https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/16/murder-offsets/
"As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their
summers tree planting; they'd come back from the bush in September,
insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of
dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest
with their own blistered hands.
I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing
my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about
the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn't merely clear-cutting our
old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs,
threatening us all.
At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our
homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity,
but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay
my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they'd fed into their
mills.
I was wrong. Last summer's Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast
and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons
of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren't just an effect of
the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by
my pals in the eighties and nineties."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
