Fortunately, woodland creatures don’t hire lawyers

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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netOPtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•The fifth pocketEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    No, I think we have painted ourself into a corner again. You now HAVE to do controlled burns since our previous management avoided any fire at all costs and built up huge fuel stores that would have normally burnt.

    Also, sidebar: our ecosystems today are not those that were present thousands of years ago. I can hear the keyboards clacking already, but what I mean is this: ecosystems will come together and then fade away as conditions change - your pine dominant forest may not have even existed as you see it today and instead had a different canopy and/or different understory species. Ecosystems live, breathe, and adapt just like a giant organism and I think that’s super cool.

    Your soil moisture regime changes? A new community moves in. You have a global cooling or warming? That original community may go extinct, or only some species will remain and those species may not have the same dominance they once had as they are now operating at the edge of their niche conditions rather than under optimal ones.

    Look at that, you got me monologuing you sly dog

  • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netOPtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•The fifth pocketEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    Generally, good land management is lazy land management. Nature (and her ecosystems) got on just fine without us. The only reason we need to manage the fire cycle now is so that we don’t have our population centers burnt by the natural fire cycle. However, we largely already fucked that part up by intervening in the fire cycle, and not allowing areas close to these centers to burn. As a result, you end up with conflagrations popping up where you don’t want them to.

  • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.nettoToday I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL putting solar panels on land currently used for biofuels would produce enough electricity for all cars and trucks to go electricEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    As another commentator points out, transportation of electricity and vehicles themselves are the major problems. Farmers that grow biofuels could conceivably shift to another crop, and many of the crops used for biofuels are routinely farmed for other uses (e.g., corn is animal feed and biofuel feed). In that regard, I disagree with the the argument that the entire infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.

    the problem of getting electricity to cars is removed if we have better public transportation, though developing that infrastructure and reconfiguring the existing system (e.g., car-centric) is a much bigger problem. Regardless, you can still use solar for other uses (houses, industry) while you convert transportation slowly (and painfully, as we’ve really painted ourselves into a corner).

    I do* like your take on alternate land uses for quarries (and mines! don’t forget those). Not all mines are close to cities, but some are. There’s a few really good example of mines installing solar panels on their reclaimed tailings storage facilities., or old mines being used for pumped hydro batteries.

    The energy issue is multifaceted, and while it’s easy to say ‘just do nuclear’ ‘just do solar’ ‘just do hydro’, one size doesn’t fit all. However, the one thing that DOES fit, is how we have to start thinking about how to repurpose what we have already (e.g., windows as you point out) to suit our objectives of green energy.