Greta Thunberg, Margaret Atwood, Michael Mann, Naomi Klein, David Suzuki, Bill McKibben, George Monbiot and more make the case.
We go on about wood here on TreeHugger, but often fail to see the forest for the trees. In fact, those forests could save us, by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere faster than we are making it. Instead, we are chopping them down and, in many parts of the world, failing to replant them. Every thing we say about the wonders of wood construction are meaningless if we don’t replace every tree we turn into CLT and NLT and DLT and every other form of wood we invent.
Writing in the Guardian, a long list of environmental luminaries, from Greta Thunberg to Brian Eno, have written an important letter calling for protecting and restoring ecosystems.
The writers note that this can’t be a substitute for decarbonization of industrial economies, but note that “natural climate solutions could help us hold the heating of the planet below.”
Drax carbon capture and storage/ Wikipedia/CC BY 2.0
The funny thing about this is that so many people talk about CCS (carbon capture and storage) as a solution to climate change. But these were all kinds of expensive high tech solutions that Mike noted years ago were nothing more than delaying tactics; they wouldn’t work, were too expensive and were nothing more than a way of saying “Don’t bother us, we’re working on it!”
Trees on Haida Gwaii/ Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0
But in fact, the most effective and inexpensive CCS device is right there in front of us – a tree.
Global forest Loss/CC BY 1.0
Grace Jeffers reminds us that we are losing the forests far more quickly than we are planting them, and that we all play a role in this.
