Planting Trees

There is no law that says we can’t plant trees in the most arid conditions on the planet, if we spend enough time and money to get seedlings safely in the ground and prevent them from perishing from dehydration under the heat of the sun.  Linked above is a system that promises to do precisely this.

According to these folks, for each infant tree to be planted, we need to a) dig a pit the volume of a few basketballs, b) insert a round piece of fabricated cardboard the size of a huge bundt cake pan (see screen shot), c) insert a device that blocks most incoming sunlight and protects against hungry birds, d) pour in 25 liters of water, e) place a cover on top to slow its evaporation of water, and f) hope, without evidence, that most of these trees take root.

Again, there is no rule preventing our doing this, if we don’t have a problem paying hundreds of dollars for each of the billions of new trees we’ll need to absorb the huge levels of CO2 we’re emitting.

Yet maybe we should think about this for a moment.  All that’s required to regrow forests, (“aforestation,” the opposite of “deforestation”) in every temperature zone other than the “frigid” and the “desert,” 80+% of the Earth’s land mass, is that we show some modest level of environmental responsibility.  Trees grow like weeds in these regions if we can simply stop our greediest corporations in their quest to ravage our planet in search of profit dollars.

The United States now has 4% of the trees that were here when the Europeans arrived.  The Amazon rainforest is losing the area of a championship golf course every 15 minutes.

It just needs to cease.