- This elm tree is 300 years old.
It's the oldest tree in Manhattan.
And in its lifetime, it's captured nine tons of carbon.
My carbon footprint last year was about 16 tons of carbon.
So if this 300-year-old elm tree
can't even sequester one year of my carbon footprint,
is it really worth it to plant a ton of trees
to reverse climate change?
Trees, they regularly make headlines
as a savior for climate change.
Whether it's articles arguing
that planting one trillion trees
could sequester all our carbon emissions,
or YouTubers raising money to plant over 20 million trees,
there is no shortage of news
about the potential salvation trees can provide.
But is planting trees all it's cracked up to be?
Or is this an overblown promise to generate headlines
and unrealistic hope?
To find out, I'm gonna talk to experts
with different perspectives on this question
to understand, "Can planting trees
reverse the climate crisis?"
I'm Lucy Biggers, and this is "One Small Step."
(upbeat music)
The carbon-capture promise of trees is simple biology.
During photosynthesis, trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere
and use carbon to build their branches, leaves, and roots.
This is made out of carbon.
Then the trees release oxygen. (exhales)
And as we all know, because of human activity
and the burning of fossil fuels,
there is too much CO2 in our atmosphere
and it's heating up our planet.
So it's quite logical that planting more CO2-sucking trees
could balance out our carbon balance sheet.
And forests are already doing this for us.
Annually, US forest lands sequester about 14%
of our economy-wide carbon emissions.
Even though there's a ton of hype around tree planting,
deforestation hasn't stopped.
Just ask professor Myron Dewey
of the Walker River Paiute Tribe.
(Myron speaking in paiute)
- My name is Myron Dewey,
and my Paiute name is Strong Thinker.
- [Lucy] Myron Dewey is a professor, filmmaker,
and founder of Digital Smoke Signals,
an Indigenous community journalism
and social media platform.
Myron has used his drone to document the deforestation
of the sacred Tu'ba'pe pine nut forest
near his reservation in Western Nevada since 2013.
These forests are now on US public lands,
and managed by the US Forest Service,
which has clear cut several areas over the last decade.
The forests that have been cut down
are part of the historic sacred harvesting sites
of the Paiute Shoshone tribes.
- The pine nut tree has a lot of significance,
not just to our Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe relatives.
It's shared traditional resources,
but also with the ecosystem all around it,
the wind, the natural law, the real basic things,
the moisture in the air, 'cause those trees hold moisture.
We're seeing the change from not just the land,
but the wildlife fires, and the precipitation
in those areas, snowfall in those areas,
there's a lot changing.
The birds aren't coming back in certain areas.
- [Lucy] Using Google Earth Timelapse,
you can see from 2006 to 2018,
there's been a significant proportion of deforestation
that's happened in this area.
- [Myron] So we're looking at something
that feeds the birds, the different animals
that come through when they hit the ground.
We have ceremonies around it.
We have baskets, willow baskets, that clean the pine nuts.
We have pine nut soup.
Pine nuts are used all over the United States
and the world in salads.
Americans are eating our traditional foods,
but we still harvest them.
When we go out and we manage the land,
we acknowledge the land knowledge,
we acknowledge our ancestors prior to us to most areas.
That's why we know when it's just we come back to an area,
and it's a harvesting area, and it's gone,
it's devastating spiritually, mentally, physically.
Now that we have a Native American
in the Department of Interior overseeing these public lands,
it's gonna be real interesting to see will we have a say
over our own traditional harvesting areas now.
I think that the Indigenous people, the elders that we have
would like to see some wellbeing
come back into the community.
We've got so many fights.
We don't get to be a part of that discussion.
And then to say, "No, that's not good.
Yes, that's good."
And that's what we're struggling with.
- Myron's experience highlights the importance
of consulting with Indigenous communities
before undertaking a project like planting a trillion trees.
And even if those trees were planted tomorrow,
it would take decades for a pine nut tree to reach maturity.
In addition to the significant cultural
and historical heritage that's lost
when these trees are cut down,
research has shown intact forests sequester more carbon
than planting new trees.
So the first and most important step
is decreasing deforestation and protecting existing forests.
But even if we stopped cutting forest down tomorrow,
there are still forest fires
and they're getting more extreme.
By one estimate, an average of 7 million acres of forests
burn in wildfires in the US each year.
That's an area larger than the state of Massachusetts.
So what's the best way to replace the forests we're losing?
- We need something that is able to address
that reforestation debt and that backlog,
and we need something that's to be able to be fast.
- That's Grant Canary, the founder of Droneseed,
a startup that uses drones to spread tree seeds
and reforest land devastated by wildfires.
