I asked the heads of three trillion tree organizations if anyone worldwide kept track of how many trees had been planted, or how many were still alive—if we could, in fact, tell when we planted the goal of a trillion trees. They all said no — and that planting a trillion trees wasn’t the goal at all. Nicole Schwab, the executive director of 1t.org, told me that her organization aims to “preserve, restore and grow” a trillion trees. It would be both impossibly complex and misguided to reduce the performance of the myriad organizations and individuals that make up the movement to a single figure, she says. “From our point of view, the trillion is ambitious,” Schwab says. “We have to be brave, increase ambition, put in place a system where everything that is pledged will be checked. To me, that’s more important than actually counting for a trillion.” John Lotspeich, the executive director of Trillion Trees, the partnership between the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society and BirdLife International, told me the goal is to protect existing forests, address the root causes of deforestation and restore degraded landscapes. . While that may involve planting some trees, he says, “our three organizations haven’t been trying to find a free field somewhere and put some trees there.”
The third attempt at a trillion trees, Plant-for-the-Planet — still led by Felix Finkbeiner, who helped kick off the race to a trillion trees with his 2011 speech at the UN — in turn showed what seemed like a great total. website, a chart of more than 13 billion trees planted by groups around the world. Sometime in the past year, the chart was removed. Finkbeiner, now studying for a Ph.D. in soil microbiology in Thomas Crowther’s lab, remains excited about the global movement. But the straightforward pitch of his youth is now fraught with caveats and subtleties. “We would probably prefer to think of ourselves as a forest restoration movement rather than a tree planting movement,” he told me. “I think this frame of trillions of trees still makes perfect sense because it gives people a rough idea of the magnitude of the restoration potential. It’s clear, simple and compelling.”
The race for a trillion trees may continue to motivate donors, but Finkbeiner says his organization is no longer focused on counting trees. Ultimately, he believes the movement’s success or failure in restoring the world’s forests will not be judged by the number of trees planted, but by satellite imagery, viewed over the long term and discussed in the old-fashioned way. way – in hectares.
on that April In the morning, as Eden’s team of tree planters continued to turn the field in Engenho into a future forest, Damião Santos drove me and two visiting Eden employees to his vision of what that forest could look like. A few miles south of the village we parked at the edge of the red dirt road and crossed another brushy area, following muddy tire tracks. At the edge of the field, the open landscape suddenly changed to towering forest, a mix of hardwoods and buriti palms, with dense undergrowth and draped vines. Water gathered between the roots and dripped from a nearby spring. Santos bent down to pick up a freshly germinated seed. He rolled it in his hands. When scientists said people shouldn’t plant trees in Brazil’s cerrado, he said, they were talking about grasslands and savannas, ignoring the scattered areas of dense forest like this one. These patches also needed to be patched, he said. That meant planting trees. Anyway, the opinions of outside scientists were secondary – the Kalunga wanted the trees and it was their land.
Later that day, in Engenho, I watched Eden Reforestation employees carefully count piles of trees, working to provide the raw numbers that would eventually contribute to the steadily climbing number of trees on Eden’s website. These trees had already fulfilled one of the promises of the tree-planting movement, which was to provide work for people in a place with few economic opportunities. It would take much longer to see whether the trees, which were really just seeds and seedlings, would grow into the forest Santos envisioned and bring the expected benefits to the local environment, or whether they and all the billions or dozens billions of other seeds and seedlings that Eden and other groups planted around the world would survive long enough to have any meaningful impact on biodiversity or the global carbon cycle. As a solution to the world’s most pressing problems, the trees seemed both clearly useful and hopelessly insecure. Even as countries, companies and individuals spend billions of dollars to fund tree planting projects around the world, much about the trees themselves must be believed in faith.
The tree-planting visionaries, the company founders and the employees I spoke to insisted that they had learned the lessons of past failures, that they had reversed their boldest claims, that they understood that planting trees was just one of the many solutions needed . “We know how complicated it is,” said Jad Daley, the CEO of American Forests. “We know we need to get the science right, especially in a changing climate. They say, ‘If you’re focused on a trillion trees, then you’re not focused on these details of ecologically appropriate, climate-informed, community-based reforestation,’ which is factually incorrect. To be honest, it’s infuriating.” Maxime Renaudin, the founder of Tree-Nation, agrees. The tree-planting movement is working towards greater accountability and transparency, he says. “It’s more important that we make a few mistakes than do nothing ” he says, referring to the broader movement. “We are talking about an urgent problem. Our focus should not be on perfection.”