Plans to plant billions of trees threatened by undersupply of seedlings

These forests were planted during the late colonial era by the French and German. The great naval powers at the time were running out of trees tall and straight enough to make masts. They cut down natural old-growth forests, and planted trees in a way that makes it easier to count. They grew better, and called it a success. However, that first generation grew well because they used up the nutrients banked by the natural forest. The subsequent generations did not grow as well.

So over the centuries or so of trying this, they tried things like, adding in insects, and measuring their rate of growth. But it all stems trying to force a complex system into something that is legible, but the results are its own folly.[1]

Frankly, our climate and global ecosystem is a complex, adaptive system [2][3][4], and to think that we can reduce solutions based on a single metric, such as atmospheric CO2 numbers, is a disaster in the making from our collective hubris.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/germany-s-trees-are-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework#Complex

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

The Lower Sonoron us actually a steppe biome. There are plenty of native trees and shrubs that thrive all on its own with the given rainfall. People see "desert" and picture wastelands like the Sahara or the Gobi. Many people who never been to the area are surprised at how lush both the lower and upper Sonoran are.

As far as human intervention goes, there is a nuance here: there is a big difference between acting upon the world as apart from the ecosystem, and acting within the world as part of the ecosystem.

My neighbor's Pakistani white mulberry is very well suited for growing here in the Sonoron, with some help. Jujube trees (one of the buckthorne family) is very well suited here. So are moringas, with people growing dense, backyard moringa groves here in Phoenix.

There are people who figured out how to grow the classic fruit-bearing trees here. Using dwarf varieties, careful pruning, use of deep mulch basins, chop-and-drop, companion planting, they can do very well here without having to rely on flood irrigation.

> Competing for sun isn't really a thing in a desert, because canopies in that landscape are a liability rather than an advantage. They contribute to water loss, which is extremely scarce.

In the park environment I am talking about, despite it being in the Sonoran, it is actually designed like a park you would see in temperate biomes. That means the overstory trees there are large ponderosa pines (which has high water requirements for the area, so they flood irrigate the park during the summer). The tree I was talking about in that park s going to be starved for sunlight is surrounded by the shadows of several of the overstory trees

> If anything, having partial shade is good protection for young trees, which are more susceptible to variations in drought and heat.

That's partially correct. There are other ways to work with this. For example, the people who sold my black mission fig to me told me that it doesn't shade itself. Well, it does shade itself, as long as you don't trim the lower branches that forces you to then put the white reflective paint on its trunks.

In the Sonoran, the mesquites and the ironwood act as nursery trees, providing partial shade to support a variety of plants. The Suguoro cactus, for example, requires a nursery tree to help it along when it is young. Then it kills off the nursery tree when it gets mature enough. Ironwood, despite growing extremely slowly, because it acts as a nursery tree for a variety of plants, is a keystone species.

Human intervention destroyed the ecosystem and there is immediate and ongoing harm to that destruction. It's idiotic to suddenly decide to "let nature do it's thing" now when billions of people are threatened by climate change.

So the "just" part of" just leave areas alone, is asking quite a lot. That's not to say it's wrong ... but it's more ambitious than e.g. net-zero goals. In some sense, it's exactly 2x as ambitious as E. O. Wilson's "Half-Earth" proposal.

The way things are going we're going to need to learn how to construct artificial reefs to survive as a species, and quite possibly also artificial game habitats. Planting trees is just one part of that.

Some of the things the permaculture folks have been quietly doing for over 50 years have yielded some impressive results. They go far beyond what you'd hear about in the mainstream, and we're only seeing some of it trickle in (such as the ideas of restorative and regenerative agriculture or agroforestry).

At best they "hear you" and "will take it into account", then keep on doing what was planned. At worst they treat you like an idiot or a lunatic. And it's not like the company hired to do the work is going to listen to some random person telling them how to do their job.

Only thing I've found works is volunteering for orgs that actually do things right, if you can find one.

That or just planting yourself at 2 in the morning ;-)

Trees have different kinds of roots, such as lateral roots and tap roots. What they do depends upon the species, their growth patterns, and how those patterns adapt to their native environment.

Many trees will send out some lateral roots, and depending upon the species, they can be invasive. In the Sonoron, the mesquite is very aggressive about both lateral roots (far exceeding the drip line of the trees) and deep tap root (some mesquites have been discovered with tap roogs going 250 ft in the ground). They also have the added advantage of being a nitrogen fixer.

Fig roots are invasive, though primarily lateral, shallow roots. Jujube (and all buckthornes) are invasive, sending roots that can then grow and pop up as a whole other tree! Mulberries, particularly the Pakistan varieties, also have vigorous, water-seeking roots.

Bamboo are not trees. They are grasses, and grow like grasses with rhizomes. Once established, at around year 5, you would have a running bamboo grove pop up out of nowhere (because they can grow 1 foot a day until they reach their maximum height).

As far as basins, a basin is any depression in the landscape where rainwater can pool. It can be shallow, or deep. Many of the greenways here in Phoenix are large basins that can collect and help absorb our monsoon rains.

What you are talking about with girdling happens with hardwood trees, and not with "basins". When planting a bareroot hardwood tree, you should not plant it in a way so that the root crown goes too much below the ground level. The roots need to be unravelled so that they can grow outward instead of forced back on its self. For hardwoods, they can and do strangle themselves if their roots are allowed to girdle. Contrast that to a fig, whose roots will go whichever way and it will be fine.

Knowing that, you can still create a basin for such trees. You would dig the basin as a ring much further away from the hardwood, possibly as a shallow basin.

2. "Local". You're not going to plant a million trees in Manhattan or almost anywhere where people already are.