Planet of the Humans - Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore

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ghostice

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I am wondering if anyone else has watched this and had the same reaction I had - that calling trees biomass, building beejeezuz huge "biomass power plants" and clear cutting the crap outa all the world's forests is quite fankly insane. This thing takes time to watch but it's worth it.
https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
So all oil and gas, bad bad bad, but clear cutting - well we're the new messiah's, follow us, so it's OK or we just will look the other way. So much for McKribben and Gore's credibility in any sense of the word.
Could we just be planting trees only to be used in the end to make Sierra Club, 350Org and others very, very rich puking out more CO2 and fly ash outa stacks? Where is tax money/ subsidy money going anyway? And lookit how many biomass plants in the US . . . . whoa.
Be interested in what folks think after watching this and thinking about it a bit.
Our poor poor trees and forests. Where's the screams from ISA and forestry departments?
Cheers
 
I’ll watch the show

In the Reduce Reuse Recycle ♻️ triangle there has always seemed to be a focus on Recycling instead of the other two.

My conclusion is two part:

-recycling is observable and easy. A person drops the stuff into a can and they’re doing their part. No matter the cost of actually keeping the stuff out of the dump or floating in the ocean.

-reducing hurts. Adjusting the thermostat or driving a sensible vehicle is intrusive. Using a good water bottle isn’t as glamorous as drinking fancy bottled water.

Factory forestry has costs too. Many times it seems like the worst use for the land and resource.
 
I watched this last week. All should watch this. I held out lots of hope for new green technology, that is until I watched this documentary.
 
I'll see if I can find time to watch later...but here is my thought on the idea without having seen it:

First: We need to reduce energy demands through increased efficiencies. However, there are still energy demands. Solar and wind cannot meet those demands. All sources of energy have downsides (even solar and wind).

Using wood as biofuels: what is a "better" source for biofuel? Corn? So deforest areas to grow a monoculture?

Note that clearcutting is NOT the same as deforestation. As a silvicultural practice, the idea is to regenerate the next stand of timber. In the 15-20 years it takes for short rotation southern pine, that forest is also home to a lot of wildlife. And is not like that wildlife has nowhere to go when a 100 acre tract is clearcut...because that tract is almost always in the middle of several thousands of acres. Throughout the SE US coastal plane, much of the commercial forest land is abandon/worn out cotton fields...

Also noteworthy from the wildlife standpoint: Most of the neotropic migratory birds that are declining in population depend on early successional forest for their summer habitat...in other words, they need MORE clearcuts than we have. I know: that is only one small piece of the whole wildlife puzzle, but it is a piece.

Back to the land clearing vs. clearcutting: most land clearing is for agricultural or development. Those trees were going to be removed whether they are useful or not. When that is the case, why not use the material for biomass? Most of the material that goes into the wood/fiber supply comes from areas that are going to stay forested. There is already demand/market for this material. So to start using it for biomass means we need to grow more...which means converting non-forested areas to forests (even though those new forests will be clearcut periodically). Is that a bad thing?
 
www.greenparty.ca

Michael Moore’s dreadful, ill-informed, unhelpful film

During a Green Party webinar last week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, one message from a member of the audience caught my attention: “Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day — that we are losing the battle...
www.greenparty.ca www.greenparty.ca

Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions.
 
ATH said:
Back to the land clearing vs. clearcutting: most land clearing is for agricultural or development. Those trees were going to be removed whether they are useful or not. When that is the case, why not use the material for biomass? Most of the material that goes into the wood/fiber supply comes from areas that are going to stay forested. There is already demand/market for this material. So to start using it for biomass means we need to grow more...which means converting non-forested areas to forests (even though those new forests will be clearcut periodically). Is that a bad thing?
Click to expand...
I guess this is why I wanted to post this - I used to carry the P. Biol. designation up here - the effects of all this cutting I am questioning is stuff like the loss of soil diversity, larger "parent trees" and all that goes with Ponsee harvesters cutting acres and acres an hour and a twig not left standing. All when we are studying away on how trees talk to each other! Since getting into arborist work more and more I marvel at how trees are actually magnificent life forms we still don't fully understand. "Harvesting" them as solely an input to large death-star scale industrial electrical generation where we have other technologies like say, newer nuclear, seems a waste of biodiversity - trees, soil, fungi etc. Are we sure we're going the right direction? Look at the clear cutting in the movie and shipping logs all over the planet to feed this beast? As for efficiencies - you bet - my hope is that folks in N. America could travel way more in Europe and see the public transit and high speed rail they have there (France as an example). Simply amazing.
And thank you for the link to Green Party doc above.
 
Just one quick example of 'always a downside': how is relying on mass transit working out with covid-19?

Edit:. I think nuclear is part of the puzzle too...but it has its own obvious risks. Also, the material for that is mined. Much more impact on soils and forest than regenerating clear-cuts. On a smaller scale...but a much, much more significant scar.
 
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ATH said:
Also noteworthy from the wildlife standpoint: Most of the neotropic migratory birds that are declining in population depend on early successional forest for their summer habitat...in other words, they need MORE clearcuts than we have. I know: that is only one small piece of the whole wildlife puzzle, but it is a piece.
Click to expand...

A lot of wildlife depends on young/early forest for habitat...whitetail deer, quail, many species. As far as deer are concerned, a mature forest only has a small fraction of the carrying capacity of a 2-year-old clearcut.

I've talked to wildlife biologists in PA who say that there are huge tracts of old mature forest in PA that are basically gonna collapse and start over from scratch due to deer overpopulation. Apparently the deer overbrowsed to the point that they ate all the oak saplings down to the ground. This allowed the ferns to take over on large tracts. As a result, even if any acorns survived to sprout, the ferns would shade them so they'll never grow. So now when the old oaks on these tracts die of old age, there will be no younger oaks to replace them. What that, in turn, means is that the carrying capacity of the land has crashed as far as deer are concerned.

Interestingly, this has happened several times in PA over the past 100 years. Heavy logging produced clear cuts that supported a population explosion of deer, but then as those clearcuts matured into pole woods and then mature forests, the carrying capacity dropped dramatically, so deer populations plummetted. Back around 1906, the PA Game Commission hired sharpshooters to kill overabundant deer just outside of Phila to try to temper this whole "boom-bust" sine wave...but then 40 years later, deer were so rare that people would drive from miles around to see a deer that some hunter had shot...yet by the 1990s, most parts of PA had "bumper crops" of deer again ... lather rinse repeat.
 
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Yep, I've read that rabbit (and fox) populations spike and crater in a regular cycle that's 11 years long...same period as the sunspot cycle IIRC. I always wondered whether they were related.

Then you wonder: How and why in the world does something like a 17-year locust evolve?
 
OK . . . . . , but the Guardian publishes a lot of tripe from Bill KcKribben (wait - a US resident) telling Canada what they should and shouldn't do about oil and gas policy in our country - it would please me no end if he'd clean up his own country first, then maybe tackle China and India - oh wait - too hard . . . . . A lot of Canadians took extremely high offence to his pontifications for our country in said UK publication (and elsewhere). So guess the movie touched a nerve afterall! Who are they to call for censure anyway? Intergalactic supreme beings? My original point in bringing this up was . . . what about our trees? Maybe we are doomed by the exploiters (even if they are cloaked as greenies).
end transmission
 
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