Re: Off Topic: NMD/Environment was: (Re: Ada and the NMD)

[Larry Elmore <ljelmore@home.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <3B9A4CA7.A3231B1F@home.com>, Larry Elmore says...
> >
> >The fact is, there is a great deal more land under forest in America now
> >than there was 100 years ago. Nor was much of the continent a primeval
> 
> >see:
> >       http://www.lib.duke.edu/forest/usfscoll/landscapes.htm
> >       http://www.lib.duke.edu/forest/usfscoll/AmIndian.htm
> 
> Neither of these links say that. They do make the point that we have a lot more
> dense undergrowth now that people (read-non indians who now control the land)
> aren't doing regular burns, and that some places that were savannahs are now
> forest. Both are valid points. But neither addresses in any quantative sense are
> our current state of forest cover vs. what was here.

These photos record dramatic increases in the understory 
density and overstory biomass volume of forest vegetation over the last
century, 
and a decrease or complete elimination of both the aspen component and
in the 
herbaceous understory in conifer stands.  In addition, grasslands have
become 
                                                      
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
woodlands and open woodlands have become dense forests.  Other
non-photographic 
^^^^^^^^^
studies strongly corroborate the existence of such changes (Covington &
Moore 
1994, Sampson et al. 1993).

If you want quantitative data, the UN's FAO at http://www.fao.org has
quite a bit. They're unavailable at the moment, so I can't be more
precise.

From "Lightening the Tread of Population on the Land: American Examples"
at http://phe.rockefeller.edu/:

	"The declining intensity of lumber use helped American forests expand.
The abandonment of farmland returned relatively productive sites to
forest. The control of fires, restocking, plantations, and imports
helped as well. Mills lost less wood, converting former wastes into pulp
for paper, composites such as plywood which Americans substituted for
solid lumber, and heat and electricity; by 1980 American mills converted
more than 96 percent of the wood entering their doors into useful
products and energy (US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1984).
Together, these changes caused an expansion of American forests
commencing in the early 1920s. The trend continues: by 1992 the
inventory of growing stock in US forests was 27 percent larger than in
1952, the first year of comprehensive data collection (Sedjo 1991;
Smith, Faulkner, and Powell 1994). 


> But again, its all a red herring anyway. Whatever there is or was has *nothing*
> to do with our CO2 output. It was all here (a bit more or less) happily
> converting CO2 long before the fist US factory was built.

Then why bring the subject up? I was correcting an error in data you
introduced.

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> ... When we first came to this
> continent it was covered with forests, except for the Great
Plains in the
> middle, which was covered with bison. Forests covered the
entire eastern
> seaboard, which is now just one big city from Boston to DC. At
the time, the
> forests were just cleaing up all the CO2 the bison were putting
out. We replaced
> the bison with domesticated cattle, so there's no net gain
there. We cut down a
> lot of the forests, and are still not planting more than we are
cutting, so
> there's no net gain there.

BTW, in the USA, we're only cutting 65% of annual new growth.

Larry