

The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment - brohee
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/issue-5/the-return-of-nature

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rihegher
"Since then, while the population of France has doubled, French forests have
also doubled. In other words, forest loss decoupled from population."

Meanwhile in France permanent meadow area shrank by 6.3% between 2006 and 2010
and by 3% between 2009 and 2010 alone.

it's ashamed that people who care about environment tend to get obsessed about
forest and forget about the rest.

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brohee
One could say that meadow is not a very common natural state for Europe.
Historically it was mostly forest and wetlands... You have figures about what
those meadow area are replaced with?

As for the cause, it may be because of the end of EU subsidies to set aside a
percentage of the fields...

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legulere
Historically animals like deer kept meadows open.

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yawz
Yes, a dense forest is not always good for the native species. Deer or bears,
for instance, need these small deforested pockets to survive. I think that was
one of the problems of preventing all forest fires. Now, in certain places,
there are controlled fires to clear certain parts of forests.

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jmnicolas
The author should go to China to see how the environment has been "liberated".

The western world has outsourced pollution to the third world, thinking that
it would stop at the borders.

The more I read western news (and make no mistake, I'm a westerner) the more
I'm under the impression of reading the "Pravda" back in its glorious days :
"sleep well people everything is OK".

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brohee
The author focuses on land use, and forest area is actually growing in Asia.

[http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C56/forests_2012](http://www.earth-
policy.org/indicators/C56/forests_2012)

The bad players are actually South America and Africa wrt deforestation,
Oceania is about neutral and forest growing everywhere else.

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xerula
Total forest cover is a crude statistic. Primary forests in Asia, where the
majority of biodiversity resides, continue to be felled at alarming rates.

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jchrisa
The call to action is: we need to move to fish farming not wild caught.

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mangodrunk
This seems like an odd article given that global warming is not reducing. I
hope the article was true, but it doesn't seem so. Adding some forests in
Europe is good, but the deforestation is happening in the Amazon and other
forests in other parts of the world.

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brohee
I'm not sure even a 100% forest coverage could deal with the amount of CO2 we
dump in the atmosphere currently...

