Let's Plant Some Trees!

"Scientists say planting a trillion trees globally could be the single most effective way to fight climate change." That quote comes from an article found here. The article continues:

According to a new study in the journal Science, planting billions of trees around the world would be the cheapest and most effective way to tackle the climate crisis. Since trees absorb carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, a worldwide planting initiative could remove a substantial portion of heat-trapping emissions from the atmosphere.

The researchers say a program at this scale could remove about two-thirds of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused by human activities since the start of the industrial revolution, or nearly 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

In other words, we need to pursue what advocates are calling "reforestation."

One of the best things about
forests is their natural beauty.

Humans have over the years cut down huge numbers of forest trees in order to expand their economic activities. Those economic activities have involved burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas — to generate power.

Cutting down trees causes the fallen trees to release their stored CO2 — carbon dioxide — back into the atmosphere. If the downed trees are burned, that process happens even faster.

Burning fossil fuels puts yet more CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is a so-called "greenhouse gas." The extra CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat that reaches us from the sun. The trapped heat raises temperatures at the Earth's surface. This is the cause of global warming, also known as climate change.

Reforestation — planting billions and billions of trees throughout the world — can help reverse much of the climate change that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution some two centuries ago.

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Where can these trees be planted?

One excellent place, surprisingly, is in our cities. Many of our cities were built, in fact, where forests once thrived. We simply cut down the trees to build our civilized, city-based habitats.

Now we need to restore the trees. And in performing that so-called "urban landscaping" today, we ought to prioritize the poorer communities in our cities. See "How Can We Get Trees to the Communities That Need Them the Most?" for ideas about why and how to do that.

Also see "The Benefits of Trees" for a rundown on all the many reasons why we'd be smart to plant trees wherever possible, including our cities, and particularly in our cities' poorer neighborhoods. In particular, notice that "Urban landscaping, including trees, helps lower crime rates."

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Senator Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have "unveiled legislation aimed at ensuring that climate change plans benefit low-income communities," according to The New York Times. They call their goal "climate equity." It's part of what's being called "the Green New Deal."

What better way to target our efforts to deal constructively with climate change than to aim urban landscaping plans, including the planting of trees, directly at poorer communities?

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Yet let's not fool ourselves. This would be a hard sell politically. "Study explains why thousands of Detroit residents rejected city's tree planting efforts" tells why. That article clues us in that once a city government or other organization plants trees in a neighborhood, it has to follow through and take care of the trees: giving them tender, loving care while they're young; pruning them back away from power lines when they get bigger; and raking up leaves every fall. Neighborhood residents have enough to worry about; they don't need the extra responsibility of tree maintenance.

Obviously, expanded tree maintenance done at the city level costs money. Often, that kind of money is not easily available in city budgets. So money for the maintenance of new trees planted in poorer communities needs to derive from the federal government. Such funding needs to be part of Sen. Harris's and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's "climate equity" plan; it has to be part of the Green New Deal.

The Coming Green Wave

Timothy Egan

"A Green Wave is coming this November," writes New York Times op-ed columnist Timothy Egan, who calls it "the pent-up force of the most overlooked constituency in America. These independents, Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and Democrats on the sideline have been largely silent as the Trump administration has tried to destroy a century of bipartisan love of the land."

Mr. Egan rightly feels Mr. Trump deserves much blame for supporting our country's continuing to burn coal, thereby exacerbating climate change. He says the record firestorms in the American West and in Canada this year may finally convince voters to vote "green," in view of the fact that climate scientists are at last confirming that global warming causes strange weather patterns that can lead to forest fires, hurricanes, and (as is happening here in Maryland) repeated heavy rainstorms that produce scary, killing, financially costly flash floods.

The coming Green Wave of anti-Trump/anti-GOP voting, Mr. Egan says, will arise because:

... if just one unorganized voting segment, the 60 million bird-watchers of America, sent a unified political message this fall, you’d have a political block with more than 10 times the membership of the National Rifle Association.

Bird-watchers in Colorado

And also because:

While President Trump tries to prop up the dying and dirty coal industry with taxpayer subsidies, the outdoor recreation industry has been roaring along. It is a $374-billion-a-year economy, by the government’s own calculation, and more than twice that size by private estimates.

