Planting Trees Only Matters if the Trees Live

When politicians (or autocrats) plant trees as photo opportunities, things often go bad.  In Turkey, a widely ballyhooed project to plant 11 million trees in that country appears to be on its way to produce over nine million dead saplings.  Growing healthy trees is a way to impact greenhouse gases, but only if the saplings become viable trees.

“We said it was wrong to run the campaign in a period without adequate rainfall just to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. Besides that, the people recruited to plant the trees were not adequately trained. If only we had been wrong,” the union’s chairman Şükrü Durmuş said.

“This is a murder. We are warning the Forestry and Agriculture Ministry once more. Over 17 years you have handed over thousands of hectares to international companies to develop as mines. You won’t fix the destruction caused by these companies by planting 11 million trees,” he said.

You can't fix the damage caused by the industrial plundering of the environment with a poorly planned and executed PR stunt.