We are surrounded by catastrophic visions of the future. Sometimes it feels easier to imagine the suffering of future generations as they inherit a deeply damaged earth, than a brighter or more bountiful future.
We seek a bountiful future.
Conventional agriculture is responsible for nearly 50% of global carbon emissions. Meanwhile, corn and wheat yields have been falling due to rising temperatures since 1980.
But what if we didn’t depend on vulnerable and ecocidal monoculture grain production for our diets? What if we took food sovereignty and regenerative food production seriously?
A single mature chestnut tree can provide half of the carbohydrate calories a human adult needs in an entire year. Imagine nut and fruit trees on every block. Imagine a garden neighborhood–apples, plums, hazelnuts, chestnuts, kiwis, cherries, paw paws and persimmons, fresh and dripping with juice after that first succulent bite. Instead of plastic wrapped and stale fruits from California, imagine such local abundance that the biggest challenges will not be affording food, but finding ways to share the surplus. Imagine that each one of those trees sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, cools our warming neighborhoods through evapotranspiration, and provides birds and pollinators with abundant habitat. Imagine that the fruit trees in your yard require pollen from a neighbor’s tree to thrive, and that the rain that falls on your roof drains downhill through a neighbor’s yard. Imagine that, in order to keep your local trees healthy and producing, you need to actively care for your neighbors’ trees as well. What do property lines mean when pollen is blown by the wind and water runs along the path of least resistance?
This isn’t a utopian future, it’s a practical one.
It’s also a necessary one. As carbon emissions barrel unrestrained towards unthinkable atmospheric concentrations, it is clear that our window for keeping this world recognizable is diminishing quickly. The choice is clear: we can continue on with business as usual, waiting for a magical fix from technicians and politicians, watching deadline after deadline and benchmark after benchmark race past us without action, or we can begin to act together on our own. Planting hundreds of fruit and nut trees in Olympia is only a small step, but it’s a necessary one. We can begin to plant, together, the trees and habits and practices we will need to thrive collectively in the future.
2020 Plan
This year we are focusing on planting hundreds of chestnut, hazelnut, walnut, and heart nut trees that we have propagated from seed. We are looking for homes for all of these trees—front yards, abandoned lots, community gardens, schools, etc.
We are also actively collecting cuttings, seeds, and space in order to propagate a wider variety of fruit and nut trees for plantings next year. We hope that this project serves as one of many ways for people to connect with each other, share resources, skills, and knowledge, and begin having longer term conversations about how we all want to live together in the future.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Trees?
Establishing resilient, carbon-negative sources of food is urgent and necessary. In addition to providing food, habitat, and shade, trees act as carbon sinks, sequestering atmospheric carbon in the soil and removing it from the atmosphere. A recent scientific study found room for an additional 0.9 billion hectares of forest on the planet, which could subsequently sequester 25% of the current carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Does Many Trees plant only native plants?
We love native plants, and are inspired by the long history of indigenous peoples tending the forests of this region to produce bountiful harvests. We are interested in planting native plants, but also want to plant a wide diversity of trees, especially ones that may thrive in a changing climate. So yes, we plant native plants, and yes, we plant domesticated cultivars and plants from other bioregions.
What is Food Autonomy?
We think people should have access to the means of subsistence, that food should not only be free and abundant but should feed people’s cultures and traditions, and that food is not just about a certain caloric intake but about how we connect with the planet and with each other. Food autonomy means sources of food that are autonomous from the demands of the market and from dependencies on industrial agriculture and long-distance supply chains. It means that we have to develop the means to feed ourselves and feed each other in order to imagine other ways of living together on a changing planet.
Why Now?
Estimates vary, but most experts agree that our window of opportunity to avert catastrophic climate change is vanishing quickly. A UN study found that we have 11 years to transform the earth, and our habits, if we want a chance at averting crisis. Another study, from former heads of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, found that we have until 2020 to avert the worst impacts of climate change. With three months to go, we are not optimistic that politicians and wealthy investors will solve the problem for us. This means that we must anticipate climate catastrophe, and begin acting now to develop infrastructure, protect functioning ecologies, and grow food systems for future generations. If the governments and the wealthy won’t act, it’s up to us to do whatever we can.
What does it mean to plant in anticipation of climate change?
We’re no experts, but we believe that now is the time to begin experimenting with a much wider variety of food sources. Our wager is that increasing the biodiversity of perennial food production is the best way to become resilient in the face of an uncertain future. This means planting trees now that will only begin bearing in 10 or 20 years, cultivating ecosystems that can sequester large amounts of carbon, and experimenting with both traditional and unlikely sources of perennial food. We believe that the disaster of climate change offers us an opportunity to imagine a more beautiful, more abundant, more biodiverse life. We know that business can’t continue as usual, and we see that as an opportunity, not a curse.
Will This Make a Difference?
Will planting 1,000 trees avert climate crisis, stop rising seas from flooding Olympia, and cool the planet? No. But it might help to develop a shared sense of abundance, start neighborhood conversations about climate change and sharing resources, and remind people that, when their trees depend on pollination from a neighbor down the block, that ecosystems don’t end at property lines. And why stop at 1,000?
What does climate science predict for Olympia and the PNW?
Predictions of future climate change impacts vary wildly, but everyone agrees that USDA plant hardiness zones are moving north. On the low end, NOAA estimates an average shift of USDA plant hardiness zones of 13 miles per decade, while high end predictions estimate that the Olympia area will be as warm as Southern Oregon or even Sacramento, CA by 2050. This means we can anticipate more pests and diseases, that some trees and plants that depend on freezing temperatures during the winter may not thrive, but also that other trees more accustomed to warmer climates may begin to produce well here. We can also generally anticipate warmer, wetter winters, which means less snowpack and more flooding in the winter, and hotter drier summers. While flooded fields and drought aren’t conducive to conventional agriculture, wetlands, estuaries, and saltwater marshes are historically highly biodiverse sources of abundant food. We don’t know what will happen, but we suspect that growing edible landscapes, removing dams, and restoring estuaries will do more in the long run than sea walls and chemical fertilizers.