Thoughts on Mini Forests

An article on miniature, dense, fast-growing forests popped up today in Mozilla Pocket, arguing that it is good for biodiversity and helps fight the climate crisis. While I agree that increasing habitat for wildlife is a good for the environment, the wildlife and for humans, I’m not convinced that CO2 is the crisis it’s made out to be. So along those lines, I wanted to think about other reasons that planting lots of mini-forests is a good idea or good ideas that would use mini-forests.

tl;dr

  • Spread people out
  • More wildlife habitat
  • Less noise
  • Less pollution
  • More food

De-densify Human settlements

What I usually see when people start writing about climate change and density is that people should be living much more densely than they currently are. I disagree with this, in no small part because if this would be enforced, I would be driven from the home I intend to live in for the rest of my life, just to satisfy someone else’s moral convictions. While I want to die in this house, I would like to do it of old age and not because some power-drunk dictator has decreed that I’m to live in a one-room studio apartment because “climate”.

Instead, I think that people should have more space around them. Living clustered together in cities with little to no greenery around changes a person, and not for the better in my opinion. So many people on top of each other, and everybody becomes nothing but a faceless personoid.

So, I would be happy if half or more of all the space that currently have buildings or parking lots were turned into forests, preferably in a checker board pattern. Every way you look out of a build would be greenery instead of endless concrete roads (queue Whisper of the Heart). Having easy access to greenery helps people’s mental and physical health. I also think there should be more houses with large gardens attached, like the one I’m trying to attach to my current house. You can’t get food any more local than right past the back step.

But what about the carbon emissions from people using cars to get to and from their houses that are now farther apart? That I am unconvinced that carbon is the problem and not peak oil doesn’t change my proposed solution: a cross between self-driving cars and a grade-separated electrified rail system would work just fine, having four stations per square mile has walking distances of no more than 1300 feet to a station with not much more than three miles of super-light rail per square mile.

Habitat Restoration

Habitat destruction is a serious problem. Making it worse is that the majority of people live far from where that habitat is, and thus have no way of personally protecting it or enjoying it themselves. If you want someone to protect a thing, give them ownership in it. “You want to cut down the forest I played in as a child and that my children play in so you can build another parking lot? No.” Use NIMBY to your advantage.

Reduced Noise and Air Pollution

Plants block noise by getting in the way. They do the same for air pollution. They slow the air, and the particulate matter that makes it into your lungs has more time to fall to the ground before you breath it in. This is why rural areas have less pollution than urban areas despite doing things like burning trash in a barrel in the back yard.

Food Forests

The mini-forests talked about in the linked article are perfect for being food forests. Numerous different species of plants are already called out, the only difference is that you plant a lot of food-bearing plants. Nuts, fruits, berries and herbs. More food right were the people are going to eat it. No need to transport it halfway across the planet. That’s a lot of fuel and resources that are no longer needed to have the same or better standard of living.

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