Huge numbers of outdoorsy potential voters are already in revolt:

The revolt started after Trump shrunk several national monuments in the West last year — the largest rollback of public land protection in our history. The outdoor retailer Patagonia responded with a blank screen on its web page with the statement, “The President Stole Your Land.” It was the first shot in a battle that has been raging all summer.

Bears Ears National Monument in Utah
was shrunk by presidential order this year.

The ultimate size of the revolt could be phenomenal. After all, "144 million Americans ... participated in an outdoor activity last year," writes Mr. Egan, and there were "344 million overall visitors to national parks."

If just a tenth of these patrons of national parks and a tenth of all these outdoors-loving people show up at the polls and vote "green" this year, it could dramatically change our politics going into the 2020 presidential election year.

Thomas L. Friedman

And then, writes Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman in "What if Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?," Katy bar the door!

What if all the extreme weather this year — linked to climate change — gets even worse and more costly? What if the big 2020 issue is not left-right — but hot-cold or wet-dry? What if the big 2020 issue is not “Who lost Russia?” or “Who lost North Korea?” but “Who lost planet Earth?” ...

Mother Nature is done letting us pretend that we don’t know and can’t connect the dots — and that could create some very interesting politics. ...

Sure, Trump will sneer that “green” is girlyman, uneconomic, unpatriotic and vaguely French. But Democrats can easily counter that green is globally strategic, locally profitable and working class — green is the new red, white and blue. That message can play today in Rust Belt battleground states like Michigan and Ohio.

If the "green" message — surprisingly to many, perhaps, it's a highly pragmatic one — plays out the way it ought to in Michigan, Ohio, and other key states, it could turn Mr. Trump into a one-term president!

Pope Francis Weighs In On Climate Change

Thank you, Holy Father!

Your encyclical Laudato Sí ("Praise Be To You") arrived on Thursday to the joy of liberal Catholics, myself included. Also, it drew great consternation from conservatives, Catholic or otherwise. The reason: it establishes a crucial link between the Catholic Church's traditional social-justice agenda and the need for us all to be concerned about what we are doing to the planet, namely, engendering adverse climate change.

An op-ed appearing in today's Baltimore Sun captures the gist of your argument. David Cloutier, an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary's University here in Maryland, writes:

Francis calls us "to recognize that other living beings have a value of their own in God's eyes." The rest of the world — animals, plants, even mineral resources — is not merely raw material for human consumption. Pope Benedict [your predecessor] insisted that there is a "grammar of creation," an "inbuilt order" that is from God and must be respected and cherished.

Also:

... proper care for the environment is only really possible if we love our neighbor rightly. The idea that "everything is connected" is repeated throughout [your] encyclical.

So we need, all of us, to do more than just cease misusing the Earth's natural resources to our own selfish ends. We must likewise change "the dynamic of an economy where workers are just another 'resource' ... [as well as] the dynamic of a sexual culture where we use other people for our own pleasure."

Not caring for the environment and not caring for people are really rooted in the same [unjust] moral stance [Cloutier writes]: a practical relativism that, in Francis' words, "sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one's own immediate interests."

We are all connected by virtue of the fact that we are all creatures of God — humans, animals, plants, even mineral resources and the fertility of the soil. I begin to see that your extending the template of social justice to include all of Mother Nature ought not to be as much of a surprise as, frankly, I myself find it to be.

At one of his talks, I once asked Father Thomas Reese, SJ, senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, "Why is it that the words Catholic and environmentalist are not often found in the same sentence?" His bemused answer suggested to me that he found my question well taken.

Until now.

You show in your encyclical, manifestly, the extent to which the pronouncements of our previous two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, agree with your core ideas, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe care for the natural world is indeed part of "Catholicism 101," as has been said of Laudato Sí (see "Why Pope Francis’s climate message is so hard for some Americans to swallow," from a recent issue of the Washington Post).

That article has it that

The Pope’s entire case for caring for “our common home,” as he puts it, is moral.

We as Christians and as human beings accordingly have a moral duty to "address the planet’s vulnerability," in other words.

As Americans in particular, moreover, we need to rein in our vaunted individualism, replacing it with a newfound "communitarianism." That's a tough one, I admit. All of what you say in Laudato Sí amounts to as hard-to-follow a moral prescription as any aspect of Catholic teaching is. Yet I do see that your encyclical weaves for us a "seamless garment" of commitment that we all need to put on right now.