Trees
“ I have often asked myself, ‘What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?’ Like modern loggers, did he shout, ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood ’ ?”
Jared Diamond, “Collapse”
“ He that plants trees loves others beside himself .” - Thomas Fuller
“ If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all .” - Ronald Reagan
Summary: Most biogenic carbon is not sequestered underground. Rather, there’s a constant cycling of carbon between the atmosphere and biosphere, as plants assimilate carbon with photosynthesis and then release it again when they decay or burn. One can see the seasonal “back and forth” of the planet breathing as the atmosphere’s CO 2 concentration varies in response to the n orthern hemisphere’s summers and winters. Trees are a large part of this assimilation of carbon – known as carbon fixation. Unlike the “ancient” sunlight stored by coal, trees temporarily store recent sunlight. New estimates suggest there are over three trillion trees on our planet – about 422 per human being, (which is about half the number as when civilization began 104 ). Standing forests grow in volume by only about 2.5-3% per year. 105 The volume in this 2.5% would be the amount of wood that humans could ‘sustainably’ harvest without depleting
174
Powered by FlippingBook