Protecting the earth’s nearly 4 billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health, an important foundation for the new economy. Reducing rainfall runoff and the associated flooding and soil erosion, recycling rainfall inland, and restoring aquifer recharge depend on simultaneously reducing pressure on forests and on reforestation.

There is a vast unrealized potential in all countries to lessen the demands that are shrinking the earth’s forest cover. In industrial nations the greatest opportunity lies in reducing the quantity of wood used to make paper, and in developing countries it depends on reducing fuelwood use.

The rates of paper recycling in the top 10 paper-producing countries range widely, from China and Finland on the low end, recycling 33 and 38 percent of the paper they use, to South Korea and Germany on the high end, at 77 and 66 percent. The United States, the world’s largest paper consumer, is far behind South Korea, but it has raised the share of paper recycled from roughly one fourth in the early 1980s to 50 percent in 2005. If every country recycled as much of its paper as South Korea does, the amount of wood pulp used to produce paper worldwide would drop by one third.

The use of paper, perhaps more than any other single product, reflects the throwaway mentality that evolved during the last century. There is an enormous possibility for reducing paper use simply by replacing facial tissues, paper napkins, disposable diapers, and paper shopping bags with reusable cloth alternatives.

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The devastating aftermath of this depletion and its toll on the environment should call for another cheaper, plentiful and vastly accessible source of energy on the continent.

Solar cooking is now taking root in Africa more than ever before. Solar cooking projects are springing up on the continent mostly spearheaded by local cooperatives and non-profits working with rural women to assemble cheap solar cookers. Which works for environment.

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As described by SolarCooking.org and its sponsor, SolarCookers.org (a much more visually appealing site, by the way), solar cooking is the "simplest, safest, most convenient way to cook food without consuming fuels or heating up the kitchen." But while it might be a convenience for those of us in the developed world, solar cooking is, as the site says, a blessing to millions of people around the world who don’t have the luxury of fresh, clean running water, a safe gas- or electric-powered stove, or money to throw away for precious cooking fuels.

That’s what makes SolarCooking.org and SolarCookers.org such rewarding resources: here you’ll find more information than you could possibly imagine about the history of solar cooking, how to make a solar cooker (with some instructions available not only in English but in languages like Arabic, Portuguese, Persian, Urdu, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Catalan, Kikongo and Tshiluba), solar cookbooks, a solar cooking wiki, an RSS news feed, a PowerPoint presentation, and, well, pretty much all things related to how to cook food or purify water using the power of the sun.

All of this knowledge comes courtesy of Solar Cookers International (SCI), a 10-year-old non-profit based in California. Since its start, SCI has worked to help thousands of people in refugee camps in places like Chad, Ethiopia and Kenya build simple, often portable, solar cookers that help their lives in many ways. It’s a beautiful concept that not only eliminates the ecological damage caused by traditional wood or dung cooking fuels (which contribute to deforestation, pollution and climate change), but helps free some of the world’s most disadvantaged people from the time, costs and risks often associated with the simple act of acquiring fuel to cook a meal.

Among the benefits of solar cooking: it’s a free power source for families who might otherwise spend 25 percent or more of their income on cooking fuel; it’s a method that doesn’t burn food, so people can spend their time doing other tasks rather than just watching a cooking pot; it can sanitize dishes and kill insects in grains; and it can pasteurize milk and water, which is a huge plus in the developing world, where waterborne diseases are blamed for 80 percent of illnesses and deaths. If all that sounds too good to be true, SolarCooking.org and SolarCookers.org make it abundantly clear that’s not the case.

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Solar Ovens Provide Alternative to Cooking with Wood in Rural China

Image source: SolarCookers.org

Forest plantations can reduce pressures on the earth’s remaining forests as long as they do not replace old-growth forest. As of 2005, the world had 205 million hectares in forest plantations, an area equal to nearly one third of the 700 million hectares planted in grain. Tree plantations produce mostly wood for paper mills or for wood reconstitution mills. Increasingly, reconstituted wood is substituting for natural wood as the world lumber and construction industries adapt to a shrinking supply of large logs from natural forests.

Production of roundwood (logs) on plantations is estimated at 432 million cubic meters per year, accounting for 12 percent of world wood production. This means that the lion’s share, some 88 percent of the world timber harvest, comes from natural forest stands. Projections of future growth show that plantations can sometimes be profitably established on already deforested, often degraded, land, but they can also come at the expense of existing forests. There is competition with agriculture as well, since land that is suitable for crops is also good for growing trees. Water scarcity is yet another constraint, as fast-growing plantations require abundant moisture.

Nonetheless, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that as plantation area expands and yields rise, the harvest could more than double during the next three decades. It is entirely conceivable that plantations could one day satisfy most of the world’s demand for industrial wood, thus helping to protect the world’s remaining forests.

South Korea is in many ways a reforestation model for the rest of the world. When the Korean War ended, half a century ago, the mountainous country was largely deforested. Beginning around 1960, under the dedicated leadership of President Park Chung Hee, the South Korean government launched a national reforestation effort. Relying on the formation of village cooperatives, hundreds of thousands of people were mobilized to dig trenches and to create terraces for supporting trees on barren mountains. Today forests cover 65 percent of the country, an area of roughly 6 million hectares. While driving across South Korea in November 2000, it was gratifying for me to see the luxuriant stands of trees on mountains that a generation ago were bare. We can reforest the earth!

In Niger, farmers faced with severe drought and desertification in the 1980s began leaving some emerging acacia tree seedlings in their fields as they prepared the land for crops. As these trees matured they slowed wind speeds, thus reducing soil erosion. The acacia, a legume, fixes nitrogen, enriching the soil and helping to raise crop yields. During the dry season the leaves and pods provide fodder for livestock. The trees also supply firewood. This approach of leaving 20–150 seedlings per hectare to mature on some 3 million hectares has revitalized farming communities in Niger.

Shifting subsidies from building logging roads to planting trees would help protect forest cover worldwide. The World Bank has the administrative capacity to lead an international program that would emulate South Korea’s success in blanketing mountains and hills with trees. In addition, FAO and the bilateral aid agencies can work with individual farmers in national agroforestry programs to integrate trees wherever possible into agricultural operations.

Reducing wood use by developing more-efficient wood stoves and alternative cooking fuels, systematically recycling paper, and banning the use of throwaway paper products all lighten pressure on the earth’s forests. But a global reforestation effort cannot succeed unless it is accompanied by the stabilization of population. With such an integrated plan, coordinated country by country, the earth’s forests can be restored.

Adapted from Chapter 8, “Restoring the Earth,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.

A slideshow summary of Plan B 3.0 is available at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/presentation.htm.

Image credit: AlphaTangoBravo/Adam Baker at Flickr under a Creative Commons license