The Big Idea - The future you’ll create
A trillion trees
A tree is humble and ordinary. It sprouts, spreads its arms out as wide as it can, and grows into a mammoth. It can protect itself from raging fires, brutal winters, droughts, floods, and anything else that our natural world can throw at it. It can’t survive an axe. It's amazing in its defiance and resistance to threats, but humans aren’t a natural threat. We have technology and willpower to build things. There are around 3 trillion trees on Earth right now. That’s barely 45% of the number that existed before humans got smart. If we plant a trillion trees, it would help to eliminate one-sixth of human carbon emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector - that almost equates to all of the carbon produced by transportation (cars/planes/trains). If you removed those cars/planes/trains, that would take care of the carbon from farming. It would be transformative.
Leave it alone
Perhaps though, we humans are trying to fix the problem by doing something. We humans love to see problems and find solutions to them. Our problem may well be unsolvable by us because we are the problem in the climate crisis. Planting a trillion trees can have dramatic and transformative effects on the climate, but ultimately, nature is the greatest proponent of creating thriving and balanced ecosystems. When humans get involved, we often fail to understand the complexity and therefore fail to act with enough sensitivity. Humans don’t understand how the human brain works or functions, hence, we can’t make one. We are aiming to make nature as it was, but it could be argued that the only power on Earth wise enough to do that is nature herself. Message to humans: STOP TOUCHING EVERYTHING.
Symbiosis
To stop touching everything and messing it all up, we humans need to learn how to live symbiotically with nature rather than living off it. We take resources to craft and forge our world, but a humble sloth (moving 400 metres an hour - just think about that!) takes nothing from nature that isn’t sustainable. It lives with a tree, eats from it, and never takes too much. Our ancestors (those hairy primates) lived in the same way. We humans became intelligent and then impossibly stupid to not be one with our Earth, but be apart from it. We have a simple decision to make. Will we take from Earth or finally realise that no creature on Earth can exist without living in harmony with everything else. We are all connected. We are Earth’s fauna. We are the plants and the animals, the molecules and the atoms. We’re all made of the same stuff, but we stand apart.
Alternatives?
There are none!!!
Let that sink in. Let that chill our bones. We have no plan B, no planet B, no future B. We have Earth, nature, and ourselves. What will you do?