🚀 go-pugleaf

From the Gauardian (UK) Web page.  

Aerial Bombardment to Reforest the Earth

( by Wayne Foley, Environment Correspondent )

Forests are to be created by dropping millions of trees out of
aircraft. Equipment installed in the huge C-130 transport aircraft used
by the military for laying carpets of landmines across combat zones has
been adapted to deposit the trees in remote areas including parts of
Scotland.
An idea, originally from a former RAF pilot, Jack Walters, of
Bridgnorth, Shropshire, has been developed by the US manufacturer
Lockheed Martin Aerospace so that 900,000 young trees can be planted in
a day.

A company set up to market the idea, Aerial Forestation Inc, of Newton,
Massachusetts, believes that companies with polluting power plants will
be forced by governments to plant forests to offset the global warming
effect of the carbon dioxide they emit. Planting via the C-130s will
halve the cost of manual methods.

Peter Simmons, from Lockheed, said: "Equipment we developed for
precision planting of fields of landmines can be adapted easily for
planting trees.

"There are 2,500 C-130 transport aircraft in 70 countries, so the
delivery system for planting forests is widely available - mostly
mothballed in military hangers waiting for someone to hire them.

"The possibilities are amazing. We can fly at 1,000ft at 130 knots
planting more than 3,000 cones a minute in a pattern across the
landscape - just as we did with landmines, but in this case each cone
contains a sapling. That's 125,000 trees for each sortie and 900,000
trees in a day."

The tree cones are pointed and designed to bury themselves in the
ground at the same depth as if they had been planted by hand. They
contain fertilizer and a material that soaks up surrounding moisture,
watering the roots of the tree.

The containers are metal but rot immediately so the tree can put its
roots into the soil.

Moshe Alamaro for Aerial Forestation was in Bridgnorth last week
visiting Dr Walters, who published his idea in a paper 25 years ago
while at the university of British Columbia in Canada.

Mr Alamaro said: "We are seriously considering contacting British
royalty and recommending that Jack is knighted.

"It was a great idea, which he tested at the time and found it worked,
but the technology was not up to the job. Now with metal that
biodegrades at once as it hits the soil, we are planting the trees and
giving them a head start all at once."

Dr Walters said: "I am delighted the idea has been taken seriously. I
did the preliminary tests to make sure the trees survived the fall, and
it all worked. But I hadn't any money for a development budget.

"Moshe read about my work in the scientific literature and came to see
me."

He said a man on the ground can plant 1,000 trees a day. "If we are
going to combat global warming by collecting carbon in the wood of
trees, we will want millions of them a year. Airborne planting is
probably the only way."

Mr Alamaro believes that the system will work in any area that used to
contain trees, and even in desert areas where the cones can be adapted
to plant suitable shrubs. He has a pilot project planned for the Sinai
desert in Egypt.

"One 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."

He also hopes to replant large areas of the Black Forest cut down
during the cold war to provide "line of sight" across the iron curtain
between east and west Germany, and is exploring contracts in north
Africa, the tundra of Canada, Australia and the US.

In five years he believes that his company could be planting a billion
trees a year - enough to reforest 3,000 square miles.

-- 
Wayne