This week is The Tree Council's 'National Tree Week' in the UK. Running from November 21st to December 3rd, the week is an 'annual tree planting celebration' marking the beginning of the winter tree planting season. This year The Tree Council, an umbrella group of tree conservation groups, are hoping to plant around a million trees with the help of over 200 schools and community groups. The BBC has also leant its support, organising a series of 'Tree Parties' as part of its 'breathing places' initiative.
The UK has suffered centuries of gradual deforestation, and is now one of the least forested countries in Europe. 80% of Britain was covered in forests at one time, and this had dwindled to around 5% by 2003. Just 20% of the UK's timber needs are met by its own forests, making us dependent on imported wood, with all the environmental risks that entails, both in unsutainable logging elsewhere, and the emissions involved in shipping. Events this year have highlighted the further importance of trees, as floods devastated large parts of the countryside over the summer. The Tree Council's Director General, Pauline Buchanan Black, makes the link: "Trees provide an effective flood break and improve water absorption, offering an excellent defence we shouldn't ignore."
As the writers of Forest Renaissance point out in their vision for British forests in 2050: "Britain still needs far more forests... for timber, as sources of renewable energy, to renew over-exploited landscapes, to bring money into rural areas, and for their aesthetic, spiritual and recreational values." They set a target of 15% by 2050, and one of the key ways of acheiving this, is through community participartion, through "reconnecting people to woodland." As people re-discover woodland, come to understand it and value it, and own it as a community, the will to reforest the UK will develop, and National Tree Week is an important experiment in that re-connection.
It's not too late to join in the National Tree Week events. Check the list and find out what's happening near you. And remember, as the old English proverb says, "he who plants a tree loves others beside himself."
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