There is a project trending on YouTube and other parts of the internet as of late that I am excited about. This being a landscape photography blog, I feel like it is important to talk not just about the art side of the business. This much might be fairly obvious if you have followed my posts in the past!
The project was started by the largest non-profit tree planting organization in the world, The Arbor Day Foundation. They call it #TeamTrees which has set the goal of planting 20,000,000 trees by January 1st, 2020. MrBeast partnered with The Arbor Day Foundation and several hundred YouTubers to spread the word and build up the conversation around conservation. If you are interested in helping the project reach its goal I will leave a link below!
This isn’t the first (and hopefully not the last) time that the importance of afforestation hits the internet. In the landscape photography community, we had Simon Baxter bringing attention to his own tree planting project back in February of this year called “Meg’s Grove” after his dog/photography companion. I will link to this, still active, project down below as well!
Afforestation
Recently, you might have seen plenty of news stories about large forest fires in the Amazon, California, Utah, Russia, and elsewhere. The effects of deforestation have been felt for hundreds of years dating back to before the dust bowl of the 1930s in the US (which was rooted in a lack of tree cover and poor farming practices). Arbor Day in the United States was established in part to prevent things like this happening in the future as well as to provide wood resources to homesteaders out west!
It remains important to this day to plant trees across the planet in forests, neighborhoods, and cities for various reasons. They can hold carbon from emissions, reduce noise pollution, decrease the amount of dust particulates in the air, decrease ambient air temperature through shade (which decreases the need for air conditioning, reducing draw on the power grid), positive psychological effects on those around them, giving a habitat to a diverse range of species, etc…
Climate change has been linked to our forests disappearing globally as well. Though, they are not the only variable in a complex global environment that is getting hotter every decade. The planting of trees is not the one-stop-shop for preventing climate change, but as a part of an effort to reduce its effects, they play their part.
We still have a dependence around the world on fossil fuels that have a net negative effect on greenhouse gasses. However, if we were to just stop burning these tomorrow we would still see global temperatures rising due to CO2 emissions. This is because the burning of fossil fuels also releases aerosols that decrease temperatures by blocking some sunlight (the effect is most basically 2 parts greenhouse gasses to 1 part aerosols). The aerosols get washed out of the atmosphere after a few weeks leaving only the greenhouse gasses to raise temperatures higher.
There needs to be a bigger effort funded to find ways to pull these greenhouse gasses out of the air in the future because trees have been shown to have a long-term “0” or neutral impact on the composition of our atmosphere. When I am talking long-term I mean hundreds of years because as the trees pull carbon from the air and store it while they are alive, when they die and rot/burn they slowly release it back as well.
In Summary
Having forests around the world is important to the health of our planet. That simply is enough to make it important to everyone because it is our current shared address. As a landscape photographer that happens to enjoy photographing forest scenes, I find having trees even more important to the art that I enjoy creating.
I will gladly bring awareness to anything that helps local and global forests. I believe that they are beautiful places to spend time around for everyone, and I also believe that some of the scenes that they make can turn into wonderful pieces to display on a wall. Being around trees and nature can bring a sense of peace reducing stress! If you haven’t already, please take the time to donate to this project or one of the others linked below, and even if you don’t have the means to contribute financially spend a few hours in a forest this week enjoying what makes trees truly great!
Meg’s Grove by Simon Baxter - https://treesforlife.org.uk/groves/g8298/
The TenTree online shop that puts proceeds towards various planting projects! They have some nice looking apparel which you can look good in while helping plant trees around the world. - https://www.tentree.com/blogs/posts/this-earth-week-help-us-plant-500-000-trees