this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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I'm not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from "stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground" you can imagine. You can't even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn't work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don't want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you'll get one tree the way you want it to be.
Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn't a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it's a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.
I've seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old "real" forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can't grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.
And as further proof that I don't live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here's 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/
A bunch of twigs does not a forest make.
In a pre-industrial Europe, sure, forests are everywhere and foresting alone like crazy. But we're in a post-industrial one. Most land in Europe is altered in some ways, was farmed on at some point, or had something else going on. Everything is littered with plants that we selectively bred or mutated, a wild very aggressive weed are everywhere and will be everywhere. Soil composition is wild and weird. The air ~~is unfit to breathe the food is unfit to eat I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore~~, you get the point.
It's not that it can't grow without human assistance, the human assistance is needed to keep it from human interference, because we changed the land and continue doing so.
But obviously, sometimes a forest just grows, when it wants to. But you can't guarantee this process, that was my point.