permaculture

["Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Thanks for having the courage to post again after what I did, Rain.  I'm
grateful to hear your voice again.  

I'm in complete agreement with your take on this aspect of reforestation.
It's deep greenwash, today's cynical marketing ploy, perhaps driven by the
same misinformation as I was.  Dubya info?  Predatory capitalism attracts
the best and brightest into the marketing industry then pays them handsomely
to craft the convincing illusions that are capitalism's lifeblood.  Command
economies are a dead idea but their power structures continue to operate,
ever more blindly as their guiding rationale grows more and more weak.  

Perhaps the saving grace of this cynical scheme is the other ecological
services that forests provide.  In the meantime, Big Oil scrapes bare a
space the size of Florida in one of the last operational boreal forests, in
Canada, to expose the oil sands, render them recoverable by diverting one of
the last free flowing rivers in Canada to create steam, and ships the
results 99% to US refineries.  

For this we should be proud to be Americans?  Kill nature, or
swarthy-skinned humans, for the oil we live on?  

I'm in the process of moving into town with my fiancé, and the first thing
I'm going to do when I'm there is sell my car (a Honda Civic HX) and buy a
bicycle.  Then I can afford to pay my student loan ;).  

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX  

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Rain Tenaqiya
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12:47 PM
To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [permaculture] Are carbon offsets from tree-planting nonsense?

I have always thought that the practice of carbon offsets for polluters was
problematic, for many reasons.  But if what Toby was saying about the
neglible impact of tree-cutting on global warming is true, then all those
carbon offset offers that are starting to pop up everywhere are total
bullshit.  You can now pay some person in a poor country to plant a bunch of
trees to supposedly make up for your greedy little plane trip vacation.  It
would only cost me $40 a year to pay for all the carbon I currently emit,
according to one web site (I think it is part of green.yahoo.com).  In any
case, trees do sequester carbon dioxide, and that carbon stays locked up
until the tree decays.  So for land that has space for trees, planting trees
could remove some of the carbon dioxide emitted through burning fossil
fuels, at least temporarily.  Keeping the land in permanent forest would
permanently decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.  This was part
of Robert Hart's hope, in
 his effort to promote forest gardens.  The question is, how much carbon can
be held by trees relative to the amount that is being released from burning
fossil fuels.  If I'm hearing Toby correctly, the amount of carbon released
from burning fossil fuels is so huge, that it totally dwarfs the amount that
trees could hold, even if all forests were restored.  I do believe this is
what a recent report on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest concluded,
as well.
   
   
  Rain