Desertification in Africa; how trees can reverse environmental damage
"Every year, human industry sends about nine billion tons of carbon into the air. An acre of trees, planted in the desert, could pull two to three tons of that carbon back down. ' Multiplied by five billion, we have solved the problem,'" Hoff said. [author of article goes on} ...Five million acres is an area twice the size of Europe. Even if all of it could be reforested, the trees would gradually stop sequestering carbon as they matured. Still, the benefits would be dramatic...... ...
And the Chinese have outdone everyone. Since 1982, they have planted more than forty billion trees, many of them in nearly three-thousands-mile strip along the sourthern edge of the Gobi Desert. ...By 2020, the Chinese plan to add aother hundred million acres of trees--an area larger than Germany." , p 113 [Pieter Hoff, Dutch inventor in Oman to test an experimental tree-planting device]
..In the past century, over most of the globe, the amount of dust in the air has doubled." 112
.."Worldwide, more than a billion acres of forests could be regenerated naturally, according to World Resources Institute." p.119
Burkhart Bilger, The Great Oasis: Can Wall of Trees Stop the Sahara from Spreading." The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011, 112.