Regenerate degraded soils; Advance in cancer research

Hi Everyone, I keep saying the same thing, but I am so grateful for the warmth of the sun, the bright day, and the length of the days. I seem to have so much more time now and I love seeing all the daffodils on my walks.

This month, I want to talk about the power of trees again and their ability to regenerate degraded soils. I started reading a book called “The Man who planted Trees. A Story of Lost Groves, the Science of Trees and a Plan to Save the Planet” by Jim Robbins. I have not finished reading it yet but two things have really struck me, in what I have already read. Jim discusses a short story  called “The Man Who Planted Trees” by Jean Giono, that was published in Vogue Magazine in 1954.  Robbins describes the original book as a fable about an unnamed man hiking through the French Alps, in 1910. The unnamed man passes through a desolate, parched mountain valley where crumbling buildings indicate an abandoned settlement. He then comes across a shepherd taking his flock out to pasture. The shepherd has 100 acorns with him and he plants them as he tends his sheep.

It turns out that the shepherd had planted more than 100,000 trees in this landscape. Six years later, the unnamed man returns to the valley and is surprised to see small trees spread out as far as the eye can see. He sees water flowing in once parched streams. The wind had scattered seeds and wild flowers were growing.

As the years go by, the trees grow taller and the forest valley is transformed into a thriving ecosystem.

Jim Robbins says that many scientists don’t think this type of regeneration is possible. He originally felt the same way but has since changed his mind. Because of all the research he has done, he now thinks that “Planting trees may be the single most important eco-technology that we have to put the broken pieces of our planet back together.”

I totally agree with him and have two examples to share. One is a documentary called “Fools and Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest”. It is about a man who spends 30 years turning degraded land into a massive forest. His name was Hugh Wilson and his neighbours thought he was a fool and a dreamer. It is worth watching. As the trees grew, the water returned to the land and created a wonderful forest.

The second example is a story from CBC this week. The clip they showed was from Open Spaces, the second episode of Shared Planet, a series from the Nature of Things. The article describes how an Australian sheep farmer, who had been allowing his sheep to over graze his pastures, was devastated by a drought in the 1980’s. He had to sell part of his farm to continue farming and decided to change his way of farming. He was inspired by the herbivores in the African Savannah, moving his flock every few days to stop over grazing. Again, over a thirty-year period, he was able to transform his land into a natural grassland resistant to drought.

In the Man who Planted trees, Jim Robbins talks about 330 new diseases that have emerged since 1940. Most of them originate from wildlife:- bats (Ebola, Marburg virus, rabies, and possibly corona virus), deer (chronic wasting disease, and brucellosis, a bacterial disease), ticks (Lyme disease) are a few. He feels and there is science to support him that this is a direct result of the deforestation happening on the planet.

Robbins also discusses the Champion Tree project which was started by Davis Milarch. This is about cloning ancient trees, worldwide, in order to begin new forests with DNA from very big, ancient, healthy trees.

It sounds like a wonderful project that but is really struggling for funds.