PLANTING TREES
Our Planet's environmental health is at a crucial tipping point. That fact barely needs to be stated. Anyone coming to this page is well aware of it. Unfortunately that awareness isn't enough. Our actions and our collective consciousness must change in order to sustain a healthy life for us all.
What can I do? Is one of our most common questions. The answers likely reach to the sky, but here on this site I offer one near and dear to my heart. PLANT SOME TREES--A LOT OF TREES
80,000 acres of trees are destroyed EVERY DAY and 80 percent of the worlds forests are gone.
Not breathing is the quickest way to end life. Trees are the lungs of our planet. Not to mention how they maintain its soil, it's animal life, and it's temperature. They work like the medicine needed to restore health to a body.
The thing is, it FEELS AWESOME TO PLANT TREES. The connection you make to the earth feels alive and powerful. Grounded couldn't be a better term and if you read at least a little of the page below you'll discover that by partnering with TREES FOR THE FUTURE---
We aren’t just planting trees. We’re changing lives through regenerative agriculture.
Thank you so much for sharing this with me. Ray McD.
The following is taken directly from the TREES FOR THE FUTURE site
The Problem
We lose trees at a rate of 50 soccer fields per minute as our food systems destroy our ecosystems. Most of this degradation occurs in the developing tropics of Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia where hundreds of millions of chronically-hungry, smallholder farming families use destructive and short-sighted agricultural practices that further degrade their communities trees, soil, water and biodiversity, making them even more likely to migrate and more vulnerable to the climate changes that lie ahead.
Our Solution
The Forest Garden Program is a simple, replicable and scalable approach with proven success. We train farmers over a four year period to sustainably revitalize their land. We provide all of the training, seeds, tools, and materials. The farmers come prepared with their own land and ready to change their family’s life. Through our Forest Garden Approach, farmers plant thousands of trees that protect and bring nutrients back to the soil. This helps farmers grow a variety of fruits and vegetables. Forest Garden farmers gain increases in income and food security, even in the first year.
ENDING HUNGER
Our latest data indicates that the Forest Garden Approach ends hunger for most families after the first year. Only 13% of our project participants were food secure when they joined the program, and after just 12 months of planting Forest Gardens, 86% of our farmers aren't worried about going to bed hungry.
ENDING POVERTY
Through the Forest Garden Approach, we are impacting the lives of their farmers and children, resulting in positive impacts for over 28,000 people so far. A total of 82% of our farmers have seen significant income increases and more than 92% now feeling capable to brace for any unforeseen circumstances the future may bring.
ENDING DEFORESTATION
By decreasing the use of destructive farming practices such as burning, clearing and plowing, Forest Gardens reduce deforestation by eliminating farmers' dependence on forests for food, timber, and many other non-timber forest products. The positive environmental impacts of a Forest Garden are endless.
A few more questions answered from the TREES FOR THE FUTURE site
How exactly do trees help people?
There are many ways that trees are beneficial to both people and the environment: Trees are habitat for biodiversity; Trees create much of the planet’s oxygen; and, Trees help combat climate change – the list is nearly limitless, but we focus on the role trees play in agroforestry and in helping farming families improve their land quality and productivity.
Agroforestry integrates trees into agriculture and landscapes, a model that is particularly appropriate for resource poor farmers in developing countries. In addition to providing fruits, berries, and nuts, trees provide environmental services that are essential for families in the developing world: they can improve the fertility of degraded soils (through nitrogen fixation), prevent wind and soil erosion (thereby also contributing to improved fertility), increase water penetration into underground aquifers, and contribute to improvements in the growing environment. Trees help to lessen the wind that might affect crops, cool off ground temperatures, and trap moisture and nutrients in the soil so that food crops grow better in the improved microclimate.
Trees also provide fodder for animals, create living fences, and can be a source of sustainable fuelwood production. (Yes – some of these trees are cut for fuelwood, but these are trees that coppice well – meaning they will grow back year after year when they are properly cared for.)
Is a Forest Garden like permaculture?
You may know Forest Gardens by other names, such as polyculture, permaculture, agroforestry, or something else – and these are all related and good descriptions of what we aim for – a multi-layered, multi purpose distribution of vegetables, bushes, and lots of trees – designed to optimize productivity of a piece of land. It is a farming system that thinks vertically, not just horizontally.
Forest gardens stand in stark contrast to modern industrial agriculture which encourages farmers to plant one or few crops. Time and time again, we find monocultures to be chemical-intensive, environmentally-destructive, and deadly to biodiversity and long-term human prosperity.
You just plant indigenous trees, right?
No. In the degraded and deforested zones where we operate, we cannot simply plant the types of trees that used to be there. As trees are lost, the growing conditions on a piece of land change. The trees that once stood there cannot regrow in harsh, direct sunlight. We have to find other trees with pioneer qualities that tolerate harsh, full sunlight and arid conditions. After the pioneer species begin to cool the land and improve soil quality we have more success growing a diverse array of fruit trees and hardwoods. There are times when the best pioneer trees for a given landscape and climate are not native, but they are generally naturalized, meaning they already exist and grow in that country.
For us, the primary concern is not indigenous vs. non-native, but rather, of invasiveness. Whether a species is invasive or not is a complex issue; the same species may or may not be considered invasive, depending on local environmental conditions. We work with local forestry specialists and the communities themselves to identify appropriate trees species for each place we operate.
Further, many of the most economically beneficial species can be both non-native and non-invasive. For example, we plant many orange, mango, and banana trees every year at some of our project sites in Africa, even though they are not indigenous.
I am so grateful to have discovered the TREES FOR THE FUTURE organization and to be able to be in partnership and inspire others to take part. If you're interested in learning more about them CLICK HERE to explore their site.
Thanks again Ray McDaniel
Now LET'S GO PLANT SOME TREES
