HanaHou!

Story by Malanie McLellan. Photos by IJfke Ridgley.

Issue 24.1 January-March 2021

For Camilo Mora, planting ten thousand trees is only the beginning

It’s nearly winter in Hawai‘i but it feels like summer. On this unseasonably hot, sticky December day, hundreds of volunteers are standing in an empty field at Gunstock Ranch on O‘ahu’s North Shore, awaiting instructions.

The sun is merciless and there’s no shade—yet. But that’s why they’ve come. Their hope is that in a hundred years there will be a forest here, a lush canopy that will provide shade in which the next generation will cool themselves in what is becoming a Hawai‘i of perpetually unseasonable heat.

In the center of the group, Camilo Mora, an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, crouches low, pushing his hands into the dirt. He’s demonstrating how to plant a tree, which is more complicated than one might think—you can’t just throw seeds in a hole and hope nature will take care of the rest. Mora details seven steps—printed (perhaps ironically) on paper and distributed to volunteers. The steps must be meticulously followed, or the tree might die before it can fulfill its mission: removing tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over its lifetime. Out of every ten trees planted here today, only one is expected to survive that long—in fact, most won’t survive the first week. “You all come to make a difference the first time, but very few of you will come back,” says Mora. “So make sure you get the planting done right the first time.”

Everyone wilting in the heat watches Mora intently. Over the course of the day, some two thousand volunteers will participate. Some are here because they believe climate change is the disaster of our generation and that planting trees is part of the solution. Some are here because their partners or family brought them along, and some are here simply because they have a green thumb. But they’ve all been rallied here by Mora, who has planned this event for years with a single goal—to plant ten thousand trees. But that’s just for today. His lifetime goal? One million. “If every person in Hawai‘i planted just six trees, we could potentially fix climate change in the Islands,” Mora says almost pleadingly as beads of sweat run down his face. “On O‘ahu alone, seventeen thousand trees are cut down annually, and most people who live here aren’t even aware of it.” The reward for today’s project is years off, but the volunteers respond with cheers and applause. Heat or no heat, they’re up to the challenge, and they get to work.

The “Planting of Ten Thousand Trees in One Day” event was inspired by a conversation Mora had with his then seven-year-old daughter, Asryelle, about the horrors of climate change. A light bulb went off when she said simply, “Well, why don’t we just plant trees to fix it?” Well, thought Mora, why don’t we? “So I looked into it and concluded that, yes, we can reverse climate change simply by planting trees. In fact, Hawai‘i could become completely carbon neutral and be an example to the world. How cool would that be? That conversation with my daughter was divine intervention for me—it showed that we’ve had the solution in front of us the whole time.”

Mora and his daughter did some math, calculating that an average person produces roughly twenty tons of carbon dioxide over their lifetime and that every tree planted removes one to two tons in five years (some are better at this than others, like the native Hawaiian koa, which removes five tons in five years). “The project challenges people to calculate their carbon footprint with the calculator on our web site and then plant enough trees to offset that,” Mora says. Then Mora and his daughter started doing public outreach to raise awareness and inspire action. Last November, Mora and teams of volunteers planted one thousand native trees as part of UH Mānoa’s Carbon Neutrality Challenge, an initiative Mora launched to address human-caused climate change. That was a record for the number of trees planted in the Islands during a single day and proof that mass tree plantings are feasible. But scaling up to ten thousand is no easy feat.

“You’d be surprised how difficult it is to simply plant a tree. Something so natural …” he says, burying his face in his hands in frustration before reemerging to continue. “From finding land, to bureaucratic paperwork, government regulations, volunteers to give their time to keep the tree alive, money to buy materials, plotting out irrigation—the barriers are seemingly endless. But people want to help. They want to make change, but they don’t have access. A tree-planting event gives people the resources and ability to be proactive, and this project is an attempt to do that.”

Mora knows a thing or two about overcoming barriers. Born into poverty in Colombia, he yearned for a life of material comfort. He joined the army, and one night, holding a machine gun in a dark jungle a few days after a comrade had killed himself, he contemplated his own mortality and purpose. “Is this what life is about? Just trying to get ahead for money? There has to be more than that,” he thought. At that moment he decided to pursue his dream of studying science, specifically fish. He went to college, earned his bachelor’s degree in marine biology and decided to go further. After scraping together everything he had—even taking his mother’s offer to sell her only car—he bought a ticket to Australia to study with a professor at the top of his field. After e-mailing the professor for months with no response, Mora arrived on his doorsteps and said, “I want to work with you.”

