and I apologize. I am letting the little things bother me.
Well even the land with a gold mine under it or an oilfield has value that changes with the times and the economy around it. Now if your farmland was deprived of oil derived fertilizer and pesticides along with all the other farmland so that yields dropped would it be worth more or less. The demand for food would be the same at least at first and supply would be very reduced.
I cut an ash tree the other day that had succumbed to the Emerald ash borer infestation. I counted the rings in the butt log and determined it to be 70 years old so it was a bean pole sapling when I was a boy helping my father selectively cut our firewood from this stand. It ended up being 70 feet tall and 30 inches through at the butt and yielded a half cord of firewood. The soil on this slope and brook bottom has never been plowed and is a rich black loam and tree growth is good to excellent. Some of the maples which are the majority species on the slope are a hundred years old or more and yield a nice bit of maple syrup each spring. So not all the land in America is a sterile dust that needs chemicals to yield a crop.
edit to add picture of the woods in summer.
dohboi wrote:Good points about urban trees, vt. As I understand it, just the air pollution can take quite a toll on them as well.
And good to hear that you are seeing some re-forestation in your area.
Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case globally:
Global tree cover loss nears all-time high
http://www.wri.org/news/2015/09/release ... d-hotspots
This is a couple years old, though, so if anyone has time to track down more recent stats, it would be much appreciated. Right now, my gardens are calling me!
UMD and Google’s new data measures tree cover loss, using satellites to see all types of clearing and death of trees for all types of tree cover, from tropical rainforests to boreal forests and plantations at high resolution. These data do not account for tree cover gain, which is another important dynamic affecting forest landscapes worldwide. The new data was made possible through free public access to satellite imagery provided by the U.S. Geological Survey Landsat program, in partnership with NASA.
About half of the world's tropical forests have been cleared, according to the FAO.
Forests currently cover about 30 percent of the world’s landmass, according to National Geographic.
The Earth loses 18.7 million acres of forests per year, which is equal to 27 soccer fields every minute, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
It is estimated that 15 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation, according to the WWF.
In 2016, global tree cover loss reached a record of 73.4 million acres (29.7 million hectares), according to the University of Maryland.
global forest loss (2.3 million square kilometers) and gain (0.8 million square kilometers) from 2000 to 2012
forests occupy just under 4 billion ha, with the world's forest area declining by 129 million ha in the period 1990 to 2015
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