There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
The last post was the bad news. Now, the good news. We don't have to sit back in our seats on Spaceship Earth feeling bad; we can work for change. Scientists have moved on and so should we. They realize that it's too late to reduce carbon before climate change increases and it's time to work on mitigating it. Many have come to understand that we can work to make the Earth stronger and more resilient to face whatever's coming.
In the coming years, we're going to hear more about Climate Change Mitigation, Climate Change Adaptation, and Restoration Ecology. Many mitigation, adaptation, and restoration projects are already going on in places around the world. In today's post, I'm going to look at restoring, what I call, traumatized landscapes. Another term for these landscapes is degraded. All around the world, forests have been cut down and replaced by agricultural, industrial, and urban landscapes. The photo above, shows one such landscape in Rajasthan, India. In Rajasthan, so many trees have been cut, that women must spend the better part of the day gathering firewood. The women above have to walk one hour each way to get to an area with any wood left - and from the looks of the loads they're carrying, those trees left must be pretty small.
Reforestation is an important part of Restoration Ecology
Planting trees is often a key part of restoring degraded landscapes. Planting trees in our own communities or yards (gardens) is a good place to start. However, where trees are desperately needed are in places like Africa, China, and South America. A tree planted in a rain forest is also worth more - ecologically speaking - than one planted in a temperate forest. Although there has been some debate about the ability to restore landscapes it has become generally accepted that restoration ecology is a win-win situation for everyone involved: included the restored ecosystem.
My Father-in-law's Story
My father-in-law grew up in a degraded landscape in the Saginaw Valley of Michigan. The Saginaw Valley had been clearcut in the nineteenth century, with the exception of a few stands of mature forest in difficult to reach areas. By the 1920s, when my father-in-law was growing up, few trees had been replanted and the landscape was taken up by marginal agriculture and littered with huge pine stumps. Forest fires had come through more than once during the late nineteenth and twentieth century burning second-growth forest. My father-in-law - Albert Augustine or A.A. - bought a 93 acre farm in the early 1940s. The farm, much of which had sandy soil, had about three trees growing on it, including a beautiful maple that's still there today. Sometime in the early 1940s, the Civilian Conservation Corps began giving out free pine seedlings and over the course of about a decade, A.A. planted 15,000 trees. He had no means to water the trees, so some years most survived and some years, few. By the time I met my husband in the mid-70s, A.A. had his own forest of about 30 acres of white and red pine. It was a beautiful place and, as the trees grew, he also transplanted orchids from areas slated for construction and soon birds and deer began to come back into the area. His final project - and one that has thrived beyond his wildest dreams - was reintroducing wild turkeys. In a way, you could say that my father-in-law was practicing restoration ecology, albeit in a rather crude form. The vacant land that was once filled with only burned stumps became a forest, not as diverse as the one it replaced, but a forest nonetheless. Seeing that forest always makes me smile and think fondly about my father-in-law and his belief in restoring landscapes.
Next time, some exciting reforestation projects and how you can support them. Meanwhile, here's an inspirational video about climate change and reforestation.
