Tropical Reforestation

Tree Meditation
Trees are somehow a focus for my life.  Ayurveda teaches that I should be like a tree: no-harm, no killing, no lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no intoxicants.  Simple clean food offered freely, with fresh air and rain.  And a place to stand and grow - upward and downward.

Earth molds water.  Water nourishes trees.  Trees touch the earth and feel the air.  Trees stand apart from all philosophy, and yet are subject to our philosophy, our economy.  Strange that in my job I plan the cutting of hundreds of trees from computer documents and databases. Somehow I am both, I have my roots in the reality of trees and mud, but my arms in the ethereal computer worlds of planning and economy, laws.

Can I do something to balance the world, something electronic for the trees?

Forest Reforestation
There are problems with many reforestation efforts. Monocultures that don't help local people, protests around the world against REDD+.  In Japan, people are waking up to the problem.  (Link)  The problem of monoculture or few species planted in US cities has led to invasive insect pests wiping out large areas, for example in Worcester, MA.  The International Society of Arboriculture says the goal should be to follow the 20% rule (max 20% of any genus/species).

Example solutions: Health in Harmony listen to people. They give people healthcare, pay them to plant and monitor forest.  Other groups like Eden also pay people to plant.  Trees for the Future tries to create sustainable agroforestry.  Search engine ecosia donates money to these and other organizations.

But I have concerns about cost effectiveness and the ability to scale.  TFTF has only helped a few thousand farmers in the 30 years they've been around.  But CharityNavigator rates these groups highly; they have good governance, but they may not be as effective.

Policy action to improve REDD+ payments could make a huge difference, but the scale is too big for me to think about, and maybe for anyone. There will always be problems with a system that big.  The Effective Altruism community's assessment of Coalition of Rainforest Nations (CoRN) tries in vain to wrap their analysis around policy.  Policy is just too amorphous to apply straightforward risk and return.

WRI's Global Forest Tracker (10 year report on deforestation) will be important to measure and monitor leakage.  Mondabay also has good rainforest statistics page.

WRI supports restoration with venture capital as a way to scale, it is unclear how this makes money. they speak in corporate-ease, another example of how the real work is in board rooms or on the ground? Its hard to tell.

Ecosia has nice on-the-ground videos showing the work they support.

Conclusion
I need to research more, learn more.  Restoration is a passion project for me, but to be professional it may need to be something like WRI or EDF. But i'm not a corporate person, being in the field is what inspires me.  Maybe, like a tree, I can grow from the earth and reach into board rooms?

Maps of Puerto Rico

Tropical Agroecosystems

Tropical Agroecosystems: These habitats are misunderstood by the temperate zones, mismanaged by the tropics. Janzen 1973. Science.

What tropical countries so rarely grasp is the fact that agriculture in the temperate zone countries evolved (and is still evolving) from short-term exploitation to sustained-yield agriculture while operating off a much larger natural capital than the tropical countries possess.

...social rather than technological environment is at fault...(because of side-by-side comparisons)

The plea for technological advance gives the scientific community a perfect excuse to continue their reductionist and esoteric approaches rather than to put their efforts into the far more frustrating task of generating sustained-yield tropical agroecosystems...

...tropical people are no more interested in spending all their waking hours picking beetles of bean bushes and transplanting rice by hand than they are. High-yield tropical agriculture requires immense amounts of very accurate hand care or tremendous amounts of fossil fuel, or both...

Most of the lowland tropics would be classified as marginal farmland...there is no biological reason that the capacity to support human life should be evenly distributed over the earth's surface, nor why is should be correlated with the primary productivity of natural ecosystems or with the biomass (standing crop) of these ecosystems.

If one wishes a high yield from a particular site, year-0round warmth necessitates complex fallow systems to deal with the weeds and insects. However, it is possible that over large areas, a much lower yield per acre in fields under continuous cultivation could produce the same average yield per acre as fallow systems.

The complex biological systems of the tropical lowlands are very easily perturbed and cannot be easily reconstituted from roadside and woodlot plants and animals, as could many North American habitats.
A great variety of horticultural practices and strains of common tropical food plants have accumulated over the centuries. They are closely adjusted to local farming conditions and coevolved with the other dietary resources of the area. When high-yield hybrids are introduced, the local strains and practices are quickly abandoned. This later lead to (i) expensive and complex programs to reevolve these strains when adjusting hybrid monocultures to sustained yield tropical agriculture, (ii) increased dependence on pesticides and complex breeding programs to keep abreast of the pest problem in single-strain monocultures, and (iii) increased imbalance in the distribution of wealth among farmers.

Tropical insects appear to develop resistance to pesticides much quicker than temperate insects.

Argues that population has increased as a result of increased cash cropping, which rewards larger families and eliminates the feedback associated with subsistence agriculture.


Well-meaning persons are constantly injecting fragments of temperate zone agricultural technology into the tropics without realizing that much of the value of these fragments is intrinsic not to the technology, but rather to the society in which that technology evolved...That the tropical country "cannot resist" these gratuities is hardly justification for giving them. [as a consequence of "development"] the land deteriorates, deserts spread or become more barren, and a greater number of people end up worse off than they were before development of the area took place.

When an experiment station is centered around a major food crop, such as rice or maize, the goal becomes one of maximizing production per acre rather than per unit of resource spent...

Costa Rican Dry and Wet Rain Forest