IMHO this is a romantic effort, no one can plant a tree species at such a scale.
Small ones, big ones. They're just everywhere.
"See that park over there? Someone put every one of those trees in the ground."
Then, as a corollary, one day, a parking lot has several dozen trees. Next day, they're all gone. Week later, a bunch of new ones are back. Guess the old ones were just getting too big.
Friend recently had to take down a 100 year old tree. Was just getting potentially unsafe.
No doubt they'll stick another one in there, and leave it. It'll be there when they pass.
Hell I've had a little cottonwood tree growing in the corner of my truck bed for 3-4 years. It never gets any bigger but always produces new leaves every spring.
Trees definitely do not need us.
Until they do. Eventually bugs and diseases would kill off huge portions of them. Trees would still be around, but it'd definitely be a different mix than we have now. Right now every ash tree in my state is either dead or dying due to beetles, all the chestnuts died when I was a kid, the native oaks mostly only live where they've been planted because anytime one dies a faster growing maple replaces it.
It's incredible how our minds are unable to grasp timescales greater than a decade. It dawned on me recently. I visited a place that had trees which were roughly my height 10 years ago. It's a genuine forest now.
Trees are perfectly fine with those timescales. Let them be and they will grow.
Another mind-blown moment was when I was visiting a park in Warsaw. Seemed like old-growth forest - little do I know! There was a display nearby which shared, that during WWII, the Nazis cut the park clear because the opposition was hiding in the trees. That was less than 100 years ago.
"Fifty million trees planted- the government said in 2014- with a success rate of 61% compared to the average European planting success rate of 35%."
No, that's why I asked. I was aware of the less than perfect record elsewhere wondered if they had done better.
You don’t have to take an empty field and plant 100k trees. You can go to where chestnuts used to grow, have some volunteers plant some over time, say 100 every month in an area. Over the course of 10 years, we’ll get some data.
Don’t let great be the enemy of good.
Achieving a good approximation of pristine natural forests might have a lower priority than the variable needs to increase rare plants, provide an habitat for rare animals, make the forest robust against climate and geological hazards, dealing with people with friendly (e.g. edible fruit) or hostile (e.g. thick vegetation to discourage secret hemp cultivation) features, etc.
And, for how long do we want to believe that environmental change (including fungus) can be frozen in a specific time moment that should be preserved?
Wasn’t the blight and panic that wiped them out largely a result of human activity?
I think this is one environmental change that happened VERY fast, in which we see our own hand, and that we believe we might still be able to turn back.
But I sense that you see some down side which I don’t see?
One thing is to protect nature, another to reject somehow inevitable change happening all the time.
A legitimate concern could emerge on discussing whether there is no better plan, because IMHO this plan offered false hopes, and perhaps many such restoration plans provide more hopes than quantitative performance indicators.
If it's ecologically competitive, it will spread again in the fullness of time, no?