Bombing Our Way into a Greener Tomorrow
By Charlotte Creamer - Published on Friday, 12 November 2010 16:01
If you’ve ever donned industrial-strength bug repellent and headed “up north” or “out west” to plant trees (or know someone who has), “tree-bombing” might make more sense to you than to someone who hasn’t suffered the slings and arrows and mozzies and aching lower back that tree planter’s flesh is heir to. And, no – tree-bombing doesn’t mean taking revenge on trees for the low pay and poor working conditions tree planters are traditionally subjected to – it means carpet-bombing deforested or remote areas with baby trees from a retrofitted C-130 military transport plane, like a giant delivery stork accidentally on purpose dropping its precious load.
Just imagine – baby trees, millions of them, dive-bombing from on high like prickly little green meteors. But instead of exploding on impact and radiating the environment with harmful cosmic rays, the baby trees self-plant by force of gravity and immediately start to cleanse the air around them.
Or so the theory goes.
Tree bombing is the brain-child of British wag and former Royal Air Force pilot, Jack Walters, who published his idea in a scientific paper some four decades ago. Not surprisingly, such a novel use for aging war planes raised more eyebrows and giggles than cash and supporters, and the project gathered dust in the “impossible dreamers” file until the turn of this century, when US manufacturer Lockheed Martin Aerospace decided it wasn’t as “technologically infeasible” as first imagined. In fact, Lockheed jumped into the project feet first, deeming Walter’s scheme as the ideal way to breathe new life into outmoded military planes while at the same time capitalizing on the dawning of the Age of Green. Lockheed intends to rent out the planes to companies who want to raise their environmentally-friendly profile. What better way to green your brand than to plant a forest-full of new trees in a day?
Peter Simmons, a Lockheed rep, enthuses over the potential. “These planes can fly at 1,000 feet, at 130 knots, planting more than 3,000 [trees] a minute in a pattern across the landscape – just as we did with landmines…. That's 125,000 trees for each sortie and 900,000 trees in a day." Simmons calculates that upwards of a billion baby trees can be planted each year, or enough to reforest (or forest for the first time) 3,000 square miles.
But what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down the way it was intended. Swaddled in their metal diaper “cones”, the baby trees must be dropped at just the right height to ensure they imbed in the ground at the same depth as if they’d been hand-planted. Each cone contains fertilizer and a material that soaks up surrounding moisture. Though made of metal, the cones biodegrade immediately, allowing the tree to put down roots. However, the biggest problem is not the planting depth or moisture retention but getting the saplings to survive the shock of impact. While heralded with great fanfare, the initial tree-bombing pilot program was not expanded, and the idea remains a work in progress.
So take heart, all you current and wanna-be tree planters – your jobs are still safe and the mozzies await you. Unless, of course, someone gets the bright idea to ditch the C-130s, load up a hot air balloon, and drop the weighted saplings from tree-canopy height…. Up, up, and away!