AMID ROLLING FARMS and green pasture 150
miles northwest of São Paulo, Brazil, two tropical
forests bloom as one. The first consists of a single
species, row after row of non-native eucalyptus,
planted in perfect lines like carrots. The other is
haphazard, an assortment of dozens of varieties
of native saplings.
There’s no denying it: This forest looks ridic-
ulous. The gangly eucalyptuses shoot like
witch fingers high above patches of stubby fig
and evergreen trees. Yet these jumbled 2.5-acre
stands of native trees, ringed by fast-growing
exotics, are among many promising efforts to
resurrect the planet’s forests.
The eucalyptuses, says Pedro Brancalion,
the University of São Paulo agronomist who
designed this experiment, get big so quickly they
can be cut after five years and sold to make paper
or fence posts. That covers nearly half or more
of the cost of planting the slow-growing native
trees, which then naturally reseed ground bared
by the harvest. And this process doesn’t hamper
natural regeneration.
You needn’t look far these days to find orga-
nizations trying to save the world by growing
trees. There’s the Bonn Challenge, sponsored
by the German government and the Interna-
tional Union for Conservation of Nature, which
enlists countries to reforest 865 million acres
by 2030, while Pakistan has its Ten Billion Tree
Tsunami Programme. Major tree-growing cam-
paigns, including Trillion Trees, sponsored by a
trio of wildlife protection groups, and the World
Economic Forum’s trillion-tree initiative, plant
seedlings while also working to restore or con-
serve existing forests. Some companies even
offer “buy one, plant one” deals for items from
whiskey decanters to surfing gear.
Yet too many planting campaigns, forest
experts say, still get too much wrong. On a tour
of another of his rangy forest sites last fall, the
Brazilian restoration ecologist drew newspaper-
size boxes in the dirt to represent his plots. He
found that if he leaves portions of each plot
entirely free of trees—if he puts seedlings on
only about half the land—the woodland fills
in on its own. Decades on, he will have saved
money and produced a thick wild forest while
planting less.
Too often, tree-planting groups are so focused
on getting credit for each seedling planted that
they ignore what matters most: What kind of
woodland is created? At what cost? And mostPLANT
MORE TREES,
BUT DON’T
OVERDO IT.
GIVE
SEEDLINGS
ENOUGH
ROOM TO
THRIVE —
AND HAVE
LONG
LIVES
SOLUTIONBY
CRAIG WELCHFIXING FORESTS 127