@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:
no, you just avoid the facts in US deforestation in all your posts.
You avoid the basic relationship between development and deforestation:
Land is always being developed and re-developed. When a parcel of land is cleared of trees/forest and then covered with sand by developers, it is dead. It will be covered with buildings and pavement and a few ornamental trees/shrubs, and it will not do much in terms of absorbing and storing atmospheric CO2 for the next several centuries, and probably not for many millennia if human land-use isn't reformed to incorporate more trees and other green growth.
Roof gardens and trees have gained some popularity as part of growing environmental/climate consciousness, but just subjectively compare a city where all the buildings are covered in roof gardens with one where tall, narrow buildings make room for robust tree canopy on the ground.
Ground trees/plants simply do better than ones in pots on the tops of buildings.
If you take the carbon-offset mentality, which you seem to have, then you are always neglecting to reforest parcels of land that are re-developed, because you are just justifying unsustainable design of some parcels by leaving others undeveloped.
Yes, it is good to leave land undeveloped whenever possible; but it is also important to reform the way developed land is developed so that human population levels will become less of a sustainability threat generally.
In short, we have to reform the way humans live and consume so that their lives contribute, rather than threaten, long-term sustainability.
Think about it as if humans were parasites living in a host body. If the parasites are gradually eroding the host body and transforming it into dead matter, the parasites will only be able to live there until the host body dies from the infection.
If, on the other hand, the parasites are mutually beneficial for the host body, like many microbes in the digestive tract, they will contribute to the health of the host body, causing it to live healthier longer and future generations of parasites will benefit from maintaining/sustaining the health of their host.
It's just a question of looking at how humans live and how they can change the way they live and work and use resources so that it all contributes to the ecological health of (all) the land and water and not just the far-off places that we deem precious enough to save and/or reforest.