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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • There is no direct adjacency needed to spread seeds from one plot of land to another, that’s one of your made up hurdles. Small seeds naturally get blown far in the wind. Larger seeds still get carried large distances by animals, which was why I specifically copy pasted the bit about birds carrying acorns …

    To claim that it would be difficult and expensive to let a wild forest grow in those meadows is absurd, that’s what this was about for me. It’s a convenient excuse to do nothing, but it’s not a very good excuse.


  • To give another example:

    Instead, the trees at Knepp Castle Estate in southern England were allowed to spread naturally. Birds such as jays can disperse as many as 7,500 acorns in four weeks. “Not a single tree was planted, no saplings were bought from commercial nurseries, no tanalised wooden stakes, no polypropylene tubes and plastic ties, no direct financial or carbon costs – no effort,” says Isabella Tree, co-owner of Knepp Castle Estate.

    Chazdon, who has studied natural regeneration for more than 30 years, questions the commonly held assumption that trees need to be actively planted to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. “There’s a perspective that humans did this damage and it’s our job to fix it, and that we should govern the process, and just let nature help when it can,” she says. “Another view is that forest restoration is fundamentally natural, and that humans can assist it, but ultimately it should be governed by natural processes.”.

    Proponents are arguing for natural regeneration to be taken more seriously in national and international efforts to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crises. Recent research has shown that natural regeneration can potentially absorb 40 times more carbon than plantations, and provide a home for more species. It is also significantly cheaper than tree planting, with different studies in Brazil showing costs reduced by 38%, or even up to 76%.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210524-the-reason-wild-forests-beat-plantations


  • I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.

    And as further proof that I don’t live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here’s 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/


  • Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.

    But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

    And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.


  • They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.

    In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.


  • The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.







  • The surface of the salt grains reacts with what is in the air (moisture, smells), slowly changing the surface over time, and since it’s that surface that touches our taste buts most, the taste of the salt will be different.

    Salts are also often not pure sodium, but have added elements that give it a distinct taste and aroma. That original taste/aroma will be lost over time, because aroma = smell = particles flying away in the air. Long exposure to a strong smell will also cause the salt to acquire that different smell as part of it’s new aroma.

    Starting from larger grains and grinding them shortly before usage, would thus give salt that smells and tastes more like it’s fresh from the salt factory. But I do wonder how many people would be able to tell the difference in a blind test.






  • As a child I read Groosham Grange from Anthony Horowitz, and when I first heard a description of Harry Potter, I thought that they were describing that book from Horowitz. I can’t believe no one else noticed. But I also think that most people active in children’s literature will have an attitude of “anything that gets a child reading, is a good thing”, so they’re not that upset about poor quality being popular and they’d rather keep the positive vibe going.