maybe its bc i live in a place where forestry is one of the dominant industries but like tree planting rly isnt good. like the majority of the time its done by forestry companies to “offset” what they’ve cut down, and they almost always just plant fir & spruce monocrops and then they prevent the rest of the forest from naturally regenerating by spraying glyphosate, because they want to kill off the hardwoods that grow back since softwoods are worth more to the pulp industry… anything a company does that is supposedly “green” never is.
They aren’t actually replanting the forest, they’re building lumber farms in the middle of it and trying to pass them off as the same thing to people who think a forest is just trees because they live in a world mediated by images and have never been in an actual forest long enough to be able to tell healthy diverse growth from a struggling monocrop.
And unfortunately even choosing all the right trees and plants would not actually help either. Some naturalists I recall coined the term “ghost forest” to refer originally to “replanted” rainforests, in the same sense as “ghost town,” because it never brings back the same rich diversity of life or the healthy microbiome that took centuries to form.
And the average person doesn’t think about that at all, they don’t care that the layers of rotten leaves and insect colonies and mycelia are as much “the forest” as the presence of trees, and in fact the whole existence of that understory *is the actual benefit of the trees,* the actual reason the trees are important to all that wildlife. Companies are glad people don’t care about this, and as long as “replanting” is seen as a valid compromise, it means environmental regulations will continue to be lax and let them kill the majority of life in those habitats.
It’s the ecological equivalent of Weekend at Bernies. They made a corpse look alive enough that they aren’t being held accountable.
