America’s Billion-Dollar Tree Problem Is Spreading
Grasslands are being overrun by drought-resistant invaders that wreck animal habitats, suck up water supplies, and can cost landowners a fortune.
Yep. Really. Trees.
They’re complaining about trees growing now.
It is just the trees reclaiming their normal range. I have pictures of the land my grandparents hacked out of forest in northern Wisconsin. A lot of it is now dairy farms. If the trees aren’t continuously removed, the land reverts to forest in a couple of decades.
Ironically they are having the opposite problem in California. The cattle eat young coast oak seedlings. The environmentalists are afraid the mature oak trees won’t be able to replace themselves. Another reason they want to ban cattle.
They really do want to have their cake and eat it too.
Entertaining to hear how North America is amazonifying. And I like the way they just tap the button, and the computer tells them how awful it is.
Perhaps another aspect of it is that people who would otherwise be farm labourers now just trot off to the cities to live on the dole. I’m pleased to see, though, that when bothered by the bush they just burn it off. If only we did that in Oz, all the whining about bushfires could be solved.
“Rewilding” has been going on for years as farming on marginal land is revealed to be uneconomic and can’t compete with efficient farms on prime land. USA leads the way but it’s a world wide phenomenon.
Naturally, governments try to stop it by transforming farmers into subsidy whores.
The industry is being transformed into hobby farmers (G Monbiot / millionaire retirees) and technology entrepreneurs (Dyson).
I’m a bit sorry for traditional farmers but I prefer cheaper food.
The same would happen in the Dales and NE England and Wales if sheep farming stopped.
Trees are bad now?
The same would happen in the Dales and NE England and Wales if sheep farming stopped.
We need more Aurochs.
“The same would happen in the Dales and NE England and Wales if sheep farming stopped.”
Maybe, or maybe the bloody deer would browse all the saplings.
Mother Nature doing what Mother Nature does.
Britain has less and less heathland because the heaths are being colonised by trees. Can’t the undergraduates demand decolonisation of the heaths?
ITS BEING CAUSED BY CARBON EMISSIONS!!!!!!
Can’t we just solve a billion dollar problem by printing another billion dollars?
Damn those arboreal bastards
Is the billion dollars net of any money to be made from selling the wood?
@ dearieme
Wolves, not lions, to sort out the deer. Or at most, lynxes. Lions are bloody useless cats that indulge in kitten massacre.
The North Yorkshire Moors used to be called the Pickering Royal Forest. Because it was a forest. It’s the continuous clearing that keeps it as moorland.
Remember.. It’s not re-greening if it isn’t overseen by a properly connected NGO in a place that’s politically photogenic in Poor Africa..
And what others above has said..
It’s just Mother Nature doing her thing. There’s an insane amount of effort and volunteers spent to keep “Valuable Landscapes” static against natural developments. And they dare call those places “Nature”….
The same thing is happening in New Zealand.The big trouble is that these are FOREIGN TREES.They out compete the natives so are a BAD thing which cant be allowed.
@Philip
You need to import some cougars. They do a good job on the deer. As a bonus, they take out the occasional jogger
Have a lake in a local park that has an info board about the type of small forest lake that over time due to insufficient water flow it becomes naturally filled in, there’s also a sign about the ongoing efforts to dredge/clear it so that it doesn’t follow its natural course and disappear
I think the term deniers is misused as it’s those that want to freeze nature and climate in its current state that are the deniers of change
The wilding pines in NZ aren’t just a pest because left alone they will take over. They are also ugly as a forest, and support no wildlife, so our native birds would also be a threat. Agapanthus is also a pest, but at least it holds banks in place and has flowers. Deer are a pest, but at least provide food and entertainment by hunting them.
It would be better to cover the whole place in cities, which at least have spots of beauty, than mile after mile of wilding pines.
That is a very different situation to where natives are encroaching.
“Forest” doesn’t mean densely packed trees, necessarily. It is a royal hunting area that would be partly wooded.
According to google it derives from latin ‘foris’ = outside.
You’re looking at the reason for all the wild fires blamed on gerbil worming. Change of land use. Why we get wild fires here in Andalucia. People stopped keeping goats so no goats to graze the scrub. It proliferates on the mountainsides. Summer it dries out & turns into a tinderbox. One spark & it’s off.
Bloke: I was hoping to slip that past people. 😉 The “natural” landscape of the North York Moors is more like what’s in the background of this picture, not the stuff in the foreground. A scrubby landscape with random patches and clumps of trees and shrubs. The forests, by the modern meaning, such as the stuff in the foreground, are all artificial.
You should know that this place is a wretched hive of scum and pendantry!
Have you got something we can import that predates on lycra louts?
The same would happen in the Dales and NE England and Wales if sheep farming stopped.
I chair the “Friends” of our local Chiltern common. 100 years ago, it was grazed heathland (there are elderly people in the village whose fathers tended sheep and cattle on it, but grazing ceased before WW2) with just a few veteran trees. Now it’s densely wooded, in fact there are too many trees (guidelines for broadleaves are 40/ha or 100/acre), mainly beech.
You need to import some cougars. They do a good job on the deer. As a bonus, they take out the occasional jogger
I’ve seen a cougar/puma roaming free in the Chilterns (and presumably subsisting on deer, of which we have too many). I’d thought that wild big cats in England were an ‘urban’ myth, until I saw one in broad daylight. They don’t seem to take many humans in the US – 2/3 per decade – I’m sure they’re much more likely to run than attack.
@Chris: are you sure it wasn’t an alien visitor in disguise? They get lots and lots of alien visitors in the US. Maybe it’s got too crowded and now some visit us.