A budget for the Age of Global Restoration
As the UK government clutches at straws for evidence of economic recovery, we reiterate our warning: global economic decline is the inevitable and logical result of resource depletion.
We must therefor deploy all our knowledge of nature and technological skill to actively and wisely invest in our shared Natural Capital. In short we must restore the Earth.
Thankfully all around the world people are gathering together to rebuild their local ecologies, led by forward thinking organisations such as The Savory Institute. Is this part of a major trend?
Rainbow over restored grass land in Africa (The Savory Institute)
Two years ago I was stunned by the FREdome Youth Team who claimed a new age was about to dawn:
‘The Age of Global Restoration’.
It was a then-16 year-old Tara Gibbins-Klein who introduced the idea at the opening of our second Parliamentary meeting, March 2012. Please view this short video clip:
I, along with many others, support the ambitious, creative, and beautiful concept of Operation OASIS: a climate change reversal and carbon cycling solution for global recovery.
In time, it will restore arid environments to make them lush, green, productive and sustainable – again.
Let’s make environmental investment an essential requirement of our economics. ‘Economic’ means ‘household management’ in Greek. What’s the point in the ‘nomics’ (management), if you have no home to live in?
Could Operation OASIS could help kickstart Global Restoration?
Suzanne Watts
FREdome Visionary
Save our Shores! Crack appears along Birling Gap
The 9 m crack at Birling Gap (Source: Geograph)
The BBC reports a large crack has appeared along a cliff top at Birling Gap:
The popular coastal attraction has suffered seven years’ worth of erosion in two months.”
Our Isle has been shrinking significantly this winter. Cliff falls like this one at Hastings not uncommon.
The old coastguard cottages are being taken one-by-one. Some local people think defences should be built… But for now Nature is being left to take its toll.
Is anything being done to stop coastal erosion?
Should anything be done?
Surely, where something can be done – it should be done?
Find out more about our proposal to rebuild vulnerable parts of the British coastline – using nature’s own defences.
http://www.fredome.org/save-our-shores/save-our-shores-home
Citizen power to save trees
A citizen science study, involving more than 3,500 people, has revealed the spread and establishment of the horse chestnut leaf-miner in the UK according to a recent report by Mark Kinver for the BBC*
Our own initiative http://www.spreadtrees.com is a citizen-led project to plant saplings to defend our coastline against further erosion: 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.
Please help by collecting seeds and registering them at http://www.spreadtrees.com
* View report by Mark Kinver Environment reporter at BBC News
‘Plant trees to stop flooding’
Britain should turn swathes of its upland pastures into woodland to help prevent flooding, according to a former environment minister, Lord Rooker. He said new forests would slow flooding by trapping water with their roots.
The idea of “rewilding” the uplands is catching on as parts of Britain face repeated flooding.
Find out more about this story at the BBC website
Read this supporting Environment Agency research paper at the River Management Blog
Our project – www.SpreadTrees.com – aims to involve the community in tree planting in reforesting vulnerable coastal areas to improve soil, absorb water, encourage tree growth and stabilise climate
George Monbiot in the Guardian: Flood policies wreck homes and lives
Every year billions are spent in Britain and Europe on policies that wreck homes and lives through flooding, says George Monbiot writing in the Guardian on Monday 13 January, 2014 Jump to comments (836)
BBC report on sea level threat to Wales
Coastal communities in Wales face being abandoned as rising sea levels mean the cost of maintaining defences can no longer be justified, BBC Wales can reveal.
View video and report transcript on the BBC website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-26125479
Given that the amount of energy from the sun on the Earth’s surface is a constant and the Earth’s water is also relatively a constant, water evaporation into the atmosphere should not change.
We know that losses of arable and fertile land through desertification is expanding along with the immense deserts which are already over 1/3rd of our land.
This does not take into account all of the land we have built on, tarmac’ed / concreted over.
We can see Australia, Southern Europe, United States, and other countries affected by more extreme weather events year after year. Forest fires raging in one region and flash floods in another are by no means happening in isolation.
