Comment by hpcjoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hpcjoe | Hacker News Reader

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What troubles me about this is the rate of planting. The idea of reforestation is hopefully a net positive. But the rate of planting seems improbable.

350M seedlings/trees. 12 hours or 43200 seconds. This works out to roughly 8102 per second.

So start with 1M people planting these trees, that would be 350 trees per person. Or roughly 29 trees per hour. So a tree every 2 minutes for a million people doing this.

Non-stop. For 12 hours.

I know, many assumptions built into this. If they had 10M people, it would be 35 trees over 12 hours, which I think is far more manageable.

And the people aren't uniform. Some will plant (far) more/faster than others. I'd expect some sort of long tail distribution for the rapid planters, with peak(s) around mode(s).

Just thinking aloud, that politicians may be politicianing, and reality will be somewhat different. Definitely curious about the participation rate of the population. And what the abrupt introduction of 0.35T trees will do to groundwater levels, aquifers, etc.

[edit: to correct a spelling error]

For anyone looking for the realities of planting trees en masse, BC has a long history with industrial tree-planting:

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/pains+gains+tree+planters+five...

>> This month, as B.C.’s planting season reaches full throttle, about 3,500 people are slinging seedlings into soil up and down the province. Industry bosses expect them to plant 240 million trees in the province by the time the season ends this fall.

>> Eating Dirt author Charlotte Gill’s pay ranged between six cents and about a dollar for each seedling planted during her 17 years as a tree planter.

Another really interesting figure from that article:

> 3,500 people are slinging seedlings into soil [...] > punching about 80 baby trees a second

That works out to about 1.3 minutes of work per tree planted.

They do note that it's skilled labour - it takes a few seasons experience to hit those rates. But BC conditions may not be the friendliest, either.

Hitting similar totals in a day instead of six months, but with perhaps 2-3 orders of magnitude more people is an extremely impressive effort!

It's not improbable if there was sufficient preparation. The country relies on agriculture more than anything,basically a nation of farmers with >100M people of which most are very young and able bodied. 10M people planting 30 trees an hour for 10 hours (12 hours minus breaks) is 300M trees a day.

I could be mistaken but a lot if their concern is not so much about climate change but about preventing drought and famine which is causee by unsustainable farming and over-grazing. It's been a while since I read the wiki page but something like 70-85% of the population directly relies on farming in sub-sahara.

Correct. These are tiny seedlings, not trees. The majority of them, if planted poorly, won't survive the 1st year.

It's also telling that the article doesn't have any pictures. You would think that if you're breaking a Guinness record and doing a good thing for the planet, you would take some pictures and document it quite well.

For context, Ethiopia has a population of 105M, and the government's goal was 40 seedlings per 12 hours per participant. Not far fetched at all.

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