It works great for fisheries, no reason it wouldn't work for land too

America I believe has as many trees now as when the Europeans first arrived

Our extensive National Forest system is a good start

I don't think so

There are accounts of explorers being able to walk across the whole continental US without leaving the forest in the 1700s

We've got some pretty big prairies in the middle these days

We might be close though

And prairie is good anyway

Doesn't all have to be trees

I think overall we're trending towards a more sustainable economy without the massive government overreach but we're going to end up with government policy slowing it down and taking credit for it anyway

Probably

Kind of like with racial discrimination I think the culture pulls ahead, then the government steps in and passes a law that is no longer necessary and takes all the credit.

me sounding like a hardcore Libertarian today 😄

Well I am not an extremist Libertarian but we've swung too hard the other direction so we need to pull that way.

true

i do wonder how much progress we're making overall in terms of conservation etc that the leftists actually know about

it'd probably make a good man on the campus segment

and the real progress will be made when someone finds a way to prioritize rubbish

Do you mean profitize?

Yeah that would be great.

oh yeah profitize

stupid spell checker

it red lined it and changed it and I didn't notice it

I'm hoping the microbes evolve to eat all our plastics

especially that one big lump of plastic

In the ocean?

ya

even as bad as that plastic lump is, the Jellyfish there are thriving

Well they like the water warming up

Cleaning up the plastic would save a lot of sea turtles and birds

one potential idea is to take the plastics and recycle them into nests

if it's not going to break down for a long long time use that stability

The problem is not what to do with the plastic, it's how to collect it economically in the first place.

It's not actually in a cohesive lump, it's just a huge region with lots of plastic bits floating loose

tourism could help in some way with that in creating a profit incentive for it

although I'm talking more land based now and not the giant lump

Oh

that giant lump is a tricky one, best i can figure is some kind of bacteria to dissolve it and using some kind of bacteriaphage to control that bacteria

There's no real need, once they eat all the trash they'll die off

the environmental doom has been forecasted for ever as results of overpopulation and terraforming, etc. The end result is it can either be viewed/announced as a dooms day scenario, i.e. no one will give a shit because it's to big of a problem. Or it can be broken down into small parts that can be fixed. Easy fixes such as removing farming subsidize and farming price floors could easily free up many american regions to be returned to nature. Opening up trade barriers on goods like sugar from cheap tropical world markets so that corn and beet sugar production is slowed and lands are freed for better uses, removing federal subsidize for living in flood zones removes the financial impact of rising waters, etc. All effectively cost nothing (actually saves money) and improve environmental issues. Yet we ignore these things to focus on nonsense like high speed rail

https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/ has a great approach, i don't agree with everything but the approach is solid. If we could even agree on an approach, then its just a matter of turning a dial on what a human life is worth, or an average 1 iq point increase is worth to quantify and priorities social reforms