Posted on 03/23/2009 7:35:44 AM PDT by Notoriously Conservative
Don't tell me I donated all of those quarters to save the rain forest for nothing? No one told me we could simply plant another one. All those wasted quarters. I say, we cut it all down so we can use the wood for nice toilet paper, hard wood floors and toothpicks, then just replant it later. Not only would that create jobs in harvesting the wood, but all the libtards could get jobs replanting it. Win, win.
April 17, 2008 How campus researchers helped to rescue a rain forest By Beth Skwarecki
Half a century after most of Costa Rica's rain forests were cut down, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences (BTI) on the Cornell campus are attempting what many thought was impossible -- restoring a tropical rain forest ecosystem.
When the researchers planted worn-out cattle pastures in Costa Rica with a sampling of local trees in the early 1990s, native species of plants began to move in and flourish, raising the hope that destroyed rain forests could one day be replaced.
Ten years after the tree plantings, Cornell graduate student Jackeline Salazar counted the species of plants that took up residence in the shade of the new planted areas. She found remarkably high numbers of species -- more than 100 in each plot. And many of the new arrivals were also to be found in nearby remnants of the original forests.
(source)
You mean TREES are a renewable resource????
Who’da thunk it?
;^)
IIRC, rain forests are those kinds of places that, when you machete a trail through the bush, and return the next day .. the trail you blazed is grown over (or something like that)
Meanwhile, we’re using advanced sensing equipment, trying to find Mayan ruins obscured in the jungles of Latin America. These were once major cities, with huge populations — but they were abandoend and consumed by the advancing rain forest. And the greenies want us to believe that rain forests are delicate little things that cannot bounce back once man has encroached. Fah!
LOL...universities are the homes of the truly clueless.
These enviro-geniuses must not know that the vegetation has completely obliterated all signs of man on islands that were blown up during WW II, including Bikini Atoll, where the first atomic bomb was tested. Nature always wins.
“The group planted mixtures of local tree species, trimming away the pasture grasses until the trees could take hold. This was the opposite of what commercial companies have done for decades, planting entire fields with a single type of tree to harvest for wood or paper pulp.
The trees the group planted were fast-growing, sun-loving species. After just five years, those first trees formed a canopy of leaves that shaded out the grasses underneath.
“One of the really amazing things is that our fast-growing tree species are averaging 2 meters of growth per year,” Leopold said. He believes that microscopic soil fungi called mycorrhizae can take much of the credit. They have apparently survived in the soil and form a symbiosis with tree roots. Research at Cornell and BTI, he said, has shown that without mycorrhizae, many plants can’t grow well.
The promising results of the project mean that mixed-species plantings can help jump-start a complex rain forest. Local farmers who use the same approach will reduce erosion of their land, while creating a forest that can be harvested sustainably, a few trees at a time.”
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So it seems replanting a variety of local species has unexpected benefits. Usually, it’s a monoculture of commercial species. The article hints that local landowners can be convinced to do it on their own, for the benefit of their farmed land.
For as long as I can remember, the gospel was that rain forests could not be re-established. I guess until this project, no on bothered to try.
The dirty little secrets they don’t tell is the rain forest floor is one of the higst producers of Co2.
In the course of the lighthouse tour, I saw some old photographs from the turn of the century when the lighthouse was new. To my amazement, what was now a lush forest used to be stripped bare! I asked the tour guide about it and he said that there were two reasons for the barren landscape: one was that the local indians used to torch the land to drive game out (basically hunting with nukes); the other was that the lighthouse crew cut the trees for firewood, etc.
Watching Ax Men and found it kind of interesting that the loggers are actually repairing the forests. In many cases the greenies came along and replanted bottomland trees on mountaintops and made a far more unhealthy forest.
What loggers are doing these days is clearing land for proper replanting.
If it takes a tree 50 years to grow to maturity, then I have no problem with cutting every other tree every 25 years.
The main problem with logging, historically and in my personal experience, is when they cut every single tree in a clear cut, and when the roots rot, the whole mountain worth of dirt comes cascading down into the river. Not so nice.
But if you keep half the trees and log the other half, the remaining root systems will keep the dirt in place.
A timber owner should not be allowed to externalize his costs by clogging someone else’s (in the U.S., our public) rivers with silt.
< / fish hugger>
Yup! Cut your way in in the morning and cut your way out on the same path that evening!
A few years ago, I went back and tried to find some of the fishing holes I used to hit as a kid. I found a few, more by chance than anything else. Most of the places were overgrown and/or unrecognizable. And I was only going to them 20 (well, maybe 25....) years ago.
Man-made climate change I'm sure. Also, Bush's fault.
Most logging companies plant 3 to 4 times as many trees as they cut. They’d be stupid not to.
It is the worms! Worms! I tell ye!
Well duh, they're made of wood. ;-)
Let’s make NYC a rainforest
Why is anyone surprised by this? Having been to Central America, I have seen vast areas where rainforests have been clear-cut for cattle or to grow corn. I have also seen lands where people stopped grazing cattle or growing corn, and the neighboring rainforest begins to spread back into those cut areas. It’s called God’s work. The conditions are still there for a rainforest - the wet, the humidity, the soil - it is only a matter of time before the rainforest reclaims the land.
One clear example - anyone been to some of the Mayan runs in the rainforrests? In their Heyday - those were wide-open plazas that the Maya kept cleared. Yet when many of these ruins were discovered, the rainforest had pretty much completely reclaimed the land and even grown to cover the mighty structures as if they were just another hill.
You don’t have to go to central America to watch the rain forest return. My husband has been a rancher on the Texas Gulf Coast for almost 50 years. He leaves a pasture alone and doesn’t mow it for 2 or 3 years and the brush comes back, the trees will follow in short order. This “rain forest is gone stuff” has had me snickering for years.
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