Earth Day 22nd April Every Year

Earth Day is probably the biggest co-ordinated expression of support for the environment in the world. Earth Day is on April 22 every year and it is a unique chance to demonstrate support for environmental issues. However, the Earth Day organisers, The Earth Day Network, emphasise that its acitivies continue all year round. It was first held on April 22, 1970 and is coordinated by earthday.org According to Wikipedia, it has become ”the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year”. This is an astonishing achievement.

The Earth Day activities and celebrations include a variety of activities such as the Great Global CleanUp, Citizen Science, Advocacy, Education, and art. Many of these activities are accessible online and they include a three-day livestream event, Earth Day Live, organized by coalition of youth activists, which focused on; citizen science, volunteering, community engagement, education, and the role of art in furthering the cause. Earth Day is really a network of organisations, comprising the Earth Day Network and their website is really a gateway to multiple individuals and organisations offering a huge variety of events. This is because it lets indiviuals and organisations register their Earth Day Events, and the details appear on the Earth Day website. The website includes a global map of where events are occuring.

Earth Day is when people work together to deal with environmental issues and help to create a sustainability environment. It is an opportunity to have hands on experience of environmental defense or learn about environment and science and ways to prevent environmental degradation. The Earth Day organisation has become one of the leading environment organizations on the planet, paving the way to conservation of the invironment at a grass roots level. It is also a way to not only get news about the environment but also to discover what you can actually do to improve the environment.

Plant a tree for earth day

Of course, the planting of trees is a major aspect of the Earth Day and the movement includes The Canopy Project which has already planted millions of trees. This is innovative project which “works closely with on-the-ground community groups that are trained and committed to nurturing these trees to maturation for life spans that often reach 100 years or more.” Therefore the project is about building community as much at it is about planting trees. It is only when there is harmony between the local human population and nature sustainability goals can be achieved.

Earth Day is a truly phenomenal movement and The Canopy Project it a well conceived and innovative. To date they work by training local people in creating tree nurseries and planting out and maintaining the emerging trees. This a superb method and more power to them. However, I believe that they are missing a trick.

The could also train the locals in planting by using a Rewilding Stick and in some situations this would be more effective and efficient. I am in no way suggesting they ought to do this in every situation. They have found a method which works superbly and should stay with that as their core method. However they could trial using Rewilding Sticks as an alternative method where suitable – such as where there is:

+ an abundance of seeds
+ the consumption of the emerging plants would help support the re-emergence of the local indigenous wildlife.
+ suitable ground cover to ‘hide’ the emerging plants from predators
+ little in the way of potential predators of the plants.

When trees are grown in nurseries it is tempting to see things too much from the perspective of the needs of the trees, and the needs of the people, rather than the needs of the local wildlife. The local wildlife may damage or consume emerging trees and can be seen as a problem. However, the local animals are only a “problem” owing to previous human intervention in destroying their habitat. For example, a forest is comprised of not only trees, and other plants, but also the animals which sustain the forest. The local animals sustain the forest, and other environments, by consuming the plants (to keep them in check) and spreading their seeds as they go about their activities. As they forage and burrow the animals bury the seeds from the forest plants helping it to regenerate. There cannot be a healthy environment without a healthy population of indigenous animals.

The Earth Day’s Canopy Project is entirely laudable and deserves to grow and flourish. However, it seems to me that they could give over at least a part of their tree planting activities to Reseeding by using Rewilding Sticks, even if this means a percentage of trees gets ‘lost’ to the needs of the local animals. Later those local animals will pay back this investment in good measure when they spread and ‘plant’ the seeds of the emerging trees.

Using a Rewilding Stick is not about ‘spreading’ seeds as this is often a very inefficient way of planting. The Rewilding Stick is used to put seeds directly into the ground in-situ, where they are intended to grow. This greatly increases the chances that the tree, or other plant, will at least get a chance to germinate. Using Rewilding Sticks can also be an excellent way of building up the under-story, comprised of the various plants which can grow around the trees, and in this way help restore the forest. Therefore the result becomes a genuine forest, which supports humans, animals and a wide variety of plants, and not just a plantation of trees which is being claimed to be a ‘forest’.

It is easy enough to carry different types of seeds and switch between them at intervals or even every time a seed is planted. Therefore even in a single planting session a Rewilding Stick can be used to plant multiple types of seeds.

Most organizations engaged in tree planting only evaluate themselves, and are evaluated by others, in terms of how many trees they have planted and the survival rates of those trees. Yet, we need to look at the bigger picture and allow for the fact that some of what gets planted may be better sacrificed to the needs of the local animal population. The restoration of the local animal population would allow for a better environment and will even contribute to the ‘planting’ process as they forage and burrow and spread and, more importantly, bury the seeds. Where things are already to out of balance, owing to human intervention, this may not be practical. However, it is always worth considering.

Perhaps we need to move away from the obsession of the numbers of trees planted and too look to the bigger picture of how many acres of forest, or other local landscape, is being restored.

For more about the Rewilding Stick and how it can revolutionize tree planting, how to make them and how to use them, please check out the videos linked on this page.