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Forrest Fleischman

@forrestf.bsky.social

2.9K followers 5.6K following 890 posts

Associate professor of environmental policy at the University of Minnesota. Forest governance, Restoration Social Science, South Asia, Central America, Environmental justice, urban ecosystems, NEPA, homegardens, etc.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · Jun 23

A couple years ago, I was approached by some scientists at The Nature Conservancy with a proposal: Would I help them create a better global restoration opportunity map? The resulting paper is now out, and I will explain my view of it in this thread. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Addressing critiques refines global estimates of reforestation potential for climate change mitigation - Nature Communications

Reforestation is a key climate change mitigation strategy, but global maps of its potential are widely criticized. This study shows that addressing those critiques substantially refines estimates of t...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Jeremy Bassis @bassisjeremy.bsky.social · 18h

The University: We need to become leaders in climate and sustainability and there is an urgent need to develop climate science courses.

Me: Our department has climate in the name and we already offer courses on climate science at every level.

The University: Who invited you to this meeting?

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 1d

And yet big NGOs (and plenty of big name ecology & forest scientists) are still promoting them, and arguing that little tweaks will fix them. At this point, If you think your little tweak is going to fix things, you need to show me really strong evidence.

David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 1d

News that shocks no one: Carbon offsets do nothing for climate.

Carbon offsets fail to cut global heating due to ‘intractable’ systemic problems, study says

Analysis of 25 years of evidence shows most schemes are poor quality and fail to lower emissions

www.theguardian.com

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 2d

Well, since you are missing the Alhambra, I'll just say that Granada has a surprisingly excellent Science Museum.

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 5d

Applications due Oct. 31

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 5d

The employment would be through Wassan, and would also involve collaborators in Sweden and Delhi University, and would be fully remote-work based. Would be a great opportunity for a graduate student looking for a part time job, or a recent graduate with experience in textual analysis.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 5d

A team I am a part of is hiring an India-based part time research assistant to help us with textual analysis of government forestry documents related to forest restoration and pastoral livelihoods in Himachal Pradesh. Information and application instructions here: forms.gle/4D6aVqtDU7FY...

forms.gle

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 7d

oh yes! I definitely heard about this as a major issue when I was there.

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10d

And in this atmosphere, it won't be the student who gets punished, and we'll all have to start pretending like there are male and female corn plants or something.

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10d

Sorry - that was a little glib, what I meant to say is that its fine for a botanist to make distinctions between sex and gender, but just as with that story at Texas A&M, I can see a student creating a ruckus at Texas Tech or wherever based on misunderstanding the distinction you made.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10d

Thanks this is a good answer. Although I'm not sure it will protect against the thought police.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10d

I guess it ends up meaning that you will leave behind the species that are most effective at growing rapidly/capturing nutrients/allelopathy, which is to say, you won't end up in 20 or 50 years with the species that will be strongest then, just the ones that were strongest in the first few years

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10d

synchronized aging seems less concerning to me if you are planting alot of different species, they'll have different life spans. But what does "leaving the strongest" actually mean in the context of planting diverse species together?

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10d

But then again, after a few years most of the trees will die and it won't be dense anymore?

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10d

ok, but I don't want a dense planting in my neighborhood, I want visibility. Also where I live the "natural" vegetation is an oak savanna, which is to say, pretty sparse vegetation. I guess I could imagine some really specific uses of this (e.g. a screen between a park and a highway).

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 11d

I don't really understand why this idea has gotten so trendy.

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 11d

This trend is really weird. Natural forests usually aren't overgrown thickets of plants that don't necessarily grow well together, and most of the trees are likely to die after a few years due to density-dependent mortality. It seems like an overly expensive way to get an impenetrable thicket.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 11d

I have a serious question: How do you teach botany or agriculture if you are required to say that only 2 genders exist and that individuals can't be both? I'm not trying to troll, I'm genuinely curious about this.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

As someone who cares about convincing people to agree with me, that's good enough reason for me to avoid the term and focus on the specific institutional conditions that lead to bad outcomes rather than the broad and very popular concept.

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

As a final note, I'll add that as I have lived my whole life in societies in which capitalism is considered extremely valuable and popular, my experience is that political critiques that blame "capitalism" are rarely successful at swaying the opinions of important people.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

I'm aware that some fields use very specific definitions, and since I don't know Ben or his background, I'm going to assume he was using it with some very specific meaning, but I don't know what that meaning is.

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

My training as a political economist was to avoid the term pretty much at all costs because people understand different things by it (and the most common understanding of it - i.e. as the broad economic system used in most of the world today) is vague enough to be useless as a specific analysis

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

I think Ben doesn't want to continue to engage with this, which is fine, but while Ben may have a specific meaning in mind when he uses the term "capitalism", its definitely one of those words that is used in numerous ways to mean different things to different people.

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

"At the earliest time slice of our model, 1000 BC, the Near Eastern regions (Iraq, Syria-Lebanon, and Palestine-Jordan) clearly display widespread deforestation. Several small parts of central Europe (within Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria) display 70% clearance by 1000 BC" doi.org/10.1016/j.qu...

Redirecting

doi.org

Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

I would also dispute that capitalism "caused" forest loss and degradation except in the most vague sense. Lots of forest loss and degradation in Cuba, for example, in spite of an absence of capitalism. Forest loss in the UK preceded capitalism by thousands of years.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18d

One of the largest forces for forest conservation in the world is investment by forest products companies in future forest production (otherwise much land would be converted to pastures). I would argue that this is capitalism leading to forest conservation by any measure.

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