There have been comments on my enthusiastic “Trees to the Rescue,” also comments on the Guardian article I was quoting. Some of these, I thought, were redundant. Trees should not be planted on wetlands and peat bogs, which also absorb and store carbon – well, of course. Completing the planting of a trillion trees could take a century – well, we said so. Saving the planet this way would probably cost more than the minimum rate of 30 cents per tree, therefore more than $300 billion (£240 billion) – well, we said so. But, as Geoff Meaden pointed out, the cost of replacing the Trident submarine nuclear weapon system (consider by many to be a waste of money) is £205 billion.
Many times greater would be the cost of abandoning most of New York city, London, Venice, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities to a world ocean three meters higher, as it will be if the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses, or tens of meters higher, as it was the last time there was as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is now, three million years ago.
The trillion added trees would remove two hundred billion tonnes of that gas from the air.
Amd they would restore more than a tenth of the planet’s land surface to its natural state. And a great deal more could also return to nature, if vertical farming makes it unnecessary to use vast areas for monoculture farming.
When I mentioned vertical farming a couple of years ago, my friend by correspondence Néli Busch, an Amnesty International activist in France, with whom I almost always agreed, objected, because she believes in smallholding – sustainable farming on a personal scale, which she practises herself. She perhaps saw vertical farming as a sinister industrial technology. I would answer that smallholding is very compatible with vertical farming. If vast areas of countryside become no longer needed for industrial agriculture, there would be plenty of space available for smallholdings – more than there is now.
I think we do have permission to hope for a future in which humanity’s cities and villages, like those of ants and termites, nestle in a natural landscape. They would still be connected by highways – or moving pavements, or whatever are the better transportation corridors that will be invented – but, with vertical farming, these highways would be free of our enormous fleets of food-transporting vehicles.
We think of the space between our towns as “countryside.” But most of it consists of fields. It’s an artificial landscape. It’s been “cleaared.”
England’s Dartmoor, Exmoor, and Lakeland mountains are classified as, and are, “Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.” But they were not always open moorland. The clearing of their forests began in the Neolithic age, typically by fire, to make space for agriculture and for sheep.
The same applies to many other lands, such as those around the Mediterranean, converted from forest to scrubland by generations of goats. The legends of the Greek heroic age are set among forests, not the bare mountains of modern Greece. A famous book, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a study of myths and religions and a seminal work for anthropology, starts with the strange story of the ritual King of the Woods, who haunted the forest around the Lacus Nemorensis, the lake of the nemus or sacred grove, now called the Lago di Nemi, south of Rome. I’ve cycled along the bare hillside around that lake.
Nemi
The islands of humanity in a green world of the future will not be isolated from each other, but we can hope that they too could be less monocultural. Anthony Barreiro noticed my mention of “civilizations” in the plural. Ever since studying anthropology I’ve been concerned with human variety.
The fate of the present world’s remaining forests is bound up with the fate of the tribal peoples who have adapted to living in them without destroying them. As ranchers and mining and logging companies clear the forests at a hideously rapid rate, the indigenous peoples try to fight back, are destroyed by firearms or unfamiliar diseases or are forced into the miserable underclasses of the outer world.
This destruction is being speeded by the man elected to power over the world’s largest rainforest: Bolsonaro, who declares “the Amazon is ours” and calls the satellite photos of deforestation “lies.” There is at least some growing resistance among Brazilians.
We have added to our Ready-Made Human Rights Letters web page an easy email action to take for the indigenous peoples of the South American forests.
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Thank you Guy. I need encouragement these days. A realistic vision of a better world and practical steps in that direction are helpful in keeping despair at bay.
I never heard of moving pavements but I like the people movers at airports. Walking fast on them gives me the sensation of flying. Teleportation (Beam me up, Scotty) would be an ideal form of travel but I doubt it’ll ever work. Nanotechnology shows some promise of creating food on demand. If perfected it would decrease the need for food transport.
Indeed. We can stop our headlong rush to mass suicide voluntarily, or we can just wait for the Earth to flick us off. Either way, the rest of Nature will be able to thrive once more. It would be nice to witness the reconstruction instead of the inevitable conclusion of the destruction.