It might seem like an odd question — why do we need trees when they provide some of the oxygen we breathe? — but efforts to repair and reseed forests have been ongoing for decades. Have these efforts really never borne fruit — or trees?
Ancient Trees
Forests and their denizens have always fascinated humans. Estimates suggest that just 5% of the Amazon rainforest’s mass is known to humans, for example. However, the knowledge of local tribes has been eroded as local groups die out. This is where legends of strange peoples and cryptids rise to fill the gaps.
The 1997 movie Anaconda took this idea to its logical extreme, featuring a colossal boa as its antagonist. Anaconda Uncoiled, a casino slot game, followed suit. The latter also plays on the idea of tribal royalty lost somewhere in the Amazon.
Source: Pexels.
Forest residents have their ideas, too. Legends say that a one-eyed humanoid called the mapinguary protects the ancient trees. That’s all fantasy. What we do know is that there are roughly 16,000 known tree species in the Amazon rainforest, many of which have been helped along by ourselves.
So, ‘yes’, reforesting schemes have met with enormous success. A paper published in Nature revealed that there are more trees on earth today than 35 years ago, occupying an area of 2.24m sq km or “the combined land surface of Texas and Alaska”.
Yet our lust for greenery hasn’t abated, and tech firms continue to repaint the world with trees. The Symbiosis Coalition was created recently by four of the world’s biggest tech companies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce, to plant trees and remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Intensive Planting
The reasoning is simple — artificial planting isn’t as beneficial to the environment as natural. So-called ‘primary’ forests harbor greater biodiversity than human-generated ones, including timber farms and trees for products like palm oil. This ultimately means that reforesting — successful or not — is a bit of a band-aid on a broken leg.
Source: Pexels.
Whether more intensive planting is the answer is up for debate (current examples involve drones, dogs, robots, and even a parachutist, Luigi Cani) but an abundance of time seems to be the key to undoing previous harm. It’s a complicated issue. Recently, scientists have highlighted issues with just how and where trees get planted.
A 2024 paper published in Nature Geoscience revealed that seeding trees at high latitudes, such as in the Arctic, could actually release more carbon into the atmosphere by disturbing the carbon-rich soil. These northern areas are generally void of trees except for the taiga biome, the last vestiges of vegetation, a ring of pines and spruces encircling the earth.
A New Problem
There’s more to trees than nature. In cities, tree cover correlates with urban temperatures, i.e. less shade means warmer days (as much as 12°C, according to researchers at Cambridge). There’s a twist, though. Depending on variables like species, urban planning, and a settlement’s location on earth, trees can trap heat at night, potentially creating a new problem altogether.
Overall, even as tech companies like Ecosia continue to line every inch of soil with trees, the world isn’t as far along in its battle against deforestation as it might seem. Google’s Symbiosis Coalition claims to do something different by setting parameters for planting projects to count as useful. All this does raise a final question—are the top sustainable tech companies in the world, including Lenovo, Dell, HP, and Intel, truly all that they seem?
