I was recently listening to NPR where they talked about the amount of trees that were in the world. Immediately, I thought, well there are a lot of trees in the word! I guessed maybe a couple hundred thousand trees. A couple of years ago, Thomas Crawther was inspired to take a census of all the treats in the world. He was working with a friend who wanted to undertake planting 1 billion trees to fight global warming. But because they didn’t know how many trees there really were in the world, they didn’t know if this would make a difference at all or if it would change our world for the better (Greenfieldboyce 2015).
Not many people have done research on the quantity of trees in our world. One estimate was that there were 400 million trees world wide (Greenfieldboyce 2015). So using satellite imaging and meticulous data collection spanning over 2 years, we now have been given a number. Are you ready… there are 3 TRILLION trees in this world (Greenfieldboyce 2015). Now, that is a very large number. So my thoughts automatically went to the idea that we are fine, global warming is not a big deal, because we have so many trees. One Sunday when I was visiting my mom in Conyers, Georgia I noticed that one of the woods areas where we used to hang out when I was in high school was torn down and there was a Publix, Target, AT&T and restaurants all over the place. There were so many trees there, that are all now gone.
So, this is the dilemma: We keep cutting down trees to build more and more buildings because we have more and more people occupying this earth. It is estimated that 15 billion trees are cut down each year by people to make space for our growing population. The earth isn’t getting any bigger to accommodate all of the people it is housing. Data suggests that in 300 years, there will be no trees available. What will we do then, how will we breath, what will our world look like? How can we realistically fix this population problem and keep the trees we have now?
Crawther and his colleagues want to now plant 1 trillion trees based on this new information. But planting so many trees won’t happen over night, it will take years and years for these trees to be planted (Greenfieldboyce 2015).
For more information you can go to: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/09/02/436919052/tree-counter-is-astonished-by-how-many-trees-there-are
or
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/5d29245e237a4004aa9b0df074ca640d/lots-trees-hug-study-counts-3-trillion-trees-earth
I love trees. I enjoyed reading your post and could not help but wonder about what the statistics were on the rate that trees are disappearing? I also wondered what alternatives there are for the products we make from trees? I know that steel is being used in home construction more and more but that it is not a cost effective alternative. I wonder if recycling is able to use recyclables to make reusable paper?