Greenstorm's Journal

For some reason folks don't seem to associate planting trees with land tenure. Have some sense, folks: if you want to be buried with a tree growing on you, want ten trees to be planted for every sweatshirt you buy, want your government to plant trees to stop global warming, those trees must all be planted on land that is then dedicated to them for (I imagine you would like) a length of time. Five years? Ten years? Two hundred years? That land was doing something before the trees were planted, what was it? Are they draining wetlands or displacing crops for this? Would trees have been planted there anyhow by someone else? (forestry companies in Canada are legally obligated to replant so anything that promises to replant on that land is a scam). Are poor people being displaced to plant the trees? Will the trees thrive on that piece of land without maintenance like watering? Are the trees intended to all live, they do get very large and usually are planted more densely in the beginning and then some die as they get bigger so the crown of the tree shades the ground. Does planting trees displace wildlife habitat for browsers or animals that need thermal cover like moose? Do you really think this is a good allocation of land, like for instance in land that can support agriculture or housing instead set aside for every dead person, or maybe just for rich dead people?

Bah.

I'm so tired. Maybe it's from shoveling the driveway or maybe it's from news of what's going on down south.

Up here everyone did panic buying and cleared the grocery stores, at least in the main city. We apparently have main supply routes coming in from the east over the mountains so we can expect to be resupplied pretty easily.

The lower mainland, which is down south, which is where the most chaos happened... it's hard right now. Almost the entirety of food grown in BC is produced down there, including the animals. Folks are mostly getting their dairy cattle to higher ground, swimming them out using boats. I think some chicken farms are pretty soggy but not drowned. Watering the animals is an issue since the water systems are shut down; everyone's trying to truck water in. There's... a lot of hay underwater. Grain isn't produced there so I suspect that'll be less of an issue, but the winter's stockpile of hay won't survive being flooded.

Dairy animals don't stop producing milk. They need to be milked daily to keep from getting ill, basically. Because of food and supply regulations around milk and the failure of the pasteurization plants, all that milk has been ordered to be poured into the manure piles. That's 100% of the local provincial supply, give or take a fraction of a decimal.

I'm not sure what this is going to do to my feed supply for the winter but I suspect it won't be good.

I probably need to stop reading about it all and take a day off work with an analog book in my bed.

Still trying to figure out if Josh will be able to come up here.

Also have some thoughts on wetlands these days. I really enjoyed the "nature is healing" weird photoshopped covid memes and honestly? I'd quite like a picture of the flood captioned "nature is healing". Wetland is the most frequently damaged ecosystem out there. Pretty much every bit of the tremendous marsh/estuary/shallow lake complex that was the fraser delta has been destroyed; it used to be a pretty significant stop on bird migrations that, much like the salmon migrations of the time, can't really fit into our modern concept of how abundant nature can be. Largescale wetland restoration will never be as popular as "save the old growth" campaigns though.

Anyhow, I'm disjointed and bitter today. Time to eat some borscht and maybe take a nap.

I spent the last two days in the field for work. They were short days, and the drive in was only about an hour each way on easy roads. I was doing work that's new to me, basically wandering around a clearcut making sure that baby trees were planted back properly.

I work in forestry. My employer doesn't really allow me to comment on my job. My profession wants me to educate the public. I have a lot of thoughts about the western world's current emphasis on planting trees as an environmental solution to ...everything. It is not. Even if the right trees from the right genetics were planted, even if the ground those trees were planted into was protected in some way in the long term, even if that type of ground would do best as a forest, planting billions of baby trees is a minor part of a larger solution. Because it makes a great soundbite, because people like baby trees and simple solution, it's what's done.

Don't get me wrong, migrating trees to help adapt to global warming is probably super important.

It's just that the world we're going into with inconsistent climate, high likelihood of fire and even very warm/dry fire plus the requirement for carbon sequestration, and maybe some sort of breakdown of our huge unwieldy high-input agricultural system... that world really needs some proper grasslands. We need, not lawn, not monocultures, but deep-rooted prairie that keeps most of its biomass below ground for when fires or other climate artifacts sweep over, that feeds groups of ungulates that pass through, and that's quick to go from species movement to seed to more species movement as climate continues to shift, and that drives carbon/humus deep into the ground. We need wetlands. I mean, we need forests too. We need intact old forests, we need young forests.

But the thing folks have trouble with is specifically that diversity is great. People really like grasping onto a single solution and waving it around, instead of saying "that's great, but it's only a hundredth of a solution".

But still. I spent the day wandering around in the sunshine looking at baby trees. The block was gentle, not too steep and not too many branches and trunks and bits on the ground so the walking was ok. There was a nice cool wind. Four species were going back into an area where two were taken out, and a lot of what was taken out was dead pine, replaced with barely-visible green sprigs.

And any day spent outside, any day, is a good day. Any day spent in the bush, even if the bush has been cut down, is a good day.

These were good days.