Updated: Jun 16, 2023
Once inspired, always inspired. In 2007, when Felix Finkbeiner was in fourth grade, he suggested to his class that one million trees should be planted in every country by children. Finkbeiner’s proposal began to spread throughout Germany and soon grabbed the attention of outside countries.
Inspired by the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Recipient and professor of veterinary anatomy Wangari Maathai, Finkbeiner chased his goal to help the world. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, which began in the late 1970s and paid rural women to plant trees in their community. Maathai’s idea soon became prevalent in other countries, and according to her tree-count log, 30 million trees had been planted by the time she won the coveted award. In 2006, Maathai and the U.N. Environment Program initiated a campaign that promised to plant one billion trees known as Plant for the Planet.
After Finkbeiner’s suggestion spread across the globe, the goal to plant trees instigated a children’s movement also called Plant for the Planet. In 2010, Plant for the Planet rooted its one-millionth tree. In 2011, when Finkbeiner was 13, he spoke in front of the United Nations, establishing an end goal and advising everyone around the world to contribute to the widespread effort, saying “It is now time that we work together. We combine our forces, old and young, rich and poor, and together we can plant a trillion trees.”
After Maathai passed away that September, the U.N. handed the leadership of Maathai’s organization to Finkbeiner’s Plant for the Planet in December. A few years later, the campaign soon became known as the Trillion Tree Campaign.
Many organizations and campaign groups have been created to aim for the goal of planting more trees. Individual countries have also begun to participate in helping the environment. Canada pledged to root two billion trees across the country, and Saudi Arabia pledged to grow 10 billion trees.
In Engenho, Brazil, a village located in the northern part of Goiás State, men and women dig holes into the nutrient-rich ground and carefully insert each tree into its designated position. Damião Santos, the leader of the planting team said that over the past three weeks the group has planted around 30,000 trees.
Eden Reforestation Projects, based in California, recruited Santos and other villagers to plant trees because the organization believed that it would lower the poverty rate in Engenho while also reducing deforestation impacts and improving biodiversity and climate change.
However, people doubted the amount of space Earth still had to plant another one trillion trees. Gregor Hintler, a founding member of Plant for the Planet, asked Thomas Crowther, a postdoc researcher at Yale School of Forestry, to help investigate the lingering question.
In 2015, Hintler, Crowther, and a group of colleagues published their results in the journal Nature. They estimated that the Earth contained around three trillion trees and concluded that an estimated 15 billion trees were being deforested annually, forming a total loss of approximately 10 billion trees annually. Though the Nature study did not elaborate on whether the earth could fit another trillion trees, Hintler told journalists that “We can now say there’s plenty of space.”
The journey to reach 1 trillion trees may be difficult, but people all around the world are working to help fight and solve climate change by planting trees.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/magazine/planting-trees-climate-change.html
Once inspired, always inspired. In 2007, when Felix Finkbeiner was in fourth grade, he suggested to his class that one million trees should be planted in every country by children. Finkbeiner’s proposal began to spread throughout Germany and soon grabbed the attention of outside countries.
Inspired by the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Recipient and professor of veterinary anatomy Wangari Maathai, Finkbeiner chased his goal to help the world. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, which began in the late 1970s and paid rural women to plant trees in their community. Maathai’s idea soon became prevalent in other countries, and according to her tree-count log, 30 million trees had been planted by the time she won the coveted award. In 2006, Maathai and the U.N. Environment Program initiated a campaign that promised to plant one billion trees known as Plant for the Planet.
After Finkbeiner’s suggestion spread across the globe, the goal to plant trees instigated a children’s movement also called Plant for the Planet. In 2010, Plant for the Planet rooted its one-millionth tree. In 2011, when Finkbeiner was 13, he spoke in front of the United Nations, establishing an end goal and advising everyone around the world to contribute to the widespread effort, saying “It is now time that we work together. We combine our forces, old and young, rich and poor, and together we can plant a trillion trees.”
After Maathai passed away that September, the U.N. handed the leadership of Maathai’s organization to Finkbeiner’s Plant for the Planet in December. A few years later, the campaign soon became known as the Trillion Tree Campaign.
Many organizations and campaign groups have been created to aim for the goal of planting more trees. Individual countries have also begun to participate in helping the environment. Canada pledged to root two billion trees across the country, and Saudi Arabia pledged to grow 10 billion trees.
In Engenho, Brazil, a village located in the northern part of Goiás State, men and women dig holes into the nutrient-rich ground and carefully insert each tree into its designated position. Damião Santos, the leader of the planting team said that over the past three weeks the group has planted around 30,000 trees.
Eden Reforestation Projects, based in California, recruited Santos and other villagers to plant trees because the organization believed that it would lower the poverty rate in Engenho while also reducing deforestation impacts and improving biodiversity and climate change.
However, people doubted the amount of space Earth still had to plant another one trillion trees. Gregor Hintler, a founding member of Plant for the Planet, asked Thomas Crowther, a postdoc researcher at Yale School of Forestry, to help investigate the lingering question.
In 2015, Hintler, Crowther, and a group of colleagues published their results in the journal Nature. They estimated that the Earth contained around three trillion trees and concluded that an estimated 15 billion trees were being deforested annually, forming a total loss of approximately 10 billion trees annually. Though the Nature study did not elaborate on whether the earth could fit another trillion trees, Hintler told journalists that “We can now say there’s plenty of space.”
The journey to reach 1 trillion trees may be difficult, but people all around the world are working to help fight and solve climate change by planting trees.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/magazine/planting-trees-climate-change.html
