The Green Old Deal

For enjoyment and adventure, I have hiked across parts of the arctic ocean, the tundra, above the tree-line in the mountains, along beaches of many oceans, and through fields of wildflowers. My favorite hiking, though, is the forest. Maybe I am guilty of a little magical thinking.  The trees are, in my imagination, my friends who line the path of my life shading me from the sun and sheltering me from cold winds.

But is my imagination more real than imaginary? Trees, after all, give us oxygen, filter our water, cool and moisten the air, enrich our soils, provide elements of essential medicines, and are the livelihoods for 1.6 billion people.

In the fight to prevent runaway warming the tree is our best ally. It is the “Green Old Deal”. A tree can store up to 48 pounds of carbon per year. Thus, by aggressively promoting trees, woods, and forests, we can convert 37% of the excess carbon dioxide to wood.

Just a note here to bring us back to reality. If you drive round trip from Wakefield to Duluth, (200 miles) and you get 33 miles per gallon from your Honda, you will burn about six gallons of gas. Six burnt gallons of gas create 48 pounds of carbon dioxide because each gallon of gas, burned, produces 8 pounds of carbon dioxide. Even though I always promote planting trees, no amount of magical thinking should trick us into thinking we can solve the climate crisis without transitioning to non-carbon forms of energy. There is no way we can plant that many trees.

Back to our friends in the forest. Is it time we turn some of our efforts and our treasure to helping our friends? World-wide we need to stop deforestation, start reforesting degraded lands, and investigate the afforestation of lands that have been over-looked as potential forests.

Many studies indicate we need to intelligently intermix trees into our agricultural communities to protect the land from erosion and to strengthen the soil health and reduce our use of chemicals.  Additionally, we know rain events will become more intense threatening soil erosion that trees prevent. These efforts are called agro-forestry and tree intercropping.

Even more studies show that pasture land is more productive, economically diverse, and stable if trees are wisely chosen and interspersed across the pasture.  This is called silvo-pasture. This is almost a no-brainer in animal husbandry because, in a warming world, we know that heat waves are not an “if” event but a “when” event. Shade will not be something nice for our animals, but life-saving.

The first step in taming rapid climate change is taming ourselves. Can we look inside our-selves and prioritize rationally? Where do we want to spend our money? What are the biggest threats?

The world spends 1.2 Trillion dollars on weapon systems each year. This is a lot of money devoted to killing each other efficiently and in great numbers. These weapons, luckily, are rarely used and eventually end up stored somewhere. When they are obsolete, they become expensive junk.

It is estimated that if we, that is world-wide humanity, could motivate our leaders to spend 4% of that 1.2 Trillion, and divert it to nurturing our forest friends, the trees, we could store that 37% of excess carbon into something life giving and profitable. Something we call wood.

While we try to rationally evaluate the Green New Deal and its potential to save our climate, let’s not forget that we can do a lot better at something already given us by the Good Lord, the Green Old Deal.

This column, in large part, comes from the Scientific American article by Hans de Groot, the CEO of The Rainforest Alliance with additional information from the book, Drawdown.

Drawdown has 104 chapters, which are more like 104 super-charged short stories. If you want a base-camp or jumping off point to learn about how mother earth works, buy this book.

My favorite read of the year was, “The Hidden Life of Trees” by  Peter Wohlleben.  It was chapter after chapter of astonishment.

One book I have not read but has tremendous reviews by its readers and the authors of Drawdown, is “The Hidden Half of Nature”. In case you didn’t know it, the agricultural corporate race today is not to find the next chemical.  It is to understand, patent, and commercialize microbiological solutions.