Tim Worstall

7 responses so far ↓

• 1 JuliaM // Aug 17, 2009 at 2:52 pm

  Except, of course, it’s usually a whole different set of trees and plants to the ones destroyed.

• 2 Doug // Aug 17, 2009 at 5:04 pm

  Aren’t large areas of the ‘pristine’ Amazon rainforest now increasingly thought to be relatively recent. There seems to have been a flourishing civilisation along large areas of the region which was wiped out by the diseases that came over with the Europeans.

• 3 Mark Wadsworth // Aug 17, 2009 at 8:23 pm

  Given you’re talking about rainforests, why stop at “Jeepers!”?

  “Jeepers! Creepers!” would have been more appropriate, methinks

• 4 Monty // Aug 17, 2009 at 10:45 pm

  Something tells me that if I cleared a patch of land in the Scottish Highlands, it would not subsequently be re-colonised by tropical hardwood trees, orchids, birds of paradise, and tortoises.

  Whatever is re-establishing in those areas is probably supposed to be there because it got seeded from stuff that is naturally there already.

• 5 Ian B // Aug 18, 2009 at 9:24 am

  Forests grow back much quicker than greenies believe. They are wedded to a Romantic ideal of the ancient forest, unchanging for thousands and thousands of years. They don’t want to believe that if you log a forest it’ll just grow back the same- they have a mystical belief in the ancientnessness of it.

  Hence the lunacy of saving paper to protect “virgin” forests.

• 6 Bruce // Aug 18, 2009 at 2:17 pm

  It takes about 60 years to go from logged trees back to sometime resembling a rainforest and maybe 100-200 to get back to its pre-logged state. However, I believe rainforest is being cleared at a faster rate than it can grow back.

• 7 dearieme // Aug 18, 2009 at 3:25 pm

  Monty, what you get on your Scottish clearance depends almost entirely on fencing versus Bambi. What’s available for re-seeding is likely to be bambi-sensitive too.

  On almost everything to do with British woodland, the required reading is Oliver Rackham’s The History of the Countryside.

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