Is it possible to rebuild tropical rain forrest?
- Thread starter steveda19
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Yes, we know how to plant and grow trees and other forms of flora.
Asterix knew.
How long would it take to make up for the damage we've done just to this point? Assuming we could stop dead cutting down more swaths of rainforest.
I mean, trees don't grow on trees y'know.
I mean, trees don't grow on trees y'know.
You would struggle to regrow rainforrest on cleared land. The soil leeches nutrients and physically washes away once the trees are gone, and the insect/small mammal population that manage the forest have gone. The land quickly becomes spent and unproductive - that is why it is only used for agriculture for a season or two before the farmers move on.
The most sensible approach would probably be to protect, heal and then expand the remaining forrest. The forrest margins could be planted and encouraged to spread, eventually becoming established. With luck, islands of forrest may eventually join up, reclaiming the clearings.
Starting from scratch probably wouldn't work...
The most sensible approach would probably be to protect, heal and then expand the remaining forrest. The forrest margins could be planted and encouraged to spread, eventually becoming established. With luck, islands of forrest may eventually join up, reclaiming the clearings.
Starting from scratch probably wouldn't work...
Yeah, apparently we know very little about restoring destroyed rain forest ecosystems. Planting trees isn't enough. I did find this, in which an attempt to restore a portion of Costa Rica's rain forest was quite successful over a 10-year-period, including bringing lots of biodiversity to the reclaimed area. So, it is at least possible, but clearly not something we understand how to do in great depth, nor on a large scale.
It seems obvious that it's not possible to do on a cleared patch of land. You can only expand existing forest. But that makes a good bit of sense, since that's botanical ecosystems have always spread (apart from human intervention.)
First - stop destroying the rain forest that already exists.
Actually it's probably not true that the Amazon rainforest developed on its own. The idea that the Americas were untouched wilderness before Europeans came along is an outdated myth that's profoundly dismissive to the societies that were here all along. I recommend reading Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which talks about the evidence that the Amazon rainforest was once densely populated and cultivated by the indigenous peoples of the region. It seems that the reason so many Amazonian plants are either edible or medicinally useful is because they were bred that way. Conventional agriculture wouldn't work in that part of the world, since the heavy rainfall would wash away the soil on clear-cut land, so instead of farming, the indigenous South Americans bred the rainforest into a vast orchard, cultivating the trees and forest-floor plants into useful forms.
A major factor in the fertility of the region is terra preta, an incredibly rich soil made of a mix of soil, charcoal, pottery fragments, bone, and, err, various wastes produced by human habitation. Part of the reason the rainforests have been in decline since the indigenous population crashed is that we've forgotten how to make terra preta, instead resorting to destructive slash-and-burn agriculture in the region. But there are efforts underway to recreate terra preta and reintroduce it to Amazonian agriculture, which could go a long way toward restoring the rainforest and reducing atmospheric carbon levels.
So the secret to restoring the rainforest is not just to leave it alone. The rainforest was a marvelous work of Native American bioengineering, and restoring it will take the same kind of thoughtful and responsible human effort that created it in the first place.
I don't want to diminish the achievements of Native Americans but I would seriously like to see a serious source from a peer-reviewed journal for this.
I know there's a few people who claim this but I thought in its extreme version (and yours sounded like that) it was more of a fringe view.
Personally the extreme view on this reminds me way too much of "noble savage" theories based on the assumption that the Natives knew more because they were oh-so-closer to nature.
As Emilia indicated, you are really overselling this idea.
Tropical biomes are the oldest on Earth, as the equatorial region represents a very large part of the planet's surface area, and much of it has been populated with land masses over the past few billion years. This has given many kinds of life time to develop and thrive and built up the biodiversity of tropical regions such as rainforests. While I don't doubt that humans used those forests to their advantage, the idea that the Amazon was deliberately spread by humans as a widespread, coordinated effort doesn't seem to have much evidence. It's a nice idea but would need some pretty good evidence to back it up beyond a pop archaeology book's speculation.
Ah, I guess that explains it. I tend not to pay too much attention to "pop science" because it's usually very enthusiastic but also naive and really bad. Also the authors almost never know about actual current research. They usually found some old scientific book about it and then go: "I found a flaw! I'm a genius."
While actual science has usually moved on ages ago.
The area that was "destroyed" was cleared to create farm and rangeland for the production of food, Brazil export large amounts of food to the world. If you "rebuild" the rainforest, well just too bad for all those people who will go hungry I guess.
Also the areas behind hydroelectric dams are rainforest, althought the current drought is leaving that uncovered.
I already mentioned the name of the book I learned about it from. You can consult it for a more detailed bibliography.
Not at all. They simply developed their technology in a different way than Eurasians did, developing a greater mastery of organic materials and agriculture while Eurasians developed a greater mastery of inorganic materials. Neither is superior, just different, as you'd expect of populations that were separated from each other for millennia and existed in different environments.
The key is the simple recognition that the population of the Americas was much larger pre-contact than we've generally assumed, because the vast majority of the indigenous population was wiped out by imported diseases that spread along American trade routes well ahead of European settlement. So by the time the Europeans got there -- at least, later waves of settlers, in the case of the Amazon -- they found formerly well-populated areas that had been largely abandoned and allowed to run fallow and assumed that they had always been that way.
I'm not saying it didn't exist beforehand. As I said, the inhabitants of the region couldn't clear the forest and practice conventional agriculture, because removing the trees would cause the soil to wash away too, so they had to make use of the forest and modify that biome to serve their needs. So of course I'm not saying the forest didn't exist before, because if it hadn't, then the soil wouldn't have been there in the first place. But the inhabitants of the Amazon had thousands of years to cultivate the forest and modify it to serve human needs, rather than eliminating and replacing it. It's not the totally untouched wilderness that people tend to assume, because there have been people living there all along, and humans always affect their environments.
That's a book from a journalist. I don't mind enthusiasts but come on... I didn't think you'd fall for pop "science". I don't even think it belongs in a science forum but I'm not going to close the thread yet unless there's more esoteric hobby archeologist theories coming up.
But if you're going to make scientific claims on a science forum they should be from scientific sources and not pop books.
Personally I just lost every interest I had in this discussion.
The area that was "destroyed" was cleared to create farm and rangeland for the production of food, Brazil export large amounts of food to the world. If you "rebuild" the rainforest, well just too bad for all those people who will go hungry I guess.
Also the areas behind hydroelectric dams are rainforest, althought the current drought is leaving that uncovered.
Of course the majority of that food production was either to generate profit, or to generate subsistence for people who had been displaced from their more fertile land due to large corporations expanding their profitable farming operations.
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I think Mann's credentials as a science writer seem pretty sound. And as I said, the book does thoroughly cite its own sources. You're welcome to consult its bibliography and consult the original research for yourself. If you're really concerned about scientific integrity, you'll do that before forming conclusions about the worth of the text.
And really, I don't see what's so implausible about the idea thatt the indigenous populations who lived in the Americas for over 12,000 years actually affected the landscape rather than living in some kind of "pure natural state" like wild animals. If anything, it's the conventional narrative that's completely implausible.
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