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Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

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151–160 of 258 posts

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#151
post #99

But tell me again how the world's largest economy can't be bothered to do anything about climate change.

~1.6 billion trees are planted in the US every year and the total area of forested land in the US has been consistently growing since 1990.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#152
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that the European powers of 17th and 18th centuries "exploited" the Americas to include the U.S and yet here stands the U.S head and shoulders above these "exploiters".

America’s success was the direct result of ethnic cleansing of millions of Native Americans and the backbreaking labor of millions of slaves. The comparison is ridiculous. We were the exploiters.

Actually America industrialized quite early. The north was business and industry savvy, while the south focused on slavery. Slavery was not important for national economy - otherwise there would have been no civil war in 1860:s. Instead north was doing just fine economically without slavery, while south wanted to hold to most of it's capital (slaves).

I agree that the expansion to west was facilitated by forced migration of native americans from their homelands in a process that was borderline genocidal.

The fun part is about american industrialization - quite lot of it was based on directly stealing the IP of european industrialists (i.e not respecting their patents). This is quite fun in the sense how vocal US is now in upkeeping IP laws.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#153

Did anyone else find the 350M number implausible? They claim it happened in 12 hours. Unless they're talking about planting seeds, I find it hard to believe and take this story just as a political stunt. Ethiopia's population is 100M. Did 10% participate in this somehow, and each person plant 35 trees across the country? How would you even get that many trees to plant?

Yea, it does feel like there must be some fine print behind that number. FWIW, the Minister's twitter account does specify tree seedlings, so it doesn't sound like they just airdropped 350 million seeds or anything like that.

Though the limiting factor on how fast you can plant trees is more the production of seedlings than the physical labor of planting. So I guess if they've spend the last several months growing and distributing seedlings in preparation for this campaign, actually plainting them all in one day isn't so crazy

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#154
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finland we specialized tool which you can get easily 200 trees planted in an hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLtspCQPeqY

Even 200 seeds per hour would require ~145,000 participants to plant all 350M seeds in a 12 hr time frame. I’m literally just imagining a few guys with a leaf blower and a bag of seeds for how they got 350M in 12 hours haha.

They closed schools for this. There were a lot of people involved.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#155

350M are a lot of trees to be planted in a day. I've done tree planting and the estimated time/effort don't add up. I'm skeptical about the numbers. Seed planting is a different story

What are you estimating as the effort?

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#156

Did anyone else find the 350M number implausible? They claim it happened in 12 hours. Unless they're talking about planting seeds, I find it hard to believe and take this story just as a political stunt. Ethiopia's population is 100M. Did 10% participate in this somehow, and each person plant 35 trees across the country? How would you even get that many trees to plant?

I have a friend who has a small business doing, well I actually have no clue what the English word for it is, but its direct translation would be “Nature Nursing/Care taking”. A descriptive translation would be something like a wild nature gartner.

I asked him and he said it would be little trouble to plant that many seedlings if you coordinates the efforts and planned for it.

He also told me that these stunts, like airlines planting a lot of trees to go carbon neutral, often ends up with a lot of dead trees. Because the hard part isn’t planting trees it’s making sure they survive the first five years.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to reap rewards that can only come from most simple needs being met easily. In general, the developing countries are mostly "behind the curve", meaning their economic growth mostly wasn't that much lower for most of history, but rather they started somewhat later,…

> I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to reap rewards that can only come from most simple needs being met easily. Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. Sweatshops and slave…

> Sweatshops and slavery and cheap mass transportation of goods make our lifestyle possible.

One of these things is not like the others!

Cheap sea transport is a triumph of engineering. Sweatshop is just a term for a factory which the speaker disdains. Usually implying that the peasants should stay on their fields in picturesque poverty, and not make their own life choices.

Slavery, on the other hand, is actually evil. Fortunately it's now confined to certain backward parts of the world which have very little to do with the modern economy. I mean how many things manufactured in Mauritania have you bought recently?

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#158
post #156

Did anyone else find the 350M number implausible? They claim it happened in 12 hours. Unless they're talking about planting seeds, I find it hard to believe and take this story just as a political stunt. Ethiopia's population is 100M. Did 10% participate in this somehow, and each person plant 35 trees across the country? How would you even get that many trees to plant?

I have a friend who has a small business doing, well I actually have no clue what the English word for it is, but its direct translation would be “Nature Nursing/Care taking”. A descriptive translation would be something like a wild nature gartner. I asked him and he said it would be little trouble to plant that many seedlings if you coordinates the efforts and planned for it. He also told me that these stunts, like…

Now that is interesting. What are the challenges for making sure the trees survive the first five years? Do you have any knowledge you can help to elaborate?

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#159
post #158
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who has a small business doing, well I actually have no clue what the English word for it is, but its direct translation would be “Nature Nursing/Care taking”. A descriptive translation would be something like a wild nature gartner. I asked him and he said it would be little trouble to plant that many seedlings if you coordinates the efforts and planned for it. He also told me that these stunts, like…

Now that is interesting. What are the challenges for making sure the trees survive the first five years? Do you have any knowledge you can help to elaborate?

My assumption is making sure they get enough water.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. If colonialism was necessary for industrialisation the European powers with no or smaller colonial empires would have had lower growth. Germany would have been behind the U.K. and France. Austria would have been obviously suffering compared to Germany.…

> If colonialism was necessary for industrialisation the European powers with no or smaller colonial empires would have had lower growth. Which countries are you referring to? First of all borders in Europe were not the way they are right now 150 or 200 years ago. Second, an example for a tiny country that was exploiting an african nation well into the 20th century is Belgium [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel…

> Which countries are you referring to?

It's the next sentence: Germany, Austria.

Belgium indeed went on a bit of an exploitation spree. But it's never been notably wealthier than its neighbours. (Of course the king got some nice palaces, but that's not country-level wealth.) Instead the industrial part of Belgium was wealthy in the same era that the nearby industrial part parts of France were (and Detroit was). Now that's rust-belt poor, and the wealthy bits are tracking Holland. These patterns seem hard to explain by referring to the (very real) evils of the congo empire.

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