A Pocket Full of Acorns is also the brainchild of Andrew K Fletcher.
Our long-term aim is to plant trees in arid coastal areas across the globe, but where do we need coastal trees in the UK right now?
As a small island, the UK. cannot afford to get any smaller. However in areas, such as East Anglia, the coastline is receding rapidly and the re-building and maintenance of traditional concrete defences has become economically unsustainable.
In Happisburgh for example the coastline is therefore receding at an alarming maximum rate of a metre a month – 12 metres a year! Residents’ properties, which constitute their lifetime investments and retirement security, are simply falling into the sea. Breaching of sea defences threatens flooding and salt-poisoning of flat, low-lying agricultural land upon which UK food security depends. Furthermore, along this stretch of coast is situated the Sizewell Nuclear Reactor. The catastrophe in Japan has demonstrated that nuclear reactors and seawater do not mix well.
Meanwhile, New Zealand has demonstrated that community re-vegetation of coasts, which costs very little indeed, actually cause the shoreline to rise and extend.
As well as defending the coastline against erosion, trees would help resolve the drought/deluge cycle suffered by the region. Areas in East Anglia receive lower annual rainfall than even Jerusalem. Coastal trees would help conduct much needed airborne moisture from the sea to increase rainfall over dry farmland. In cases of deluge, tree roots would help take up excess water. Further, this would demonstrate a potential path to resolving both today’s economic and environmental issues.
In practical terms, cliff faces could be sloped and the resulting rubble used to fill stainless steel gabions – inexpensive collapsible metal baskets – leaning back along the slopes. The roots of planted trees will first bind the rubble together and then bind the rubble to the coastal soil, providing economic, immediate protection, which will then grow in strength. Highly salt-tolerant species, such as Sea Buckthorn are required at the shoreline, with moderately salt-tolerant Oaks further back, followed by general trees inland.
Communities across the UK can readily be involved in gathering tree seeds and nurturing saplings in used supermarket plastic bags of soil in their gardens, for transplanting both to local woodland and to our seaside bio shield.
Help plant a National Community Garden Forest!
1. When you and your children are out walking, pick up acorns, nuts, berries, fruits and other tree seeds that you find on the ground or ripened on the lower branches.
2. Take them home and nurture them in plastic carrier bags of soil in your garden.
It really is that simple!
“You can even grow trees without even leaving your house and at any time of year – from your fruit/nut left-overs at home!
When buying apples, pears, plums, cherries, hazel nuts etc, please check that the packaging says that it has been grown in England. Supermarket staff are very helpful on this point.
To get started, all you need do is throw your fruit cores into a used plastic carrier bag of soil in your garden and let them grow. After the winter you will be able to go out and salvage very young self-seeded trees.
For more info visit: http://fredome.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/local-businesses-encouraged-to-get-involved-in-a-pocket-full-of-acorns/”
In a couple of years they will be ready to be transplanted (as permitted by authorities and under the direction of scientists) locally or taken to the seaside in order to build a ‘bioshield’ and help:
While you are out walking, please us help spot any Ash trees infected with the Chalara fungus which currently threatens a third of England’s trees.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20219649.
You can report incidences using the mobile app Ashtag http://ashtag.org/ in order to help contain the spread of the disease.
If you also spot resistant strains growing unaffected alongside infected trees, you can also help establish the resistant strains in your garden.
DON’T FORGET TO WASH YOUR BOOTS ETC AFTERWARDS, IF YOU ENTER AN AFFECTED AREA.
When everyone’s seeds are in carrier bags of soil, a huge National Community Garden Forest will have been planted!
Read on to understand just how far-reaching this project will become – potentially providing a combined solution to today’s economic and environmental issues…
Why? – the Even Bigger Picture
Self-seeded trees in parks tend to be mowed down, while those in woodland fail to thrive under the shade of the canopy. So, the saplings that you nurture and save, will not otherwise exist.
We all know that we need trees for oxygen, for their produce, as a wildlife habitat, for local environmental beauty, and for a host of other reasons.
In areas of the UK, such as Happisburgh in East Anglia, the coast is receding by a massive 12 metres a year! Concrete defences are undermined by waves and eventually crumble under the onslaught and are too expensive to maintain. England can’t afford to get smaller and smaller but sea levels are steadily rising anyway, so that our major cities, which are built near the mouths of rivers, are predicted to be underwater one day. At first sight there is no solution.
However, in New Zealand, where communities have planted vegetation on all types of coastal terrain similar to those found in the UK, the coastline instead of rising has been found to rise and extend out to sea. In West Java it has been observed and recorded that coastal trees can protect homes even from the full force of a tsunami.
But there is still more…
Sea levels are rising measurably as carbon emissions cause the earth to warm.
Think back to your school days, when you learnt about photosynthesis… Vegetation converts carbon emissions (CO2) and waste (which are both building up in the world) into food and fuel (which are becoming scarcer and therefore rocketing in price).
There is simply not enough vegetation left in the world. That leaves us with climate change and food/energy insecurity. When we first explored the great landmasses, we cleared the coastal trees to land and settle, unwittingly cutting rainforests off from their source of airborne moisture and causing massive continents to turn into vast deserts.
We need to restore the coastal trees on arid shores.
Operation OASIS plans to do this by using the ballast capacity of returning oil supertankers to transport organic, nutrient-rich treated wastewater, outfall-piped off our beaches, to turn coastal desert sands back into soil and irrigate starter tree belts. We can then implement agroforestry back inland, taking excess CO2 out of the air and growing all the food and energy crops that the world needs.
The UK could apply for international green funding, attract inward investment and become a leader and shareholder in a new world economy that will grow sustainably, restoring the environment and natural resource base in the process.
Our aim is to grow a National Community Garden Forest very quickly indeed.
Please do your own little bit to help us?
So, please help this message of hope and practical action to go viral…
Showing how global sustainability is achievable providing confidence in the future economy and environment
CONTACT US
by using the e-mail facility on the right.
or at
info@fredome.org
