If you destroy existing forest to make a farm, maybe. But if it’s an empty field and you want to do something with it, making it into a forest makes little sense. It’s complicated, very expensive, and doesn’t do much. Just let natural forests do their things, allow them to expand if you want more forests, don’t make one from scratch.
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.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from “stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground”. You can’t even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn’t work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don’t want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you’ll get one tree the way you want it to be.
Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn’t a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it’s a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.
If you destroy existing forest to make a farm, maybe. But if it’s an empty field and you want to do something with it, making it into a forest makes little sense. It’s complicated, very expensive, and doesn’t do much. Just let natural forests do their things, allow them to expand if you want more forests, don’t make one from scratch.
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.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from “stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground”. You can’t even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn’t work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don’t want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you’ll get one tree the way you want it to be.
Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn’t a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it’s a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.