I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about some surprisingly hopeful news: the planet’s forests are growing back.
As agricultural technology becomes more efficient and more people move to cities rather than rural villages, marginal land has been returning to nature. Planet-wide, the rate of deforestation peaked in the 1980s, and it’s been decreasing ever since. In many places, like North America, Europe and China, there’s been a net gain of forest cover since 1990. It turns out nature can regenerate surprisingly fast, if only we give it the opportunity.
Some countries are still cutting down forests, especially tropical developing nations like Brazil and Indonesia. However, a majority of that destruction comes from domestic demand – not cash crops grown for export, as you might assume. That too is a hopeful sign, because it means these countries might soon go through the green transition that many industrialized nations have already completed.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
While Western-style consumption on a mass scale is unsustainable for the planet, it’s also true that more advanced economies have less environmental impact.
As technology continues to improve, we can adopt more planet-friendly methods—like vertical farming, or agrivoltaics that provide both food and renewable energy, or even precision fermentation and other advanced biotechnology to grow meat substitutes.
These green technologies are a step above fossil-fuel-driven industrial agriculture, which is a step above slash-and-burn farming or subsistence agriculture that requires cutting down trees for firewood. As societies move up this technology curve, their impact on the planet decreases.
If we disseminate these technologies to countries that haven’t yet adopted them—and especially if all us privileged Westerners eat a few less hamburgers—it’s very possible that global deforestation will slow to a halt and then go into reverse. We may well see reforestation on a planetary scale occurring within our lifetimes.
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