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person749 t1_izenxzp wrote

I hate this so much; acres and acres of beautiful wilderness being taken down all over the state for solar panels ..."to save the environment"...

Why not tear down abandoned buildings and parking lots and put them there? There's a ton of spots of urban decay around the state.

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BostonPilot t1_izf74gt wrote

Being a local pilot, I can see that most of what is now "beautiful wilderness" was farmland 150 years ago... I'm not saying I don't love wooded land, just that most of it wasn't wooded in the 18th and 19th century. The vast wide areas we see how is a fairly recent thing.

When we have alternatives to solar arrays, it'll go back to wooded land very quickly. Assuming global warming doesn't kill off all the species of trees...

>Why not tear down abandoned buildings and parking lots and put them there? There's a ton of spots of urban decay around the state.

The same reason we aren't mostly doing rooftop installations. Cost. The major cost of solar isn't the panels, it's the installation cost. It's much more cost effective to install on a fairly large space, on the ground, than in many little installations scattered around.

Not saying I 100% support converting green space to solar, just saying it's why it's happening the way it is. There have been some good studies over the last couple years about sharing solar fields with agriculture ( plants and animals below the panels ). I'm hoping we'll go more this way, so the land doesn't have to be dedicated to just solar...

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person749 t1_izmwn1v wrote

>18th and 19th century.

But was it wooded in the the 16th and 17th centuries? We can never get back what we had before colonization, but I think it's sad to think of any wildlife habitat as dispensible just because the land had been altered before.

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BostonPilot t1_izne2un wrote

Actually a lot of it was open fields being farmed by native Americans, at least according to one book I read. The names of towns reflected that... Mansfield, Marshfield, Springfield, etc. etc. was already open agricultural fields when the Europeans showed up. So you probably have to go back 5,000-10,000 years to find a time when it was all untouched aboreal landscape.

Also, my point wasn't that:

>I think it's sad to think of any wildlife habitat as dispensible just because the land had been altered before.

But that it's not a one way path... It's gone from wilderness to open field and back to wilderness before... And in a relatively short amount of time.

Also, if it was a new Walmart these people would probably be shrugging and saying "that's progress". I don't see any of them calling for a halt to all new construction. Just, you know, construction next to their house... Quite literally NIMBY.

While loss of habitat due to construction etc. is a real thing, it's nothing compared to the damage coming from global warming. Entire ecosystems across huge amounts of the country are going to be decimated over the next 100 years. If we can minimize that by converting a small percentage of previously farmed land into solar farms, it's arguably a worthwhile strategy, especially when it will quickly go back to wooded land once we no longer need the solar array.

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person749 t1_j1i7sq1 wrote

Another great response. I'd still rather see windmills and nuclear take up the slack, but this makes a little more sense.

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NeilHanlon t1_izfj99t wrote

Your "beautiful wilderness" is a mockery of the land before we came here with non-native plants and planted giant tree farms to fuel the world we're living in now.

90 foot pines aren't that old.

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person749 t1_izmw57x wrote

You're right, what we have now isn't as good as what we had originally, so let's just tear it all down and make it even uglier. /s

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winter_bluebird t1_iziwpst wrote

Look into the environmental history of the state. What you call “beautiful wilderness” is mostly anything but.

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person749 t1_izmw7rh wrote

Yeah, trees and animals are so disgusting. Let's kill them all! /s

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winter_bluebird t1_izn1y5q wrote

I’m a conservationist. It’s just that in this specific case what you’re trying to conserve is junk chock full of invasives nestled between two highways.

There is plenty of beautiful wilderness to protect which has to ACTIVELY be protected. Even the Estabrook Woods, for example, which are the biggest forested area close to Boston are a dying environment because of all the deer overbrowsing and an underbrush made almost exclusively of barberry, firebush, oriental bittersweet, and in the open areas, multi flora roses. Even the knotweed is creeping in now. NONE of those plants have any function for our native pollinators and fauna.

You see wilderness. I see a profoundly damaged environment that is not fulfilling its ecological role.

This is not a cut down all the trees moment! But it’s important to note that the only reason we have white pines everywhere is precisely BECAUSE we cut down our native hardwood forests for farmland. When the farmland was abandoned, the white pine seedlings germinated fast and shaded out most diversity. It’s not a healthy environment to begin with.

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