We use trees for paper, buildings, firewood, and so much more. How is there enough??
In: Engineering
Most timber for commercial sale comes from forests specifically planted for that purpose. It takes a fair bit of land but you can rotate them on a ~20 year cycle if you plan ahead
Because there are just that many trees, plus a lot of those industrial use trees are farmed instead of grown naturally.
It is true that a lot of forests are being excessively cut, but we do have enough trees for now.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
Measuring by carbon content, ~80% of Earth’s biomass is plants, and ~70% of that is wood. Which comes out to 56% of life on Earth being wood. Or roughly 315 billion tons of carbon. Humans account for 60 million tons of carbon. Which works out to a ratio of 5,250.
So for the average American, with a weight of 200 pounds (18.5% carbon), there is about 388,000 pounds of wood (50% carbon). That’s roughly 43,000 2x4s or 700,000 rolls of toilet paper.
Some statistics you maybe should worry about, for every pound of wild mammal, there are 10 pounds of human, and 20 pounds of livestock.
tl;dr there is *so much* wood. Wood for days. More than half of all living tissue is wood.
estimations say there’s 3 *trillion* trees on earth. the milky way galaxy only has 100 billion stars.
Trees grow constantly and new ones are created all of the time and there are billions of them, even though the Amazon rainforest is constantly talked about it has an estimated 390 billion trees, there is another massive area of woodland that is barely mentioned; the Taiga is an area of boreal forest with mainly conifers growing there represents a vitally important biome to our planet. https://youtu.be/EM97JYag_UI
The estimated number of trees in the world is 3 trillion. That is around 400 trees per human.
Most used trees are quickly grown where they were cut down before and are replanted. The regrow planes are cute after a couple of years to a bit over 100 years depending on the type of tree and location. There are around 2 billion trees planted per year
The shortest cycle might be 2-5 years for energy forestry when you use coppice. You cut the tree that is above the ground and new shoots grow from the remaining stump and roots. Poplar, willow, or eucalyptus are examples of trees that are grown like this. What you get is not exactly thick pieces of wood you might think of it more thick and large shrubbery not trees. Here is an example of how it can look https://www.capensis.se/Nk1bilder/4Energi/5%20Salix.jpg You often make woodchips that directly can be burned or pressed into wood pellets that you burn. Wood does not need to be in the form of big trees to be burned for energy.
The short answer is that we have a lot of trees and since they’re a renewable resource it’s hard to run out.
The long answer is that despite that we still cause massive habitat destruction from deforestation and as many will point out, the quality of lumber has significantly decreased over the years as we go for shorter and shorter planting/cutting cycles, usually indicated by the grain on older and newer timber being much more dense on the older ones. And of course a lot of wildlife pays the price for this consumption. We won’t really run out but it’s just funny how back in the 2000s curbing our wood consumption was one of the top priorities for environmental groups and now all of a sudden paper/wooden products are seen as eco friendly options.
The world is big. There are lots of trees. Like, really a lot of trees. Way, way more than you think. Some kinds of trees also grow quite fast, paper doesn’t need slow-growing “hardwood” trees, fast-growing pine trees are fine, and can easily have a cutting and replanting cycle that keeps up with demand for wood. Most deforestation is done to create land for farming, not because we need the wood (the forests are often burned, which is part of why it’s so awful for the climate)
Trees grows. Young forests grows by an average of 2-5% every year. That means we can cut down almost 5% of the worlds planted forests every year and still have the same amount of trees. A lot of these forests are in mountains, far away from cities and even farms. There are huge amount of these areas covered in forests. About 40% of the worlds habitable area is forests.
But this is still a huge issue. The amount of forest land in the world is decreasing. Even if forests can grow back at a rate of 5% a year we are cutting it down slightly faster. The way we do forestry today is not sustainable and have not been for over a hundred years. So basically there is not enough forests for everything we use wood for. Another issue is that this 5% growth rate is only true for young forests. The growth rates goes down as the forest matures. But this is where we get the biodiversity. Even the amount of carbon captured is much higher in older forests then in young. Trees grow first but most of the carbon is locked in the ground, mostly in fungi which takes over a hundred years to grow. The fungi dies when we cut down the forest releasing all the carbon back into the atmosphere.
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