Green Is Beautiful!

MANILA: This is all about greening India, greening the Philippines, greening the world.

They did. The Indians broke the Guinness World Record in number of trees (seedlings) planted within 24 hours in one day, not 24 hours distributed over several days.

Early morning Sunday, New Year's Day 2017, I saw the EcoWatch post on Facebook with Katie Pohlman reporting on 800,000 Indians attempting to plant 50,000,000 trees to break the Guinness record of 847,275 trees set by Pakistanis in 2013 (12 July 2016, EcoWatch, ecowatch.com). Samantha Cole of Popular Science reported the exact numbers: more than 800,000 students, government officials and volunteers gathered in India's populous State of Uttar Pradesh and planted 49.3 million trees in 24 hours (14 July 2016, Popular Science, popsci.com).

Actually, breaking the Guinness was only part of the plan. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav told the people, "The world has realized that serious efforts are needed to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate the effects of global climate change." The massive initiative was meant to dramatize the need for immense tree planting to capture large amounts of carbon dioxide in the air that otherwise would add to the greenhouse gas layer in the atmosphere and increase the rate of climate change.

Ms Samantha said, "In India, air pollution kills more than half a million people per year. Planting saplings won’t cure the country’s air quality problem, but the volunteers hoped getting their hands dirty would raise awareness." I'm sure they did.

Ms Samantha also said, "The Indian government has designated $6.2 billion for states to start their own tree-planting drives." Now that deserves 2 new Guinness World Records, one the huge amount set aside for greening India, and the States being ordered to green their own lands with trees, and with a budget to boot.

But some people are not impressed. Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow of the Center for Global Development, said of it, as quoted by Adam Boult (15 July 2016, The Telegraph, telegraph.co.uk):

The biggest contribution of this tree planting project is, apart from the tokenism, that it focuses on the major issues. It addresses many of the big issues for India: pollution, deforestation, and land use.

To simplify this discussion, I shall now refer to the Indian initiative as the 50-Million Mission, because it is a Mission that is meant to help bring about the fulfilment of a Vision, which is Fresh Air India, if I may put it that way. The side comment "apart from the tokenism" is uncalled for. Mr Anit, himself an Indian, is dismissing as mere gimmick the planting of 50 million saplings as mere display or feel-good advertisement of the Indians' resolve to help reduce global warming. But I'm glad Mr Anit is also saying that the 50-Million Mission is focusing on the major issues of pollution, deforestation, and land use. Thus:

Pollution: As the saplings grow bigger, they will absorb more and more of the carbon dioxide in the air and turn it into wood. Brian Clark Howard says India has 6 of the most polluted cities in the world (18 July 2016, nationalgeographic.com). So, breaking the world record in planting trees is also breaking the world record in cities clearing their air.

Deforestation: You have to regrow trees where you have denuded the forest. There seems to be no other intelligent option.

Land use: You have to optimize the use of the land and not leave some abandoned or degraded. Having worked as a journalist in forest conservation some 36 years ago and never having stopped minding the trees for the forest, I know that they will help restore the wealth of any of the sites they are planted on as long as they are first assisted in surviving the initial unfavorable growing conditions.

The problem with a massive planting of seedlings like that is survival. Optimistically, I predict 10% will grow on and 90% will die out, or 5 million survivors as against 45 million seedlings or saplings.

Reforestation is not an easy job, and a quick job like that is a huge gamble.

I am quite familiar with deforestation vs reforestation, as I worked as the chief information officer of the Forest Research Institute, or FORI, for many years more than 40 years ago. FORI was for forest conservation. I founded 3 publications of FORI: the monthly newsletter Canopy, the quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and the quarterly popular magazine Habitat. To write for all those, I and my photography team visited natural forest stands as well as savaged forest lands from northern to southern Philippines, from Cagayan Valley to Cagayan De Oro City to Davao City. And, at that time, Secretary of Natural Resources Arturo "Bong" Tanco was already proclaiming about Philippine forests, that "We have reached the point of irreversible decline" (see my essay, "We Don't Need Forests Anymore!" 04 August 2016, Creative Thinkering, blogspot.com).

Which brings me back to India with its own forest woes and its Guinness accomplishment. Fourth-rate times call for first-rate measures. And back to the greening of the whole Philippines that I proposed a little more than 3 months ago (see my essay, "b2g: Bid-To-Goodbye World Vs Brown-To-Green Revolution" (02 October 2016, Common Cause, blogspot.com).

As I have proposed, greening the Philippines' 7,000 plus islands is as easy as ABC. The rallying cry "brown-to-green," or b2g, means turning all those brown spots to green by planting any species of your choice for your site: crop, vegetable, fruit tree, creeper, shrub, ornamental whatever. The point is to turn every spot of brown to a spot of beauty. And at this point in geological time, in the midst of climate change:

Green is beautiful!

And green is in everyone's hand.

Greening India is in the hands of the tree planters; greening America is the same story, wanting planters of trees – but there is a more intelligent and faster and inexpensive way of greening any country that has any soil, and it has not been considered until now, I mean after I wrote about it.

Greening the b2g way as I propose can be done anytime anywhere without the government spending any amount of money, except perhaps for publicity. And you don't need saplings or seedlings or cuttings or tissue-culture plantlets. Any seed is good enough. That point of b2g greening is simply to turn the brown to green, the bare soil to plants growing on it.

Each individual plant, whether a prized species or simply a grass, is a carbon sink, that is, one that captures the carbon dioxide from the air and through photosynthesis transforms it with sunlight and water into more of itself, growing and absorbing more of the carbon dioxide.

This is all fighting climate change with bare hands!

This is a revolutionary approach that does not require computer modelling or simulation or even monitoring – anyone can see what's happening and monitor the progress any time of night and day.

And I'm sure the results will be felt in the cool air within the week or the next if the plantings are seedlings, saplings or plantlets.

I said this is the b2g or Brown-to-Green Revolution, meaning that you change the brown soil to green vegetation.

The b2g Revolution helps resolve global warming in 2 ways:

(1)     b2g immediately cools the soil and surrounding air of a whole town, province or island.

(2)     b2g immediately absorbs carbon dioxide in the surrounding air in a massive way, as massive as the plantings.

Cooling the air
There is a prior step you can do to immediately cool the surrounding air, as well as insure the growth of the plants. This is to brown the brown, and gray the brown. To brown, cover the brown soil with fresh vegetative matter or crop refuse that will decay later and enrich the soil. To gray, cover the soil with already decayed organic matter or compost. In the first case, the undecomposed matter will immediately shield the soil from the heat of the sun, so that there is neither heat absorbed nor reflected by the ground. In the second case, the decomposed matter will not only shield the soil from the sun but also almost immediately moisten the ground because it contains humus, which can contain 20 times its weight in water.

Absorbing carbon dioxide
The leaves of those seedlings, saplings or plantlets will immediately absorb carbon dioxide in a massive way, as they are planted all over town, city, province and country. The world doesn't need mature trees to make a carbon sink. Any plant is a carbon sink; multiply that by the millions, by cities, by states, by countries and we will have a beautiful green Earth!

And the climate skeptics will be damned. @

09 January 2017. Essay word count, excluding this line. 1459