I made my climate change dot out of the information I've discovered, slowly, painfully, over the last couple of years developing a reforestation project in Brazil, where I was born. There were so many things that just didn't fit together, until last week when I found the missing piece: deforestation and reforestation are both profitable. Climate change is just one of the costs of doing business, if you happen to be in the right business. Dow Chemical and Monsanto are.
So I put myself in their shoes to take a different perspective:
If you have a bad rap for your history creating Agent Orange, first of all, get rid of the stockpile. You could send it to South America and maybe people there would forget about it. Carnival and all. Or not. Maybe someday, someone would find it and figure out that it's an easy way to take out the rainforest without smoke being detected.
Once the trees are gone, you might as well sell your GMO soy and corn seed, and all the fertilizers it takes to grow them the (North) American way. Oh yeah. Cotton too. Lots of GMO cotton. It's a big country, you can really plant a lot of stuff there.
And business is all about partnerships, strategic alliances. So it would be a good idea to partner with some good guys, with well known names and stellar reputations to clean up any misgivings folks might have about you. Dow chose The Nature Conservancy (or maybe TNC chose Dow?), while Monsanto chose Conservation International.
Whoa, what do know? Those two organizations have big reforestation projects in the 93 percent deforested Atlantic Rainforest! What a great opportunity to help them with supplying all the seedlings they'll need for their billion tree initiative.
And since TNC/Dow were able to make arrangements with the state of Sao Paulo's Water Supply Managers (SABESP) to help supply trees for planting along the source of water for nearly nine million people, it's really good news for these guys. Not so good for the network of rural Brazilians who started nurseries to supply the demand organically, but those guys don't have good internet access or read English, so they're not going to figure this out for a long time.
And this is 2012, a year when all sorts of things are aligning nicely. The Dr. Seuss story The Lorax was made into a movie by Universal this year, and since they were green enough to know they ought to partner with BINGOs (Big International NGOs) who could plant trees for them, they chose TNC and CI to do the heavy lifting for them.
Isn't it amazing what you can learn from Google, if you just ask the right questions?
I tried putting this into my last comment below but it was too long. It finishes the thoughts:
What we discovered though (as I joined forces with the organic tree growers in 2009), was that it was very difficult to sell their trees at a fair trade price because contracts were already tied up by the entities I've named. There are mandates in place for chemicals to be used in nurseries and in the field. The organic growers need support to stay in business, and supply the people who want their trees but struggle to pay for them at any price.
That's a story I can tell without getting snarky. I promise you, I will do what I can to heal and grow beyond the turmoil of emotions my encounters with TNC brought up, and write about it here. Thank you for being interested.
I can't help with money, but if an art piece can help, I might be able to contribute. I will caution, however, that I'm very centered on my own thing--I founded a remarkable nonprofit that got Wangari Maathai to visit and later kick off a tree-planting project for the community. But due to my inability to act politically, I fell afoul of the board. Now I am indeed focusing on the trees in my own backyard. I'm most definitely not a follower or a supporter. I cut wood and let the chips fall where they may. I am the program that I follow.
You have opened my eyes on the relative advantage of tree planting in the Tropics, but muddling around with my own trees in the Southwest will have repercussions for place, like yours, that I could never have predicted. Spirit works that way.
I am honored to make your acquaintance and learn about your perfect work!
All ecosystems are integrated, and they all have loops and feedbacks to the climate and the atmosphere, and they all, altogether create the very life zone of the Earth, her biosphere/ecosphere or life itself. Deforestation heats up and dries out the climate.
I saw young forests of 4-10 years that were flourishing after being planted in this manner. Have a look at the work of Willie Smits in Borneo to see what is possible when we work with Nature: http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html
Today, after eastern forests were in their second to fourth growths, we have more eastern forests than since the white Europeans arrived. The more diversity of both plant and animal biodiversity, the more stable and life giving the ecosystem. However, long ago countless species disappeared from these ecosystems, like the wood bison, the wolf, the mountain lion, elk, and many of the native birds to these forests fell extinct and our native chestnut tree died off. Many strands in this web of life have disappeared.
Also, old growth trees are larger than second, third growth. The trunks of 1,000 year old oak trees are as wide as a car! They say before the white man began doing away with these forests, a flying squirrel could reach the Mississippi without ever touching the ground.
But this part of the story, discovering the greenwashing and corruption has emerged one piece at a time since returning to the US last year. I've send info to other bloggers and reporters, asking for them to expose the truth. No one has. I just need people to understand that the Big International NGOs I've named, are partnered with the chemical companies who've not only created the herbicide known as Agent Orange, that has mysteriously turned up for use in the Amazon, as well as spread their GMO seed all over the Brazilian landscape, and made contracts that will keep them there for years. That I could build upon if need be, but I loathe to.
I vastly prefer to tell you the stories of the organic growers who dug deep into their own pockets, unsubsidized by anyone, to create native tree nurseries to fulfill the demand of their own state government, for billions of tree seedlings...