I know paper right now doesn't have a great environmental footprint, but paper does seem like a pretty good way to trick capitalism into planting lots of trees.

Traditional forestry in Europe was keen on preserving total forest area for future harvest. And after the general shift from burning wood to burning coal, forests actually expanded.

In my country (Czechia) the contemporary forest cover is about twice as much as in the 18th century and several per cent bigger than in 1950.

The problem is species composition. Those forests are mostly monocultural and prone to devastating disease / pest outbreaks.

I don't know about forest cover, but we have the same issues in Sweden. The biological diversity in areas used for forestry is poor compared to untouched forests. The recent dry weather has been very good for a kind of beetle that has destroyed vast amounts of trees. Forests that were untouched, or just mixed kind, did a lot better.

Regulation is slowly catching up though, and some of the larger companies have actually started doing more than is required by law.

Seems like an interesting computational ecology problem.

Or to just use whatever trees are left and leave the next generation to worry about planting new ones...

That’s actively happening!

An ex-coworker of mine has been working with a team on a drone tree-planting startup that is bidding to take on government and heavy industry contracts.

IIRC there are several companies working in that space and surprisingly not more.

Though I suppose that social guilt and pressure is still required to get those heavy industrial corps to want to wear a big green badge boating about all the trees they’ve planted.

Eh, it's mostly replanting what has been destroyed previously, and with only a few fast growth species who don't make very useful wood for other purposes, while more varied forests are being destroyed to make room. It's pretty hard to "trick" capitalism into serving other interests than its own.

And yet, capitalist societies have stricter environmental regulations and the people living in capitalist societies tend to be more concerned about the environment. Look up the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea for their environmental records and compare those to the US or Western Europe. Here's the US, page 7 please: https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/Forest...

It's probably a mix of being overall rich enough that we can think about other problems (like the environment) and because spending money and consuming is actually a choice. A market driven by consumers choice will create a market for greener products. The more power the government has the less they care about anyone else but the elite. And they for sure won't care about the terrible conditions of the environment in paesants-ville.