When Planting Trees is Not the Answer — Afforestation Versus Ecological Restoration

Photo by Marita Kavelashvili on Unsplash

I love trees. I’ve taken fairly long trips just to see specific trees. There’s nothing quite like a California redwood…or even a Scots Pine. Or an ancient cedar tree on a mountaintop.

As a species, we’ve become somewhat obsessed with planting trees. Trees pull carbon out of the air, so they are the obvious low cost means of carbon sequestration. And we’ve cut down so many trees that it feels like a moral duty to replace them.

Reforestation is indeed important. But there’s also afforestation, which is planting trees where there weren’t any before.

We do this in our cities all the time. We plant shade trees to mitigate the urban heat island effect.

But should we be doing it on a wider scale?

Photo by Mary Hammel on Unsplash

The Call of the Prairie

We’ve all seen the archetypal image of the farmhouse on the prairie with the trees planted around it to make a windbreak.

The temptation has to have been irresistible for European settlers, who come from forested lands, facing that open space.