Trees can save us
Benno Hansen, website "climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu", December 11, 2009
"All four elements are created by plant systems," said Tony Andersen of Permakultur Danmark at the "10,000 trees" talk at Klimaforum09 Thursday the 10th of December. While perhaps it's a bit non-scientific to speak about the elements I bascially rationalized by the same logic when I signed up for my horticulture studies: I'd realized that photosynthesis is the single most important process on the planet. All productivity depends on this plant chemistry miracle.
More about Tony's 10,000 trees below. The core lesson is: Plants are the key to the climate crisis. And not just the ones we eat. This isn't a controversial postulate by fringe ecologists like the people in the permaculture movement. It's logic. And it was detailed in The Natural Fix? - The Role of Ecosystems in Climate Mitigation, a June 2009 UNEP report.
"Currently the world's ecosystems, instead of maintaining and enhancing nature's carbon capture and storage capacity, are being depleted at an alarming rate." - Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UNEP
Our ecosystems currently store about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere does; mostly in tropical and boreal forests. Among the key messages from that report are the need to halt deforestation and for policies to be guided by ecologic science. But it's a rather complicated matter.
Economic models that tries to add the value of forests into the equation repeatedly turn out numbers that dwarf the recent financial crisis when estimating the costs of deforestation. Because forests serve so many purposes: desertification control, gene pool, carbon sequestration, humus production, water purification, building materials etc, etc.
Bialowieza
I recently travelled to the Polish Bialowieza National Park which is a temperate forest. I'd read about the dropping ground water level there resulting in a decline in the number of spruce trees (see Cimate change clouds fate of ancient Polish woods). A guide there explained this:
He also told us that only some of their elm trees had died from the recent northward spread of bark disease brough by a beetle. In the parks of Denmark elm trees are pretty much gone now. But the Bialowieza elms had the genetic diversity and resiliency to survive.
Out in the forests, the wild animals didn't exactly parade in front of me. But there is a breeding station with a mini-zoo where one can go and see some fenced in wolves, lynx and bison. At the depth of crisis for the bison population only two males were left. If not for the breeding programme and the forest conservation I wouldn't have been able to shoot this short video of a grazing European bison. Because they would have been extinct.
So, thank you Poland for protecting the bison and its forest. Could you please follow up with some action at COP15 too?
10,000 trees
There is one sad thing about the Bialowieza forest, though: It can't move. As climate changes, those old trees are feeling the heat. Perhaps soon they'd really like to move a couple of hundred kilometers north. But trees don't have feet.
Some other species do. Or they have wings like the butterlies who have their own little specially protected reserve in the forest. But what if the butterflies start flying north? Should the reserve move along? What if there is a factory where they want to live? This type of thing isn't happening on a drastic level just yet, but it could very well do soon enough.
Tony and the permaculture movement are thinking about this issue.
"When I started doing permaculture we were always looking for native species. Now we are looking for species from south Germany."
- Tony Andersen
"We are the midwives of the forests of the future."
- American permaculturalist, guest at 10,000 trees
The meeting had forest crazy participants from India, Malawi, the USA, Central America... Denmark, of course, Sweden, Slovenia... and no doubt as many more other countries. People got so excited talking to each other about trees Tony had to schedule a follow up meeting!
The Permaculture TV cooperative YouTube channel put up recordings of Tony talking at the meeting. So, instead of believing me, you can hear him for yourself. There is also some discussion about a different sort of carbon tax going on. Enjoy...
Plant a tree? That was the 80ies. According to permaculture, now we need to plant 10,000 trees each!
Benno Hansen, Copenhagen, Denmark Patent Assistant
Write Your opinion / comment / idea to the Website's Forum