Planting a tree is as easy as planting a tiny seed in the ground. What all these headlines omit is that the majority of things planted won't survive. My back yard has a few thousand tree seedlings growing in it naturally.
When we hear of tree planting we picture a mayor or rich person planting a four year old tree in a park. The reality is that trees grow from seed.
In the case of commercial forestry all the trees planted won't make it.
A better vision of tree planting is Johnny Appleseed.
Edits. The Twitter from the Ethiopian minister says tree seedlings.
> When we hear of tree planting we picture a mayor or rich person planting a four year old tree in a park. The reality is that trees grow from seed.
Yeah but trees are hardline r-strategists and produce millions of disposable seeds with a very low survival rate. Planting a seed is in no way equivalent to planting a germinated, sprouted, and developed seedling.
The article gives no details but I'd look to see how many things are planted from seed in a nursery each day to at least get an indication of the number of things which can be "planted" in a given day.
Many trees could be said to have been planted by someone scattering apple seeds out of their pockets.
The article says something about 40 trees planted by each citizen... so I'm guessing this 350 M batch was distributed equally to everyone they could reach.
It does seem quite a bit, furiouspete talked about jobbing as a student in reforestation in Canada (his shrooms video) and apparently if you are quick you go through 4k a day per person a 12h shift.
Even 200 seeds per hour would require ~145,000 participants to plant all 350M seeds in a 12 hr time frame. I’m literally just imagining a few guys with a leaf blower and a bag of seeds for how they got 350M in 12 hours haha.
Not the worst way to teach kids a bit about how to nurture their environment. The absolute worst case here is a bunch of kids learning stuff and applying it later in their life. The best case is that and some meaningful percentage of these trees actually survives and helps restore a bit of land. Sounds like an interesting example to follow elsewhere. There's no shortage of recently arified land across the world.
I think there are a lot of countries finding out that they are not passive participants in the curve balls nature is throwing them and that they can influence what happens with simple, low tech solutions like planting trees and taking care of them and maybe a few simple changes in behavior like keeping sheep and cattle away from volatile areas.
