ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 41
In the rush to curb global warming, countries, corporations and communities have favored
planting trees as a concise, achievable and measurable action. However, the majority of tree
planting initiatives fail to recognize the intrinsic value of trees and their role as keystones of
global biodiversity, instead focusing solely on their usefulness as stores of carbon.2
When done correctly, planting more trees can be hugely beneficial for ecosystems and
communities, but it is not a panacea for all our environmental woes. Along with beach
cleanups, it has become an environmental shibboleth: a well-intentioned and widely
implemented, generally unquestioned practice that ultimately cannot be relied on to combat
an environmental crisis on a global scale.
As the ecologist and reforestation expert Thomas Crowther put it, “Restoration is not a silver
bullet. There is no silver bullet. It is just one of a huge portfolio of solutions that we so
desperately need.”
3
Tree planting as a strategy - what it means, and why it can’t be the only way
The basic idea behind the push for reforestation is that trees sequester carbon through
photosynthesis. During this process, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through
pores in their leaves, and release oxygen back into the atmosphere. This absorbed carbon is
transformed into woody fiber as the tree grows, essentially locking it away in the trees’
biomass and the surrounding soil. This ability to sequester carbon makes forests some of the
most effective carbon sinks. In theory, planting enough trees would counteract the warming
effect of carbon dioxide emissions and slow global warming.
This hope has firmly taken root in our societies, and it’s not difficult to understand why.
Planting a tree—or a hundred—is relatively easy and inexpensive to achieve. Activities like tree
planting and beach cleanups offer activists and communities a sense of achievement that is
exceedingly rare in other arenas of the climate movement: for instance, lobbying for fossil fuel
divestment or environmental policy reform. We would all like to believe that the solution to our
climate worries can be that simple. To an extent, this rhetoric may have been helpful in
creating momentum and sparking collective action at scale. Yet it belies the enormous
complexity of the issues at hand, and tends to promote measurements of success based
purely on statistics.
Reports and goals focus on figures above all else: numbers of saplings planted, their net
carbon capacity, and costs versus benefits. Yet these averages can hide nefarious truths. A
41