“He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t think so.’ And I was devastated.” But he saw a spark in Mora and offered him a deal: If he passed the upcoming English language exam, he could join the program. With just three months until the test to learn an entirely new language, Mora ate spaghetti, slept on a hammock under a bridge and studied. And passed. His career took him to Japan and Canada, where he studied with Ransom Myers, the renowned scientist who made Fortune magazine’s list of most influential people in 2005 for his work in marine biology—specifically, the problem of overfishing. Myers died in 2007.

After the death of his mentor, Mora settled in Hawai‘i. Living in one of the most beautiful places on Earth led him to consider what would be lost, and soon, if humans were to continue on their current trajectory. “We are looking into the near future here, in our lifetime,” Mora says. “More wildfires, flooding, droughts, stronger hurricanes, which will affect our access to electricity. With these come an increase of disease. Increased temperatures can damage our bodies, our organs. Mass starvation happens when agriculture is impacted, along with making many species that depend on food crops become endangered or extinct. You’d think that would make people act, but most think someone else is going to come along and fix it, or they are uninformed or they simply don’t know what to do. I want to give people something to do, a place to do it and the materials to make it happen.

Despite his scientific bona fides and having published dozens of studies, access didn’t come easily to Mora, either. Many of the sites Mora had identified as having potential for reforestation were denied to him, with their controlling organizations fearing that such a project would fail. “No one wanted to even try. They were too afraid of public perception being negative if we didn’t succeed,” Mora says. “But then we wouldn’t even be trying, and that’s the most dangerous because failure is guaranteed.” After suffering rejection from the state government and other organizations, Mora looked to private owners, which is when the Hawaiian Legacy Reforestation Initiative stepped in. They connected Mora to the owners of Gunstock Ranch, who were willing to try. HLRI added their own touch by giving each tree a code that enables the volunteers who planted it to monitor their tree via the internet. “If you plant a tree, your children and their grandchildren will know where to find it. It’s the Legacy Forest Initiative’s way of including the concept of ‘ohana in this project,” says Mora. “It’s about coming together to make a difference and inspire those in the future to keep going.”

Mora is hardly the first to try reforestation as a means to combat climate change, and by comparison ten thousand trees—or even one million—is bush-league. The World Economic Forum launched the Trillion Trees Initiative at last year’s Climate Change Conference in Davos, Switzerland. Also last year, Ethiopia set a world record for the most trees planted in a single day—350 million. But Ethiopia had 23 million volunteers compared with the two thousand who’ve shown up at Gunstock Ranch today. Planting trees might seem like an obvious solution, but the approach isn’t without critics. Many argue that these initiatives are too ambitious and fail to account for the costs and challenges of planting and tending the trees until they’re established. Others, like climate activist Greta Thunberg, say that planting trees risks becoming a form of greenwashing, giving cover to organizations and other interests while deforestation continues unabated. Planting trees is no substitute for protecting mature forests, which are being cut down at an average rate of 28 million hectares a year—about one football field of forest lost every second, around the clock—since 2016.

But there’s little disagreement that trees —along with marine and aquatic algae—are Earth’s champions of managing carbon, and they do it far more efficiently than any existing human technology. Leaves absorb it, wood stores it and roots hold down the soil, which keeps the carbon sequestered there in place. This is critical because climate change is, in part, a result of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a by-product of burning fossil fuels. Combine rising carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution with the pace of deforestation, and Earth is left with more carbon dioxide than its total biomass of vegetation, including algae, can process. While there might be some debate about the causes and severity of climate change in political realms, scientists are nearly unanimous in the conclusion that Earth is warming up, the climate is changing, humans are the cause and if the world doesn’t act very quickly, there will be no turning back. “There are biological, climatic and social implications with climate change,” Mora says. “The time is now. This is urgent.”

At the end of the day, Mora and his volunteers planted five of the ten thousand trees they’d aimed for, all native species like koa, lonomea, wiliwili and milo. For Mora the Carbon Neutrality Challenge is as much about restoring Hawai‘i’s native ecosystems as it is about mitigating climate change. This, unfortunately, ups the ante in terms of difficulty, as native species are often less hardy than introduced trees and require more TLC to become established. “We propagated eleven thousand trees for the event,” says Mora. “Out of those, a thousand didn’t survive. Four thousand more died in the nursery waiting for permits and approval to be planted. That left us with only six thousand, one thousand of which we didn’t get into the ground in the end. Ideally, we need $100 per tree to offset delays like this and maintain the tree until it is thriving on its own.”

But Mora and Asryelle aren’t giving up. “Our ultimate goal is one million trees, despite these setbacks,” he says confidently. “The project has officially taken root now. It’s just a matter of branching out.” HH

Source: HanaHou!