If you don't do sustainability, the trees stop coming back
Published on 2024-06-18
Where I grew up, there's really just one company. They have a monopoly on all the core, regional industries, and they also own all the newspapers for good measure. The real foundation of their empire, though, is forestry.
I remember riding in the back seat of my parents' car as a kid, travelling to the next town over, watching the trees pass by from the back seat. You could tell where they'd been and where they hadn't. It was especially obvious in the square plots you'd see where all the conifers were planted in a neat grid. You wouldn't expect to see conifers in those parts—this was far from a boreal forest. On their own, the more cold-tolerant trees wouldn't have spread to the area; the conditions weren't right for them. They would have had too many competitors, and they would have found the soil profile too uncomfortable for their roots. But this place wasn't like your usual temperate forest. While they would have struggled to adapt to the environment, they had no trouble adapting to a market in search for a tree crop with a short turnover time and reasonable quality that was well suited for the industry's preferred clear-cutting practice. And so, the environment had to adapt to them.
Planting evenly-spaced trees in clean rows is actually one of the worst possible ways you can grow a tree farm. It has it's advantages: it's easier to get around them, and easier to take them out once they're ready for harvest. It exposes them to the most sunlight and gives way to minimize competitive interactions from other species. But all that is nothing compared to the effect they have on the soil. Not only do boreal forests have characteristically low soil fertility by virtue of how little decomposition happens below their crowns, but what little organic matter does land at their feet decays and is quickly leached deep below the ground by rain water. Trees serve to protect the soil by acting as a cushion for rain drops—they share this role with all the plants along the forest floor as well. In your typical forest, the trees and the understory plants work together: trees catch the water in their crown, passing it to the upper-most layer of the understory plants, which in turn pass it to the layer below, before the water is ultimately, gently, passed to the ground. In fact, many understory plants are helpfully adapted in their shape to serve this role; next time you see a leafy plant shaped like a big arc, you'll know why. But if you cut out all the understory and leave only the trees—as is usually the case in tree farms like the one described above—the water will first pool in the crown, forming much larger globs of rain drops. Typically, a mature tree is high enough that falling globs will reach terminal velocity before smashing against the soil—only much larger than they would have been had the trees not been there at all.
This is how you demolish a soil profile. It was also an extremely common forestry practice in the past and is still used in some places today. You've got to wonder why, too. After all, if you don't do sustainability, the trees stop coming back. These people, after all, control the entire forestry sector. They could do whatever they want. They don't even have to think in the short-term anymore; there's literally nobody who can afford to compete with them. And yet, the trees keep getting planted in rows.
This isn't exactly a hot take. Most people these days seem to recognize that the free market has a lot of trouble planning things even a few years in advance if they aren't literally forced to. Indeed, that's why we have what little regulation we do. But I do really find it fascinating on a more psychological level. We're talking about only a handful of people at the very top, people obviously very concerned with making money now, and who I have to believe are at least smart enough to realize that making money now isn't worth much if you're not going to keep making money in the future. Even by its own internal logic, it doesn't make any sense.
I can see why it would have started out this way. European colonists showed up to Turtle Island with a lot of confidence and absolutely no idea how to manage the massive forests of so-called Canada. This was reflected in the fact that forest policy of the time was more or less "have at it, try not to overthink what comes next". There are minimum, required, demonstrable competencies you need to work in forestry in Canada; presumably everyone planning a tree farm today knows exactly what they're doing when they make the decision to plant another monocultural stand of evenly-spaced conifers. And yet, more often than not, they do it anyway. Calling it inertia feels overly charitable; this would be far from the first time market systems have changed in order to find new ways to make more money.
If they don't stop, then one day, they'll cut down the forest and that'll be the last of it. No more trees will sprout from the bare soil, and no more money will be made by selling their trunks. It's more a question of "can they be compelled to stop before that happens," or "what are we supposed to do next?"
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