In fact as one land becomes tinder dry through lack of rainfall another becomes flooded through an excess of rainfall.
This should sound alarm bells. Rainfall patterns are changing and so is our climate.
The only way to reverse this trend is to address desertification and the only way to address desertification is to restore the forests that once covered these massive expanses of barren uninhabitable lands.
What happens in one country is not disconnected to what is happening elsewhere and we need to wake up.
Find out more at http://www.fredome.org/operation-oasis/operation-oasis-home
Get Brownie points for going Green
PRESS RELEASE
The SpreadTrees website promotes our Pocketful of Acorns project
You can help plant a national forest this autumn, without even leaving your home!
In the process you will win green credentials for yourself and your chosen organisation, whilst helping a combined solution to today’s economic and environmental issues!
Just how worthwhile is all that?
The Herts Green Award-winning FREdome Visionary Trust has just launched a campaign to encourage you to scoop up tree seeds, such as acorns and winged sycamore seeds, whilst walking under trees this autumn, and to mix them with soil into used plastic supermarket carrier bags or plastic plant pots that are frequently discarded, in your gardens, drives and balconies. If everyone does this and waters them occasionally, we will have a national community garden forest in no time at all, ready to be transplanted in designated sites!
We want to involve all schools in helping to plant millions of trees for future generations to enjoy. Diseases, intensive farming and storms are decimating native woodlands. Our native wildlife is rapidly running out of its natural habitats and needs your help today in order to survive.
If you won’t be walking under any trees, then you can just throw your left-over cores from English fruit and nuts into your carrier bags instead – so anyone who cares about the environment can take part.
After 2-3 years, FREdome will organise for your saplings to be collected by local volunteers and transplanted to local woodland or taken to the seaside to add to our coastal bio-shield.
Trees improve and enhance local environments and are vital to help defend the rapidly retreating coastlines and river banks in front of our prime agricultural land upon which our national food security depends. For example, particularly during stormy weather, on coasts such as in North Norfolk, shores are receding by up to a jaw-dropping 12 metres a year! People’s property and land is simply falling into the sea. As a small island, Britain cannot afford to keep getting smaller.
The Pocket Full Of Acorns idea behind community tree planting is the brainchild of engineer, Andrew K Fletcher. As he points out, we can even save properties near eroding cliffs almost immediately. Collapsible stainless steel metal baskets (gabions) can be filled with stones or rubble. Coastal soil can then be built up and sloped back at an angle of 30 degrees against the eroding cliffs. The roots of salt tolerant trees including sea buckthorn and sycamore planted in the sloping soil will bind the rubble to the ground, affording instant and ever-increasing protection. The angle of the slope is important to send counteracting waves back towards incoming waves.
Bryony Nierop-Reading, who lives in a house in imminent danger from the sea has been waiting desperately for this moment: “It’s been seriously depressing seeing five years of re-vegetating on my cliff frontage disappear into the sea in the recent easterly gales with repeated cliff falls leaving near vertical walls of bright yellow sand. How to get stuff growing there again to hold the cliff together is my problem now. I wish Andrew’s gabion idea had been put into practice, then there would have been a natural slope to plant on…”
Meanwhile, New Zealand has found that where communities re-plant vegetation on eroding shores, their coastlines actually rise up and extend further out. In East Java, coastal trees – where they existed – even protected buildings from the onslaught of the famous Tsunami. They can certain defend our coasts against the ravages of the North Sea.
And there’s more… The ultimate global vision is to use trees to re-connect rainforests across arid areas to coastlines, so that vast new crops can convert excess carbon emissions and waste back into food and fuel, which are in ever shorter supply and therefore rocketing in price. This has the potential to resolve both today’s economic and environmental issues.
Because it is the futures of young people that are at stake, FREdome is planning to engage, not only companies and charities, but particularly universities and schools, emphasising the rebuilding of the carbon cycle within the National Science Curriculum.
