Planting trees: yes, it actually helps

[openspace4life]

There's an idea floating around that planting a bunch of trees will do nothing to solve the climate crisis, because any carbon sequestered by the trees gets released again when they die. This is silly for two reasons, the more obvious and minor of which is that trees live a long time, so at least that's some carbon we don't have to worry about until much later.

But of course I like to think long-term, so what about that later? The answer is simple if you pull back from those individual trees to look at the big picture. Think of the world in terms of big carbon reservoirs: the atmosphere, all the forests, all the crop fields, the oceans, and so on. Then planting a bunch of trees increases the size of one carbon reservoir (forests or tree farms) at the expense of another (the atmosphere). Those trees require area to grow on, which means the more trees you plant, the more area you're giving over to trees in general. And (here's the key point) once that area is being used for trees, more trees will be planted (or grow on their own) as older ones die. The carbon reservoir's size will be "permanently" larger.

Of course, the quote marks are there because someone might later knock down the forest or tree farm to build a housing development or freeway bypass. But think of it this way: there's a battle going on between those who want to increase and decrease the size of the carbon reservoirs represented by land plants, and planting some trees in an area that previously had none is a victory for our side.

For those who prefer compromise, there are "urban forests" of roadside trees, or more progressively, rooftop gardens (which can include small trees). Imagine a city with one on every roof: something like 90% of the original surface area of whatever ecosystem the city replaced is now green again -- the area just got lifted to sit on top of buildings and help keep them cool.

P.S. Check out Strong Bad's take on the environment, featuring the GreenCheat laptop charging system -- then take a look at the real-life $100 XO laptop which can actually be recharged using muscle power! (I chose that site for the hand-crank picture; here's the One Laptop Per Child homepage.)

Comments

[amentiblue.livejournal.com]

very cool ideas =)