As we start 2025, rather than look back at yet another year of climate chaos, I want to look forward and think about how we can adapt our growing systems to these kinds of unprecedented swings in our weather.
Awesome. Thanks for writing about this stuff. I started planting trees on a fairly grand scale 35 years ago in Humboldt county far northern California. I moved here thinking a lot about the climate having worked several years for Greenpeace in USA and Canada in the 80s. I saw some big chunks of old growth redwood forests from the air and they just looked black, whilst everywhere else next to them, the forest looked like mange on a dog, not very thick, you could see the ground, etc... yes it's true on a hot day here that the temperature might drop MORE THAN 10° Fahrenheit when you enter one of the little patches along the roadside that managed to survive the logging. Just apply that to the whole planet and it's easy to see that it's not global warming, it's local logging, happening everywhere, all at once, with devastating modern technology like chainsaws and fellerbunchers, PLUS the effect of cumulative impacts of logging... So protecting the ancient forests is very important, and managing all forests to become old growth ASAP, and planting trees. I planted coniferous trees around here every winter by the thousands and tens of thousands so I'm way up in the hundreds of thousands or millions by now. Luckily I also planted over 1000 diverse fruit and nut trees which survived on the Avenue of the Giants perhaps the world's best farmland, and those are doing rather well some decades on... It's like a real Garden of Eatin with multiple football fields of row crops between and around the fruit trees. It would be good if this style of agriculture would be applied to more vast acreage. Certainly logging and ranching have been making deserts for thousands of years. The entire American West is being scorched by the unchecked logging of the Pacific Northwest and northern California. It's worse than ever in my view, despite the greenwashing. They're mowing the forest like a lawn on short rotations for little pecker poles.
Awesome. Thanks for writing about this stuff. I started planting trees on a fairly grand scale 35 years ago in Humboldt county far northern California. I moved here thinking a lot about the climate having worked several years for Greenpeace in USA and Canada in the 80s. I saw some big chunks of old growth redwood forests from the air and they just looked black, whilst everywhere else next to them, the forest looked like mange on a dog, not very thick, you could see the ground, etc... yes it's true on a hot day here that the temperature might drop MORE THAN 10° Fahrenheit when you enter one of the little patches along the roadside that managed to survive the logging. Just apply that to the whole planet and it's easy to see that it's not global warming, it's local logging, happening everywhere, all at once, with devastating modern technology like chainsaws and fellerbunchers, PLUS the effect of cumulative impacts of logging... So protecting the ancient forests is very important, and managing all forests to become old growth ASAP, and planting trees. I planted coniferous trees around here every winter by the thousands and tens of thousands so I'm way up in the hundreds of thousands or millions by now. Luckily I also planted over 1000 diverse fruit and nut trees which survived on the Avenue of the Giants perhaps the world's best farmland, and those are doing rather well some decades on... It's like a real Garden of Eatin with multiple football fields of row crops between and around the fruit trees. It would be good if this style of agriculture would be applied to more vast acreage. Certainly logging and ranching have been making deserts for thousands of years. The entire American West is being scorched by the unchecked logging of the Pacific Northwest and northern California. It's worse than ever in my view, despite the greenwashing. They're mowing the forest like a lawn on short rotations for little pecker poles.
Shocking to hear that California, which we think of as Progressive on environmental matters, is allowing this logging to continue