Wangari Maathai, a professor of veterinary anatomy and member of Kenya’s Parliament, founded the Green Belt Movement in the 1970s, which paid rural women to plant trees around their villages. The initiative quickly took off, spreading to other countries in eastern Africa. By 2004, decades and 30 million trees later, she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.
Two years later, with the support of the United Nations Environment Program and others, she launched another campaign, this time aspiring for a goal of a billion trees, called “Plant for the Planet.”
Her successes inspired 9-year-old Felix Finkbeiner, a fourth grader from Germany, who in 2007 declared to his class that children should plant a million trees in every country on Earth. “That was the biggest number I could come up with, or something,” Finkbeiner said in 2019.
After his class planted a crab apple tree outside their school and more and more people heard about his proposal, both in Germany and abroad, a children’s movement which was also called Plant for the Planet was formed.
In just three years, the movement planted a million trees. Soon after, Finkbeiner, just 13 years old at the time, spoke before the United Nations as a part of its International Year of Forests. “It is now time that we work together,” he said. “We combine our forces, old and young, rich and poor, and together we can plant a trillion trees.”
Soon after Maathai died in September, the United Nations transferred leadership of its Plant for the Planet to Finkbeiner’s. Soon, the campaign to plant a billion trees became a campaign to plant a trillion and was renamed the Trillion Tree Campaign.
At that time, nobody knew whether planting that many trees was possible. “There was very little information on those questions,” Finkbeiner said.
But Gregor Hintler, one of the founding members of the movement, happened to be the roommate of Thomas Crowther, who was doing postdoc work at the Yale School of Forestry.
After using a variety of methods including satellite images, artificial intelligence and extrapolation, they and a group of colleagues published their findings in the journal Nature, estimating that the earth contains around 3 trillion trees. As Hintler said, “We can now say there’s plenty of space.”
Many have undertaken the effort to plant trees as an easy way to help the environment, but there are a few flaws.
When Lalisa Duguma, an ecosystem-restoration expert based in Australia, went to middle school in western Ethiopia in the 1990s, the government would provide them with seedlings to plant every year. However, he recalls that the seedlings would die off every year.
“Every year we are going to the same place to do the same activity,” he says. “There is no change on the ground.” The fundamental problem was that not all places are ideal for trees, more so if compounded with the issue of neglect.
Karen Holl, a restoration ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests a conceptual shift. “We should be growing trees, not planting trees,” she says, “We need to think about whether those trees are surviving over time, because it’s going to take 10, 20 years, a century, before we really get the benefits that we want.”
There are many organizations and companies committed to planting trees. Amazon has pledged to donate a million dollars in $1 trees, while search engines like Ecosia use money from ad revenue and share it with planting partners.
Despite the effort, actually counting all the planted trees is a difficult and messy task. After being planted, many seedlings die from things like neglect, and many others are counted multiple times due to the complex relationship between different tree-planting organizations.
The directors of some of these organizations say that a trillion trees is merely a symbolic goal. “From our point of view, the trillion is aspirational,” Nicole Schwab, the executive director of 1t.org, says. “We need to be bold, to raise ambition, to put in a system where whatever is pledged is going to be monitored. To me, that’s more important than actually counting toward a trillion.”
But many scientists believe that restoring forests is not the catch-all answer to stopping climate change.
A group of Kalunga villagers hired by the California-based Eden Reforestation Projects trudged through a field of seedlings in an isolated region in the Brazilian state of Goiás on a recent morning in April. They claim to have planted around 30,000 trees in the past three weeks in a region where deforestation has been severely straining the livelihoods of the nearly 800 people living in the tiny village of Engenho and beyond.
The Kalunga are descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped to the Brazilian cerrado, a vast region of grasslands, savannas and open woodlands, many centuries ago. Tucked in a region of forbidding landscapes, they were isolated from the wider world until the 1980s. Soon after that, traditional building materials were replaced with clay tiles and bricks, and electricity arrived to the village, forever changing their lifestyle.
But then, Eden appeared in northern Goiás State, announcing its intent to plant trees, causing alarm among local conservationists. “They chose one of the most conserved areas in the cerrado to plant trees,” ecologist Natashi Pilon said. “You came to the wrong place,” added Rafael Oliveira, another ecologist.
On the contrary, Stephen Fitch, the founder of Eden, said that “the Kalunga had identified large areas of degraded forest in their territories that would benefit from Eden’s trees.”
This dispute is familiar for many. “There’s a peculiar forest fetish and obsession, which I think is traced back to Europe, possibly Germany,” says William Bond, professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Capetown, South Africa, who studies grasslands. “I think it’s a massive misunderstanding of the natural world.”
Amid the climate crisis of today, restoring forests is essential to avoiding a large-scale disaster. But refraining from planting trees where they aren’t supposed to grow is just as necessary to maintain a clean and healthy planet for future generations.
