Disappearing trees

JohnFreeman said:
I hate to see trees being cut.

Then again, one doesn't even have to replant them to see trees reestablishing themselves in a year or two. Coming from the desert SW, this is miraculous to me.
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You should come to my yard and see all the baby trees, "volunteers" Mom called them, that sprout up all over. I try to move them out to the edge of the yard before they get too big, so they can do their thing in peace.
 
Millie said:
You should come to my yard and see all the baby trees, "volunteers" Mom called them, that sprout up all over. I try to move them out to the edge of the yard before they get too big, so they can do their thing in peace.
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I’ve got a maple that sprouted from random seed on the edge of my flower bed in the back yard. I think this winter I will transplant it to somewhere better. I respect its tenacity and desire to live by growing as it did, so I want to give it a good home.
 
premise said:
Let me introduce you to sweetgum.
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Sweetgum is great for critters. In late winter when things are a bit tight for our wild brethren, birds and squirrels feed on the seeds of the gumballs. And by mid-February red maple goes to seed before anything else. So, both species contribute a bit of food during times of scarcity.
What I don't like about loblolly pine is that it produces lousy lumber. I picked up some "treated" pine a while back at a reputable hardware store (not a big box store) and made the mistake of leaving it outside in the rain. Within a week or two it looked like a pile of pretzels. I assume if I had purchased regular untreated pine it would have melted and washed away. I've seen pine in new home construction twist so bad it cracks the drywall. The problem is that pine doesn't have the opportunity to mature and become a decent source of lumber. It's all relatively young growth sapwood. :rolleyes:
 
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There are more trees in the US than there were in 1970... The first "Earth Day".

There are more trees in the US than there were 100 years ago. A LOT more.

There are more trees in the US than there were in the pre-Columbian era. Before whitey. More than 1500, 1600, 1800, 2500 years ago. A LOT more.

Pick a number, choose your century, decade, epoch, whatever. Google it up. The biggest threat to trees now is poor management and lack of natural undergrowth fires. That's why our lovely NC pines are getting bug-infested and therefore quail populations are shrinking.

I woke one morning to the sounds of machinery, and a plot west of me was being clear-cut, and I admit I was kinda bummed, until I realized that because of it, I now have a much better mountain-view from my bathroom window. I personally get tired of feeling like a bug in a shag carpet, and appreciate some long-range views mixed in with the thick Eastern woodland.

The world needs ball-bats and pianos too.
 
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Downeast said:
Sweetgum is great for critters. In late winter when things are a bit tight for our wild brethren, birds and squirrels feed on the seeds of the gumballs. And by mid-February red maple goes to seed before anything else. So, both species contribute a bit of food during times of scarcity.
What I don't like about loblolly pine is that it produces lousy lumber. I picked up some "treated" pine a while back at a reputable hardware store (not a big box store) and made the mistake of leaving it outside in the rain. Within a week or two it looked like a pile of pretzels. I assume if I had purchased regular untreated pine it would have melted and washed away. I've seen pine in new home construction twist so bad it cracks the drywall. The problem is that pine doesn't have the opportunity to mature and become a decent source of lumber. It's all relatively young growth sapwood. :rolleyes:
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I blame some of the newest mills for the twisty lumber. Some of the new sawmills use lasers and robots to scale logs as they come into the mill, and it lets them cut full sized 2x4's out of tiny 4" diameter trees that 20 years ago would have gone into paper. It's good for the mill's bottom line, but the result is 2x4's that have a lot of stress, knots, and weak wood in them, and they'll bend and twist if they get wet and dry out again.

The majority of the loblolly pine that's planted today is a GMO that was chosen for fast growth and disease resistance. It makes fine paper and plywood, but the wide sapwood rings make it a lower quality lumber than you'd find years ago. To my knowledge, we do not do any GMO shortleaf pine, and it tends to have tighter rings. You might have to do some searching, but you should be able to find shortleaf lumber around.

I don't know if this is still the case, but I know at one time, finding the highest grade lumber in the US was difficult because we had a trade agreement with Japan that they got first dibs at the highest quality lumber.

If you see any lumber marked Canfor, there's a good chance that its white pine imported from Canada.
 
Aardvark said:
There are more trees in the US than there were in 1970... The first "Earth Day".

There are more trees in the US than there were 100 years ago. A LOT more.

There are more trees in the US than there were in the pre-Columbian era. Before whitey. More than 1500, 1600, 1800, 2500 years ago. A LOT more.

Pick a number, choose your century, decade, epoch, whatever. Google it up. The biggest threat to trees now is poor management and lack of natural undergrowth fires. That's why our lovely NC pines are getting bug-infested and therefore quail populations are shrinking.

I woke one morning to the sounds of machinery, and a plot west of me was being clear-cut, and I admit I was kinda bummed, until I realized that because of it, I now have a much better mountain-view from my bathroom window. I personally get tired of feeling like a bug in a shag carpet, and appreciate some long-range views mixed in with the thick Eastern woodland.

The world needs ball-bats and pianos too.
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Well that apparently depends on your sources. I've read where we have only 2/3 the trees that were here in 1600's. And using 1970 or even 100 years ago isn't necessarily a great metric either. While we have apparently been adding trees back since the 40's, a great deal of damage was done before that. Heck our current trend, at least in the greater Charlotte area, is clear cutting 100's of acres of trees, stripping top soil and building garbage houses en masse, mostly for developments we don't or at least shouldn't need.

Not to mention a lot of the "added trees" now are not as beneficial as what we have destroyed due to a lack of biodiversity and benefits of tree maturity. This doesn't get into the world wide loss of forests either. One study showed a net loss of 10 billion trees/year.

Poor forest management is definitely a big problem though, California proves that year after year.
 
Millie said:
The trees along 401 between Wagram and Raeford are being chopped down at an alarming rate. Not sure what for, but every day there's more bare ground where acres of trees used to be! This makes me sad and pissed off, because I've been looking at those trees since 1997, and now they're going away.

Yesterday I saw a smallish fox run across the road, and I guess his woods will be gone pretty soon, too.
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I would bet it is just a commercial pine plantation. Trees will be back in a few years. Cutovers might be ugly but they provide a much better enviroment for wildlife. Mature farmed pines tend to be poor wildlife habitat.
 
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