Hallu wrote:It's funny that in Australia you see so many European pine plantations, like the ugly one near Lower Glenelg National Park. Why don't the Aussies plant eucalypts here and the Portuguese pines there ? It's crazy.
Pine is faster growing, which means more profit and quicker turnaround. Of course, it also depletes the soil much faster but, hey, who cares about that when there's money to be made?
Eucalypts are hardwoods, which are prefered for certain applications as they tend to be longer lasting. (Yes, I know some pine - such as produced by Tasmanian rainforest species - lasts only slightly short of forever, but they're not the sort of trees we see in plantations as they're far too slow growing and usually far pickier about their growing conditions.) Because of their generally slower growth and the increasing pressure to industrialise timber production, where eucalypt plantations are established here it's mostly the fastest growing species such as
E globulus (blue gum).
The spread of wide-scale monoculture is as big a threat as invasive species. Perhaps bigger. But that's a whole different argument.
It's not about individual trees, or individual species. It's about the integrity of the ecosystems as a whole. We still don't know enough about how minor changes impact systems yet we're running around buggerising everything we can so the few can make more and more profit.
I've reached the stage where nuclear Armageddon seems the best chance for the planet. There may only be a few grasses and cockroaches left at the end of it, but the odds are that, given enough time, they'll evolve into a species with more sense than shown by
homo supposedly *&%$#! sapiens.