The changes in climate and weather we’re experiencing now have been gradual but will be long-lasting (even permanent) unless we take action soon.
Many cities and countries have adopted tree-planting programs as a way to cope with both severe storms along coastlines as well as rising temperatures in specific areas. Because trees absorb and store carbon dioxide and other harmful gases and release fresh oxygen as well as water that cools the air around them, they can help cool the warming Earth.
Ethiopia, for example, just broke the record for the number of trees planted in a single day with 353 million.
But some are skeptical that this is the right way to go about things: most of the trees planted probably won’t survive; it’s too simple a solution for such a complex problem; it makes us complacent in other important areas; it’s too little too late.
Those who are in favor of the tree projects around the world (and let’s be clear, it appears to be a great help but is a far cry from a complete fix) are hearkening back to a time in U.S. history when we did help solve an acute climate issue using trees.
In the 1930s, the American and Canadian prairies were ravaged by drought. But the resulting disaster wasn’t just because of the weather – some of it was man-made, just like today’s climate crisis.
Looking back, it’s a fascinating phenomenon (as long as you didn’t have to experience it first-hand) partly caused by farmers who didn’t quite understand the nature of the land they were using for their crops. To be fair, no one did, but this is how we learned some important lessons.
Plains farmers were responsible for feeding large swathes of the nation and their overuse of the land, combined with the mechanization of farm tools, displaced too much of their rich topsoil and too many of the deep native grasses that held soil and moisture in place.
To make a long story short, the soil no longer held enough moisture after all this disruption and so when the droughts came, the land was more vulnerable. It dried up and turned to dust.
Removing grasses and trees also made farms more vulnerable to high winds that, well, came sweeping down the plains (there’s a reason those song lyrics exist!).
As a result, these hard-working farmers saw their topsoil blow away.
And the winds did worse than that – they created immense dust storms, sometimes called “black blizzards” that traveled across the country, reaching as far as the coast. The dust darkened the skies from the Texas panhandle up to Canada and from Colorado to Washington D.C.
Back in the 30s, tens of thousands of families were plunged into poverty as a result, no longer to make a living off of their land – it simply wouldn’t grow anything, so there was no food to eat or sell. Livestock had been chocked to death by dust. They could no longer pay their mortgages and were forced to move to other areas of the country to try to find reprieve.
Unfortunately, those areas – such as California – were still recovering from The Great Depression and had little to offer them in terms of new opportunities.
In 1933, in the midst of all this, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) took office and used the nation’s agricultural and land management departments to take action. He not only pushed for laws that would relive some of the economic burdens on affected farmers and agricultural laborers but he trusted the nation’s scientists when they came up with a plan to restabilize the soil.
Roosevelt had one of his many public works organizations, the Civilian Conservation Corps, plant millions of trees in the affected areas. Roughly 200 million of them were planted in what was called The Great Plains Shelterbelt, which ran from the Canadian border down to the middle of Texas.
The goal was to use the swath of trees to not only break the strength of the winds but to use the roots to hold water in the devastated topsoil so that it would stay in place.
The plan also involved an education campaign to instruct farmers on cultivation practices that would ensure this didn’t happen again.
It was a massive effort, but one that worked.
A few years later, the trees were able to take root and do their job, reducing the blowing soil by 65%. But it would take more time for the topsoil to recover enough to bare the kinds of crops it once did, especially since the area simply hadn’t had the kind of rainfall it needed.
But once that normal rains came back in 1939, the land began to recover.
The Great Plains Shelterbelt still stands as the largest effort ever carried out by the American government to address a climate issue. And it’s certainly worth thinking about whether we could ever pull off something like this again as politics continue to overshadow cooperation.
Now, many think we’re headed for a 21st-century Dust Bowl in various parts of the world – it’s already begun in some areas. (Not to mention that the plains will face the same issue again now that the trees planted all those years ago are too old and battered to keep doing their jobs.)
The U.S. Great Plains along with Texas are set to get battered once more if drought projections come to fruition.
New technology and old-fashioned cooperation will be the keys to helping prevent another ecological disaster. But are we still capable of such a large-scale infrastructure project?
Since trees not only provide a barrier to extreme weather but help store carbon that industry releases into the air, they can do a lot of good. That makes it all the more devastating to see the deforestation and damage still happening all over the world, particularly in the Amazon, where there are currently 93,000 separate forest fires burning as the president of Brazil sits back and does nothing.
Only time will tell if humanity can get its act together, but that time is running out and it appears the odds are against us – and this time the stakes even higher.
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