On the second of September, 2018, the newly elected Prime Minister Imran Khan kicked off Plant for Pakistan. Also known as “The Green Tsunami” or “The Ten Billion Tree Tsunami”, the drive was begun by the planting of 1.5 Million Trees were planted on the first day.
This was a continuation of the current Prime Minister’s former campaign in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa when Pakistan Tehreek I Insaf was in power in the province four years prior to that.
After the program was stopped due to the global pandemic, it was resumed and the total manpower responsible for the drive was tripled to more than sixty thousand workers actively working on the plantation process.
The re-start was done in order to give jobs to the workers that had been left without jobs due to the halt in construction and other sectors due to the pandemic. The work involves not only sapling production and planting, but forest ranging and plant maintenance in rural areas (protection from the lumber mafia) also are a part of this drive.
Acacia and Mulberry’s trees are mostly being planted, and an excess of forty-five billion dollars have been pumped into this drive as of yet.
Pakistan is not the only country that has been making reforestation efforts across the globe. China has also been part of this global effort by multiple nations across the globe that has been looking to plant Billions of Trees.
The efforts are being undertaken in tandem with the UN global initiative of planting a Trillion trees globally. Iraq and some other countries have learned from the global leaders in reforestation efforts and incorporated new technologies (for example, using straw squares to hold together soil) and have redoubled their efforts to make the efforts sustainable.
In Niger, different techniques are being used to convert acres of land from desert lands back to green lands. South of the Sahara desert, measures are being taken to tap into existing root systems and using them in tandem with indigenous kinds of plants. This new means of re-greening the region was actually developed by an Australian researcher Tony Rinaudo, who was recognized as the introducer of the technique in 2018.
The hit that our globe has taken in the last few years as a result of the Australian Wildfires, Brazilian Deforestation, and the LA forest fires are currently on the way to being mitigated due to human efforts, but the work is in no way being done in rates fast enough to make up for the damage caused. Global warming and human-caused climate change are fast making our Earth unlivable not only for us but for the rest of the creatures that call the Earth a Home.
Why is it that globally, efforts are being undertaken to make the globe a more green place? The first and foremost reason is that even a middle-schooler will tell you that trees are the lungs of the planet. They take in Carbon that we release from our consumption of Carbon-based fossil fuels and pump into the atmosphere.
Also, these efforts by human beings to interfere in Global biodiversity are not a new thing. In fact, when we think about the Amazon rainforest, we think of wilds that have been left untouched by human disturbance. Apart from the most recent horrid attempts at de-forestation in the region, especially in Brazil, human beings have actually been shaping the Amazon rainforest for Millenia.
“The First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom,” is how Stanwyn Shetler, a Smithsonian botanist, described this region.
New evidence, however, has shown that this was not really the case. In fact, using agricultural methods like tilling, pruning, and burning of the green, indigenous populations have been modifying the Amazon rainforest to suit whatever needs they had at the moment.
José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter has stated that humans have inhabited the Amazon rainforest for 13,000 years and have been modifying and converting it to suit their needs for 8,000 years.
“Recent archaeological studies, especially in the last two decades show that indigenous populations in the past were more numerous, more complex, and had a greater impact on the largest and most biodiverse tropical forest in the world [than previously thought],”
according to Iriarte when discussing the topic with the Smithsonian Magazine.
It is Egoistical for man to think that there is a divide between the human and the natural, between the artificial and the wild. The Amazon rainforest itself, the epitome of the “natural” world has been shown to us to be actually “man-made”.
The Global efforts now being undertaken to bring back the green should be applauded, and efforts must be undertaken to stop humanity from smoking ourselves out of existence. Because species can come and go, and Human beings are also nothing but a species that could go.
Or we could decide to stay. For Good.
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