Pocket Full of Acorns – Phase 1 Instructions
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!
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:
- reduce serious coastal erosion
- tackle the drought/deluge cycle
- support our food security by protecting low-lying agricultural land prone to flooding and salt-poisoning, should sea defences be breached as sea levels rise
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.
And it all starts with these little seeds that you collect…
For more information please visit http://fredome.wordpress.com/our-vision/
