The vast majority of the trees that do exist in Ireland today [...] are actually in non-native commercial plots, such as dense pine tree plantations. "Which is mostly very low biodiversity," [...].
Text by: Chris Baraniuk. “What would a truly wild Ireland look like?” Future Planet. 11 February 2021.
Despite its green image, Ireland has surprisingly little forest. Across Europe, nations average around 35% forest cover but in Ireland the figure is just 11%, one of the lowest on the continent. This hasn’t always been the case. Thousands of years ago, more than 80% of the island of Ireland was covered in trees. Over many centuries they were then almost entirely chopped down to make way for fields and pasture and by 1925, only 1% was forested. [...] Until recently forestry was considered valuable only as a supply of timber to be harvested. This explains why, of that 11% of the Republic of Ireland that is forested, the vast majority (9% of the country) is planted with spruces like the Sitka spruce, a fast growing conifer originally from Alaska which can be harvested after just 15 years. Just 2% of Ireland is covered with native broadleaf trees.
Text by: Martha O’Hagan Luff. “Ireland has lost almost all of its native forests - here’s how to bring them back.” The Conversation. 24 February 2023. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
[I]ndustrial [...] oil palm plantations [...] have proliferated in tropical regions in many parts of the world, often built at the expense of mangrove and humid forest lands, with the aim to transform them from 'worthless swamp' to agro-industrial complexes [...]. Another clear case [...] comes from the southernmost area in the Colombian Pacific, around the port city of Tumaco. Here, since the early 1980s, the forest has been destroyed and communities displaced to give way to oil palm plantations. Inexistent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s they had expanded to over 30,000 hectares. The monotony of the plantation -- row after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts -- replaced the diverse, heterogenous and entangled world of forest and communities.
Text by: Arturo Escobar. "Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South." Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana Volume 11 Issue 1. 2016. [Emphasis added.]
But efforts to increase global tree cover to limit climate change have skewed towards erecting plantations of fast-growing trees. The reasons are obvious: planting trees can demonstrate results a lot quicker than natural forest restoration. This is helpful if the objective is generating a lot of timber quickly or certifying carbon credits which people and firms buy to supposedly offset their emissions. [...] [I]ll-advised tree planting can unleash invasive species [...]. [In India] [t]o maximize how much timber these forests yielded, British foresters planted pines from Europe and North America in extensive plantations in the Himalayan region [...] and introduced acacia trees from Australia [...]. One of these species, wattle (Acacia mearnsii) [...] was planted in [...] the Western Ghats. This area is what scientists all a biodiversity hotspot – a globally rare ecosystem replete with species. Wattle has since become invasive and taken over much of the region’s mountainous grasslands. Similarly, pine has spread over much of the Himalayas and displaced native oak trees while teak has replaced sal, a native hardwood, in central India. Both oak and sal are valued for [...] fertiliser, medicine and oil. Their loss [...] impoverished many [local and Indigenous people]. [...]
India’s national forest policy [...] aims for trees on 33% of the country’s area. Schemes under this policy include plantations consisting of a single species such as eucalyptus or bamboo which grow fast and can increase tree cover quickly, demonstrating success according to this dubious measure. Sometimes these trees are planted in grasslands and other ecosystems where tree cover is naturally low. The result is that afforestation harms rural and indigenous people who depend on these ecosystems [...]. The success of forest restoration efforts cannot be measured by tree cover alone. The Indian government’s definition of “forest” still encompasses plantations of a single tree species, orchards and even bamboo, which actually belongs to the grass family. This means that biennial forest surveys cannot quantify how much natural forest has been restored, or convey the consequences of displacing native trees with competitive plantation species or identify if these exotic trees have invaded natural grasslands which have then been falsely recorded as restored forests. [...] Planting trees does not necessarily mean a forest is being restored. And reviving ecosystems in which trees are scarce is important too.
Text by: Dhanapal Govindarajulu. "India was a tree planting laboratory for 200 years - here are the results." The Conversation. 10 August 2023. [Emphasis added.]
Nations and companies are competing to appropriate the last piece of available “untapped” forest that can provide the most amount of “environmental services.” [...] When British Empire forestry was first established as a disciplinary practice in India, [...] it proscribed private interests and initiated a new system of forest management based on a logic of utilitarian [extraction] [...]. Rather than the actual survival of plants or animals, the goal of this forestry was focused on preventing the exhaustion of resource extraction. [...] Furthermore, the extraction of commodities from every single tree (timber, rubber, or pharmaceutical substances) has been used as a form of [...] controlling space and people [...].
Text by: Daniel Fernandez and Alon Schwabe. "The Offsetted." e-flux Architecture (Positions). November 2013. [Emphasis added.]
At first glance, the statistics tell a hopeful story: Chile’s forests are expanding. […] On the ground, however, a different scene plays out: monocultures have replaced diverse natural forests [...]. At the crux of these [...] narratives is the definition of a single word: “forest.” [...] Pinochet’s wave of [...] [laws] included Forest Ordinance 701, passed in 1974, which subsidized the expansion of tree plantations [...] and gave the National Forestry Corporation control of Mapuche lands. This law set in motion an enormous expansion in fiber-farms, which are vast expanses of monoculture plantations Pinus radiata and Eucalyptus species grown for paper manufacturing and timber. [T]hese new plantations replaced native forests […]. According to a recent study in Landscape and Urban Planning, timber plantations expanded by a factor of ten from 1975 to 2007, and now occupy 43 percent of the South-central Chilean landscape. [...] While the confusion surrounding the definition of “forest” may appear to be an issue of semantics, Dr. Francis Putz of the University of Florida warns otherwise in a recent review published in Biotropica. […] Monoculture plantations are optimized for a single product, whereas native forests offer a diversity of services such as water regulation, hosting biodiversity, and building soil fertility. Putz cautioned, “if plantations are accepted as forests, then there is nothing wrong with replacing natural forests with monocultures.” […] [A]ccording to Putz, the distinction between plantations and native forests needs to be made clear. “[...] [A]nd the point that plantations are NOT forests needs to be made repeatedly,” he said.
Text by: Julian Moll-Rocek. “When forests aren’t really forests: the high cost of Chile’s tree plantations.” Mongabay. 18 August 2014. [Emphasis added.]
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