With Europe melting away under unprecedented heat, one of the best ways to lower tempretures and protect soil and foliage from dry out is by planting trees and other plants and restoring forests and meadows. There are a few ways to do this, community gardening groups are becoming more popular, there's also a service called Bee Bombs that sells seeds to turn private gardens into wild flower patches for bees. And the ecosia search engine uses ad revenue to fund tree planting 150million+ so far.
Also an anecdote, I am very sensitive to heat and sunlight, but the house I grew up in had a giant apple tree that effectively covered half the back garden. I used to spend my days under it and drink the juice from the apples it provided.
@Reddebrek every morning i have breakfast on our balcony, which is under a tree
every fucking morning i have to wear a hoodie bc its cold
every morning i think i'll need a jacket
and then i go outside (away from the shade of the tree) and it's way too hot
@Reddebrek I wonder how much of that cooling effect is actually due to energy being used for photosynthesis and tissue growth, vs simply blocking the light and dissipating it away from the ground.
@Reddebrek Do you know how much of the effect comes from reflecting/scattering the sunlight away and how much from absorbing the sunlight and evaporative cooling? (And am I missing some other important heatsink involved?)
@Reddebrek also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China) - the progress is already visible from space
@lritter unfortunately projects on that scale tend to cause ecological problems of their own including soil erosion and monoculture, which is why most reforestration projects have moved to a more localised strategy.
@Reddebrek i thought soil erosion was the reason for china to do it in the first place. but also, if they don't, they just get more desert, which is why monoculture is probably still better than just sand ;)
@Reddebrek but no doubt, they're learning a lot. their loss rate is 10% per year because the quality of planted crop wasn't good enough, they're now adjusting for that
@lritter umm the page you shared has an entire section dedicated to the many ecological issues that project has caused and is causing. Monoculture absolutely is not better than deserts which are their own biosystems. Monoculture often leads to total ecological collapse.
@Reddebrek you're right. they should just stop.
@lritter @Reddebrek or perhaps simply use time-tested methods of petrochem-free cultivating of biodiversity throughout, as any elder could have taught them if they bothered to listen.
Monoculturism is also literally an engineering flaw, so it's not just the elders guiding towards better ways.
People "in power" aren't listening to outside perspectives tho.
That is the crux of our problems here on this planet.
@lritter @Reddebrek ref https://archive.ph/OwEar for a peek at the myriad of changes that needs to happen globally with agriculture at a fundamental level.
More than hapoy to speak as a scalability engineer towards this as a more-viable path.
We've proven the concepts firsthand, and yields are 85%+ within 3 years from "dead" soil that even petrochems cannot remdiate.
The five-year prospect (viable food-calories per hectare) is over 130% of petro-mechanized fields, fyi.
Sure, it takes about 1/3 more human labor, a multi-year planning perspective (transition 1/3 of the remaining fields each season), and you easily recoup that in lowered (almost eliminated) equipment cost, money not spent on petrochems (fuel, fertilizers, spray, seed cost year over year) and as a bonus it makes John Deere and Monsanto sad while massively improving on the unsustainable externalities of the extraction-mindset agriculture-myth that dominates right now.
@jakimfett @Reddebrek oh sure. big fan of milpa and such.
@Reddebrek If anyone knows a North American (Ontario, specifically) equivalent to Bee Bombs, I am ALL EARS. I have had a hard time with trying to get seeds for native pollinator-friendly plants around here!
Here's a visual aid