Go out and plant a tree today and sustain life on the planet

Close to 1.4 billion people live in rural areas and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods, while an estimated 2.5 billion people are involved in full- or part-time smallholder agriculture. That is according to according to Smallholders, Food Security and the Environment — a report commissioned by the UN Environment Program-World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. 

Also, most of these are smallholders who manage approximately 500 million small farms and provide over 80 per cent of the food consumed in large parts of the developing world, particularly Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Tragically, increasing land fragmentation and pressure from a growing population has pushed them to encroaching on water towers and forested land to increase their acreage. This comes at a price with the attendant exploitation of trees for building material and firewood.

Added to this is the equally growing demand for real estate for burgeoning urban settlements. It is estimated that by the year 2050, half the world’s inhabitants will be resident in an urban setting.

That is why with today’s World Environment Day, the world must interrogate its relation to the common ecosystem so that their concrete jungles do not sound the death knell on the planet, or humanity, as we know it.

It is a day to remember the indefatigable environment warriors like the late Prof Wangari Maathai who literally laid her life down for the chance of posterity to live in a living, breathing and life-supporting planet.

Even as we know that water supports life and that every drop is an invaluable drop, it is important to also understand that it is also the one element that all mankind, fauna and flora share. With such realisation comes the resolve to conserve and jealously guard sources of our clean water, which are the forests and polar ice caps.

In Kenya, the expansive Mau Forest, source of fresh water to dozens of rivers became a national issue when thousands of settlers were ejected.

The evictees were to become an election campaign issue, but it was important that anyone living in the forest that was literally the “lungs of Kenya” find alternative accommodation.

A political solution needed to be found to a political problem regarding their eviction, but the evidence of depleted riverine systems downstream was too real to ignore.

Whether it is the First Lady Margaret Kenyatta’s launch of the Karura Forest Environmental Education Centre Auditorium, to promote and entrench forest and nature conservation education, or the annual scouts tree planting week, every tree shoot counts.

So do the corporate social responsibility events where staff plant trees or even the recent University of Nairobi’s College of Agriculture & Veterinary Services and Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research & Analysis (KIPPRA) joint tree planting at Vet Farm, Kanyariri, and today’s  commemoration of Prof Maathai’s life’s work, every tree counts.

Go out and plant a tree today.