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/magazine/planting-trees-climate-change.html
Two years later, with the support of the United Nations Environment Program and others, she launched another campaign, this time aspiring for a goal of a billion trees, called “Plant for the Planet.”
Her successes inspired 9-year-old Felix Finkbeiner, a fourth grader from Germany, who in 2007 declared to his class that children should plant a million trees in every country on Earth. “That was the biggest number I could come up with, or something,” Finkbeiner said in 2019.
After his class planted a crab apple tree outside their school and more and more people heard about his proposal, both in Germany and abroad, a children’s movement which was also called Plant for the Planet was formed.
In just three years, the movement planted a million trees. Soon after, Finkbeiner, just 13 years old at the time, spoke before the United Nations as a part of its International Year of Forests. “It is now time that we work together,” he said. “We combine our forces, old and young, rich and poor, and together we can plant a trillion trees.”
Soon after Maathai died in September, the United Nations transferred leadership of its Plant for the Planet to Finkbeiner’s. Soon, the campaign to plant a billion trees became a campaign to plant a trillion and was renamed the Trillion Tree Campaign.
At that time, nobody knew whether planting that many trees was possible. “There was very little information on those questions,” Finkbeiner said.
But Gregor Hintler, one of the founding members of the movement, happened to be the roommate of Thomas Crowther, who was doing postdoc work at the Yale School of Forestry.
After using a variety of methods including satellite images, artificial intelligence and extrapolation, they and a group of colleagues published their findings in the journal Nature, estimating that the earth contains around 3 trillion trees. As Hintler said, “We can now say there’s plenty of space.”
Many have undertaken the effort to plant trees as an easy way to help the environment, but there are a few flaws.
When Lalisa Duguma, an ecosystem-restoration expert based in Australia, went to middle school in western Ethiopia in the 1990s, the government would provide them with seedlings to plant every year. However, he recalls that the seedlings would die off every year.
“Every year we are going to the same place to do the same activity,” he says. “There is no change on the ground.” The fundamental problem was that not all places are ideal for trees, more so if compounded with the issue of neglect.
Karen Holl, a restoration ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests a conceptual shift. “We should be growing trees, not planting trees,” she says, “We need to think about whether those trees are surviving over time, because it’s going to take 10, 20 years, a century, before we really get the benefits that we want.”
There are many organizations and companies committed to planting trees. Amazon has pledged to donate a million dollars in $1 trees, while search engines like Ecosia use money from ad revenue and share it with planting partners.
Despite the effort, actually counting all the planted trees is a difficult and messy task. After being planted, many seedlings die from things like neglect, and many others are counted multiple times due to the complex relationship between different tree-planting organizations.
The directors of some of these organizations say that a trillion trees is merely a symbolic goal. “From our point of view, the trillion is aspirational,” Nicole Schwab, the executive director of 1t.org, says. “We need to be bold, to raise ambition, to put in a system where whatever is pledged is going to be monitored. To me, that’s more important than actually counting toward a trillion.”
But many scientists believe that restoring forests is not the catch-all answer to stopping climate change.
A group of Kalunga villagers hired by the California-based Eden Reforestation Projects trudged through a field of seedlings in an isolated region in the Brazilian state of Goiás on a recent morning in April. They claim to have planted around 30,000 trees in the past three weeks in a region where deforestation has been severely straining the livelihoods of the nearly 800 people living in the tiny village of Engenho and beyond.
The Kalunga are descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped to the Brazilian cerrado, a vast region of grasslands, savannas and open woodlands, many centuries ago. Tucked in a region of forbidding landscapes, they were isolated from the wider world until the 1980s. Soon after that, traditional building materials were replaced with clay tiles and bricks, and electricity arrived to the village, forever changing their lifestyle.
But then, Eden appeared in northern Goiás State, announcing its intent to plant trees, causing alarm among local conservationists. “They chose one of the most conserved areas in the cerrado to plant trees,” ecologist Natashi Pilon said. “You came to the wrong place,” added Rafael Oliveira, another ecologist.
On the contrary, Stephen Fitch, the founder of Eden, said that “the Kalunga had identified large areas of degraded forest in their territories that would benefit from Eden’s trees.”
This dispute is familiar for many. “There’s a peculiar forest fetish and obsession, which I think is traced back to Europe, possibly Germany,” says William Bond, professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Capetown, South Africa, who studies grasslands. “I think it’s a massive misunderstanding of the natural world.”
Amid the climate crisis of today, restoring forests is essential to avoiding a large-scale disaster. But refraining from planting trees where they aren’t supposed to grow is just as necessary to maintain a clean and healthy planet for future generations.
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/magazine/planting-trees-climate-change.html
