My first year students are meeting with a peer mentor today so I took the chance to check out the Nest Summit Campus at the Javitz Center, part of New York Climate Week. I wanted to see David Opdyke's apocalyptic "Someday, all this" presented by the Climate Museum (images below), and taste what a gathering of ecopreneurs (a new word I learned) of the "climate solutions movement" feels like. (I also was curious to see the Javitz green roof.) I wasn't there long enough to really say, but I did catch a catchy talk by someone from Unilever on an app designed to help people reduce food waste in their refrigerators, and attended the launch of the "Seed to Forest Alliance" by an organization named Terraformation.
Global efforts as part of the UN Decade of Ecoystem Restoration to plant a trillion trees require more, and more diverse, seeds stocks than are currently available, especially if the planting is to restore native, biodiverse forests. The allied organizations on many scales, are working together to address the problem. We heard from a traditional seed collector, an advocate for restoring mangroves along the world's coasts, the director of a digital hub linking 120,000 sites of "nature regeneration" across the globe, as well as the Silicon Valley engineer-turned-entrepreneur behind Terrraformation. Our moderator was from the nonprofit American Forests. The discussion was kicked off by someone from the World Economic Forum's 1t.Org, who opined that she was sure that even if someone developed a way to take all the carbon out of the atmosphere without "nature-based solutions." everyone in the room would still care about forests, right?
I do, of course, and felt buoyed by the large number of people attending the event, and the many more to whom they're connected doing this important work. And I was delighted when the moderator asked each panelist to introduce themselves and their favorite species of tree: mangrove, weeping willow, Texas ebony, strangler fig, banyan and white pine. (Actually I was given a little pause at the glee with which a strangler fig was remembered from a settler American's childhood experience in Costa Rica, its host long rotted away leaving it a delightful cylindrical ladder to the forest canopy.) Yet my readings left me noticing that the only species mentioned in the discussion were humans and the trees which matter so much to us.