The youth representatives of our Trust would like this to usher in what they call ‘The Age of Restoration.’ And it all starts with the fruit cores that you would otherwise throw away.”
To take part, please visit www.SpreadTrees.com. You can pin your participation as trees to a Google map and feature in a league showing which individuals, organisations and UK areas have planted the most trees and invited the most people to do the same.
ENDS
Additional Information…
The FREdome Visionary Trust is a Herts-based charity, Registration Number 1147724. www.fredome.org
FREdome was a finalist for the Best Environmental Project of the Year and outright winner in the Green Communication category of the Hertfordshire Green Awards 2011.
At the end of last year (6th December 2012) the Herts Advertiser published an article “Pick up seeds and plant a forest” reporting that the Paper has teamed up with the project: http://pages.cdn.pagesuite.com/e/b/ebadb391-78b2-41c3-809f-ba150c740b0d/page.pdf. Editor, Matt Adams advised FREdome to link up with schools. Now that the interactive website is available to support this, we would like to press ahead implementing this advice by organising and inviting students, parents and teachers to a launch presentation.
FREdome launches new website www.spreadtrees.com
Our Pocketful of Acorns project has taken a quantum leap forward with the launch of a new interactive website to help people plant a new community garden forest.
The SpreadTrees website promotes our Pocketful of Acorns project
Taking part is easy
1. Pick up seeds from native trees this autumn
2. Put them in a plastic bag, take them home, and add some soil from your garden.
3. Register your action on http://www.spreadtrees.com
The project is being managed by the FREdome Visionary Trust and promoted by Business Biscotti – a business networking movement. The online database will eventually be used to help track seedling collection.
In a couple of years the resulting saplings will be ready to be transplanted in conjunction with authorities locally or taken to the seaside in order to build a ‘bioshield’ and help to reduce serious coastal erosion:
Here’s why:
- People’s homes are simply falling into the sea.
- And behind the East Anglian coastline lies flat agricultural land, upon which our nation’s food security depends.
- We cannot allow this to become salt-poisoned, ever.
The aim of The FREdome Visionary Trust is to promote Carbon Cycling projects – A Pocket Full of Acorns and Operation OASIS.
Our vision is the planting of rainforests from arid coasts in order to transform inland areas so that new agriculture can convert excess carbon emissions and waste into enough food and fuel for the world’s needs.
New website for FREdome
FREdome has a magnificent new website which has been designed to host information about our various projects, as well as a history of our achievements and aims.
Bookmark it now: http://www.fredome.org
This blog will continue to host news and announcements about carbon cycling projects:
Save our Shores
and Operation Oasis
Happisburgh’s erosion timebomb
Coastal erosion at Happisburgh, Norfolk – Photo Andrew K Fletcher
The East Anglian Daily Press reported on March 2013
Clifftop shadows, where static caravans once stood, graphically illustrate Happisburgh’s coastal erosion ticking time bomb.
The North Sea’s relentless ravages have eaten away at the holiday business at Happisburgh sending once-firm land cascading down the crumbling cliffs.
A dozen caravans have had to be hauled away from the dangerous front line to firm ground nearby.
Now the Lomax family, which owns the shrinking Manor Caravan Park site, is urgently looking for a permanent new site safer inland.
Read the rest of the article at the EDP 24 website
Andrew K Fletcher – Engineer
FREdome’s Andrew Fletcher – who drives the ‘Save Our Shores’ project says,
All around our coastline, erosion is accelerating and nothing is being done to prevent it or even slow it down. We put forward a sound logical proposition to stakeholders in Happisburgh and at a presentation in the House Of Commons, which puts forward the case for planting coastal woodland on sloped cliffs with stainless steel gabions (cages filled with stones to protect the toe of the planted slopes. This has worked in Dorset, protecting a 300 foot cliff adjacent to Naish Farm for 26 years.
Find out more about alternatives to coastal erosion at our Save our Shores Project page
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