One significant challenge in cleaning up our earth is that of breaking our dirty habits: curbing our habit of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and littering vast quantities of plastic and noxious chemicals into our waterways and oceans. But another is going to be rebuilding the global ecosystems that might normally aid in cleaning.
One obvious case is: trees.
The role of trees (and other leafy green vegetation) in carbon sequestration is well understood, quantified, documented. The question I wondered about was: how many trees has the human race cut down and not replaced? I tackled this question by two means: First, by looking at how deforestation is ongoing still today and estimating that the number of trees cut down per million inhabitants won’t have changed much since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Secondly, I used estimates of global historic deforestation. The totals come in about the same (give or take a factor of three):
A half trillion trees. 500 billion trees.
Note: I’m redoing the estimates and will provide a link to the spreadsheets and source data soon. My preliminary estimates were used in the 2017 TEDx talk.
Some quick thoughts:
That’s a lot of trees - and it will take technical ingenuity and lots of human labor to carry this out. The future of work will include labor to unfilthy the earth.
Technical innovations to enable vegetative carbon sequestration at lower and lower costs (or at higher and higher speeds) should include:
GMO - genetically modifying trees, etc., to grow faster and sequester carbon more easily
Other organisms - algae, for instance - adapted and deployed at industrial scale
Innovations and inventions to lower the cost and increase the speed of germination, growing seedlings, preparing the ground, planting seedlings, and nurturing to maturity.
Finance, always finance. More on that soon.