The Hidden Forest
Hidden deep in the Oregon woods is a majestic, wild, and ancient place known to a generation of scientists as the Andrews Experimental Forest. The Andrews represents one of the most important, yet overlooked, scientific endeavors of our time: the long-term, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary study of a single contained ecosystem. Here, for the first time, researchers from an enormous range of disciplines - botanists, entomologists, wildlife ecologists, soil biologists, and others - have assembled to literally write the biography of an ecosystem - to examine the role of every working element in the life of the forest. "Here," says Jon Luoma, "in the shadows of this woods, in its rivulets and streams, under its soil, and high overhead, they have discovered a hidden forest.". This tour de force of natural-history writing reveals how such a careful, concentrated study can bring about profound changes in our understanding and appreciation of the delicate balances of the natural world. In this case, the wealth of new information is pointing the way to a wholly new approach to forest management. On a larger scale, the book underlines the importance of making such whole-ecosystem studies a top national and international priority, as they may be our best hope for understanding how to protect and nurture a sustainable environment.
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What Hacker News says
- Many”profitable” forests are monoculture that are not sustainable. To better understand the dynamic ecosystem of unmanaged forests, read The Hidden Forest by Jon R. Luoma
- Many”profitable” forests are monoculture that are not sustainable. To better understand the dynamic ecosystem of unmanaged forests, read The Hidden Forest by Jon R. Luoma
- Old-growth forests have a completely different ecology than forest that's been clear cut - and it takes decades if not centuries to recover.
If you don't care about the ecologies of forests, then maybe you don't care about whether or not we cut down some old trees. But I think you should care about the ecologies of forests, because forests have huge impacts on climate, atmosphere, water quality, erosion, and much much more.
The "old-school" logger mindset is that the forests would be better off "managed" by humans than left by itself. That is, it would be more productive. But a century of data is showing that this is not really correct. It's only in the last twenty years or so we've come to understand that long-term problems these things create.
For example, clear cutting tends to completely wipe out the biodiversity of that location. Even if they are re-seeded / re-planted, they tend to only be re-planted with one type of tree. Of course, when you start from zero, the biodiversity does increase quite rapidly, because it has a lot of room to grow, but like I said earlier, it takes decades if not centuries to fully recover.
In the PNW, clear cutting has been linked to increased risk of landslides.
This is a really big issue, and I won't even try to give it full voice here. A really good book on this issue is "Hidden Forest: The Biography of an Ecosystem" (http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Forest-Biography-Jon-Luoma/dp/0...) It's based on the best research available at the time (1999, I believe).
