Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

In marginalized communities from Appalachia to Afghanistan, the world‚ poor, often victims of climate change, are learning how to grow better futures for themselves while growing and protecting over 50 million hectares of trees. 

In each case, marginalized people are self-motivated to act (to diversify crops, grow income, feed their families). A method, SEED-SCALE, guides their action to improve their lives. They learn how to advance their communities alongside nature conservation. Teaching this process has been the work of Future Generations for the past three decades.

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People can be told to plant trees or protect the environment, but conservation action is limited when poor people are struggling to survive. It requires empowerment. Detailed above are investments (some, millions of dollars) revealing minimal continuing cost; financial investments leveraged human energy investment. 

Empowerment scales up by people getting life-improving benefits. This work is led by diverse leaders reflective of the communities where momentum is underway ‚ as seen in the Leadership Team members above. 

At the base of Mount Everest, where trees could not grow previously, a day was needed to scrounge firewood. Now solar cookers cook, solar lights open the night. The trees started were not for firewood‚Äîbut for leaves to feed yaks. The trees may in time be used for wood as woodlots expand, now they are a vertical hayfield; leaves collected each fall, to feed animals over the Tibetan winter so they‚ ll be strong for spring planting. Tree awareness was re-framed. 

A second frame extended to trees saving cities downstream on the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, and Brahmaputra Rivers. In the gorges of these rivers off the Tibetan Plateau is one-seventh of China‚ national timber reserves‚ÄîChina was clearcutting, 350 army trucks daily transporting to China‚ economic expansion. This project used grey media to convey how cutting in river gorges endangered the heartland of China. Videos to TV stations showed the potentials of trees, ecosystem dynamics, even of mushrooms in the understory. 
Downriver on the Brahmaputra is India‚ remote state: Arunachal Pradesh. Slash and burn agriculture was underway. Bill McKibben had seen the Everest and Four Great Rivers impacts; he describes how he saw empowerment grow in India, Future Generations and government officials had been talking about something new, a ‚ community biosphere reserve,‚ where the locals would keep their title to the land but also work out a conservation scheme ‚Ä¶. SEED-SCALE goes like this ‚Ä¶ development is not a product, not a target, not some happy future state ‚Ä¶. It‚ a process, measured not in budgets but in energy ‚Ä¶ Change happens because of how we invest our human energy. (Bill McKibben Deep Economy: pp.212 & 214-15). 
Appalachia once held Earth‚ greatest temperate forests, cut in America‚ first century to build East Coast cities. Land then was dug up for Appalachia‚ coal. (Lost was a carbon sequestering engine, and a carbon production one started.) By this century, Appalachia was being logged again. Farms were being foreclosed as mortgage payments were missed with no revenue in winter. Future Generations identified West Virginia was utilizing one percent of its maple trees, with potential to equal Vermont‚ production. Technologies were introduced. Tree types were identified not found in Vermont: sycamore, black walnut, black birch. Walnut syrup sells for $250/gallon ten times the already lucrative maple. Future Generations also co-founded the Southern Syrup Research Institute, expanding the growing of multiple tree types without cutting them down.

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