🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark Ballard <markballard@bigfoot.com> wrote in message news:37fce372@news.madhousenet.co.uk...
> From the Reforesting Scotland Journal issue 22
> 
> Many of you will have been amused to read recently of a plan to use C-130
> bombers to carpet Scotland with young trees (Guardian 2/9/99 , Scotsman and
> Herald 3/9/99). It sounds, as a SWT spokesperson said in response to the
> news, like a fairy story. So why is this crazy-sounding scheme being
> proposed by Lockheed Martin, one of America¹s biggest Aerospace companies?
> The answer lies in the complicated world of international climate change
> negotiations.
> 
> The scientific evidence that increasing levels of greenhouse gases are
> causing changes in the Earth¹s climate has grown over the last few years.
> Government and industry are coming to recognise that they will have to take
> action to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. This could be done
> by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but Lockheed Martin Aerospace believes
> that major polluting industries will choose to offset their emissions with
> huge programmes to plant trees. These Ocarbon sequestration forests¹ would
> supposedly absorb the carbon dioxide that the companies produce. According
> to Business Week magazine, over four million hectares of trees have already
> been planted for this purpose world-wide.
> 
> Peter Simmons from Lockheed is quoted as saying ³Equipment we developed for
> precision planting of fields of landmines can be adapted easily for planting
> trees. The possibilities are amazing. We can fly at 1,000ft at 130 knots
> planting more than 3,000 cones in a pattern across the landscape - just as
> we did with landmines, but in this case each cone contains a sapling. That¹s
> 125,000 trees for each sortie and 900,000 trees in a day.² He argues that
> planting from the air would cost half as much as manual methods, and is the
> only way that the vast areas of forest needed to soak up enough carbon
> dioxide to make a difference could be planted.
> 
> Moshe Alamaro of Ariel Forestation Inc, a company set up to market the
> scheme, believes that it will work in any area that used to contain trees.
> He told the Guardian that Oone of the areas we are interested in is the
> Scottish mountains, which used to be forested and could be again. We have
> already talked to landowners, and they are a bit worried about local
> resistance because people have got used to seeing the hills bare. We could
> replant the native forest very quickly.² Suddenly it sounds less like a
> fairy story and more like a possibility. After all, the idea that you could
> put fish genes in a tomato was science fiction only a few years ago.
> 
> So what are we to make of plans to reforest Scotland from the air? 

It may be OK for Scotland? But for Australia the idea plotted here if it could be made to work would be of outmost benefit. The problem I have on my property where I am currently planting variety of 2000 native trees is keeping rabbits, wombats and wallabies off the trees. The trees have to be guarded with plastic guards and sprayed with wombat/wallaby deterrent. Even so a great percentage of young trees get eaten before reaching a foot height. And you can not guard them from rabbits. It is interesting problem.
Any idea how to overcome it?

S.Benedikt