They also took part
in the recent high-profile TEAMTREES program.
And why can't we just leave the forest alone?
How do we know that we're not doing more harm than good
by putting the seeds in there
when you know forests are an ecosystem
that knows how to recover from a fire?
- What we see is 7 million acres burn.
Our maximum capacity to grow seedlings is maybe three,
maybe 4 million acres, best case.
That's if everybody is at 100%.
So seven minus four,
we got 3 million acres that nature has to take care of.
Now, fast forward 10 years,
we're seeing more and more moderate to high severity fires,
that 10-year rolling average is 10 million, 15 million.
If our capacity is still at 3 million,
we're headed to a future where places like California
are first to have no forests,
then Oregon, then Washington, et cetera.
We're not against nurseries.
Absolutely do the nurseries,
but that's a two to three year backlog.
Let's get out there in 30 to 90 days.
That's what Droneseed does.
- Grant's drones go out over areas hard to reach by humans
and disperse a polyculture mix of seeds,
native to the selected region.
- It goes beyond native.
We want polyculture so that it's multiple species
because that's more fire resilient.
Like isn't that amazing?
And like that's also an opportunity
to have much more diverse ecosystems.
- [Lucy] The seeds are covered in hot chili powder,
so that rodents don't eat them.
They say their method is six times faster
than the conventional reforestation projects,
and can drop millions of seeds at a time.
While Grant's method is scale and speed,
some organizations are focusing on more local solutions.
- You start with the communities and what they want,
your trees are more likely to survive
and more likely to make an impact on climate.
- Instead of millions of seeds at a time,
Sebastian Africano and his organization,
Trees, Water & People, plant 150,000 seedling trees
across Central America, the US, and native nations per year.
Why is it so important to make that connection
with the local community and have buy-in from them?
- It's their land and it's their landscape,
and they're the stewards of that land.
So if you have their buy-in,
the trees are gonna produce a future value for them
or their community, or for future generations,
the trees are more likely to survive.
- Sebastian told me that, on average,
seedlings have a one in four chance of surviving
to be mature trees.
- There's a lot more to how and why a tree is planted
than just the act of getting a tree in the ground.
The best time to plant the tree was yesterday, right?
I still believe that there's a deficit,
and planting trees is generally a good thing.
I think forest management is very different
than planting trees.
So like over the past 100 years,
how we haven't been harvesting
or haven't been tending forests,
you end up with high-density plantings
of one type of species that are more prone to disease
and more prone to fires a hundred years down the line.
- As people who have made it their mission
to plant more trees,
I was curious if Sebastian or Grant believed
that trees could reverse climate change.
- Absolutely not.
That's like saying there's a silver bullet.
"There's a silver bullet to climate change.
If we just planted trees, everything would be great."
Droneseed, what we focus on
is we wanna mitigate climate change.
There is no like solving climate change.
There seems to be this idea that like we have to pick one
and just everyone gets behind that.
We need all solutions on the table.
- I think it's ambitious.
I think that trees have the best chance of surviving
if they're planted to meet human needs,
and that's what we focus on.
So when a community is engaged and invested in that tree,
and how it grows and what it's going to be grown for,
and what it's going to produce in terms of economic value,
food value, or just soil value,
watershed value, cultural value,
that tree is gonna stand a much higher chance of surviving.
We have to be careful with the big pronouncements
because there's so many variables working against trees,
and there's also human preference in land use
and land use choices.
- So it's planting a trillion trees a silver bullet
that will stop the climate crisis?
Definitely not.
First off, the most effective step
is to protect existing forests.
As Myron explained, these forests provide
more than just carbon sequestration.
They're part of an ecological history and culture
that we'll lose if they're gone.
I do think planting more trees
can help us get toward our climate goals,
but that undertaking requires deliberate care
and consideration, and it should involve local stakeholders.
Part of me is concerned that the rush and enthusiasm
to plant millions of trees could create unforeseen issues
later down the road.
Planting trees shouldn't be a replacement for climate policy
and decarbonizing our economy.
Still, I think it's a positive sign
that we're even talking about trees in the first place.
It shows that, as a society, we're trying to heal our planet
and reverse the damage that we've done.
So my one small step is plant trees responsibly,
whether you're sprucing up your backyard,
or donating money to tree planting organizations,
having more trees is a good thing.
Just make sure you do your research.
That's all for this episode.
See you next time. Bye.
Just finished up filming in Washington Square Park
on a chilly day.
Nothing like talking about trees
when there were no leaves on them. (laughs)