A Chinese proverb has it that, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
It’s impossible to refute the wisdom of this, and while the tree can be a metaphor for so many other aspects of life, it applies more than ever to trees.
It has become abundantly apparent that much of our human civilisation treats nature as something that exists apart from us, somewhere else, that we can chose to engage with or ignore, rather than something we’re part of and indeed ultimately depend on.
Planting trees, and lots of them, is a necessary to get back on track to repairing the disruption our population has caused on the earth’s surface. The article linked relays concerns about how that is done, and that preventing deforestation through empowering people to protect their forests must be a first step, and then planting selected native species rather than building a monoculture.
Trail Running Nepal has partnered with Eden Projects, an organisation founded in 2005, which since that time has nurtured and planted over 200,000,000 trees. They partner with and develop organisations who are paid to nurture and plant trees using their knowledge to recreate resilient, native forests.
We aim to plant at least a tree or three for every runner attending a race that we organise and encourage runners to join us to do the same. Here’s more about Eden Projects in a video…
And their backstory…
Though our initial project site in Ethiopia has been completed, we have added Madagascar, Haiti, Nepal, Indonesia, and Mozambique as active project nations with the same mission and vision: to restore hope to those in dire need. We are able to accomplish this by employing those suffering from poverty. These workers assist with the revival of previously cut forests while learning how to prevent environmental degradation moving forward. All too often, the employment Eden Reforestation Projects provides a villager is their only means of reliable income. Having a reliable source of income not only allows villagers to provide for their families but it instills a sense of pride and ownership over the emerging forest and cultivates a desire to ensure the protection of the new trees.
