Just Keep Planting: Turning Wasteland into Forest

A marvelous example of determination towards making the world a better place


When Paul was a boy growing up in Utah, he happened to live near an old copper smelter. The sulfur dioxide that poured out of the refinery had made a desolate wasteland out of what used to be a beautiful forest. When a young visitor one day looked at this wasteland and saw that there was nothing living there no animals, no trees, no grass, no bushes, no birds ... nothing but fourteen thousand acres of black and barren land that even smelled bad well, this kid looked at the land and said, This place is crummy. Little Paul knocked him down. He felt insulted. But he looked around him and something happened inside him. He made a decision: Paul Rokich vowed that some day he would bring back the life to this land.

Years later Paul was in the area, and he went to the smelter office. He asked if they had any plans to bring the trees back. The answer was No. He asked if they would let him try to bring the trees back. Again, the answer was No. They didnt want him on their land. He realized he needed to be more knowledgeable before anyone would listen to him, so he went to college to study botany.

At the college he met a professor who was an expert in Utahs ecology. Unfortunately, this expert told Paul that the wasteland he wanted to bring back was beyond hope. He was told that his goal was foolish because even if he planted trees, and even if they grew, the wind would only blow the seeds forty feet per year, and thats all youd get because there werent any birds or squirrels to spread the seeds, and the seeds from those trees would need another thirty years before they started producing seeds of their own. Therefore, it would take approximately twenty thousand years to revegetate that six-square-mile piece of earth.


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When I was a child I was told by my 5th grade teacher that Lake Erie (one of the Great Lakes) in Ontario was completely dead due to decades of pollution, that no plants or fish lived in its depths and that none ever could. 20 years later I heard on the news that fish had been found living in Lake Erie.

About a month ago I saw a special on PBS about the wolves and other wildlife that now thrive in the "exclusion zone" around the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in the former city of Pripyat--an area of Ukraine and Belarus that does not have any marked roads on maps or Google Earth. Yet in 1986 the Soviet people gave up on that piece of land. It is still a poisoned place, but some creatures can not only survive, but thrive there.

My Dad grew up during the 40s and 50s near a town in the Kootenay region of BC centered on huge metal smelters that poured out toxic smoke for generations--the mountainsides of the valley were completely denuded of trees and vegetation. My hubs worked in that same town while on a university co-op job back in the 80s and the forests had come back--on their own--and we have camped in a beautiful Provincial Park in the area with our kids.

This planet has amazing abilities to heal itself, despite the actions of humans. We're just one species on this planet, and take ourselves far too seriously--both when we do what we perceive to be good as well as what is bad for our environment. We do not know the true result of any of our actions, the earth is far too old for us to measure our real impact.

That said, my belief has always been that it is best to walk as lightly as possible on the earth.

our earth is a living planet and more resilient than we think. Only thing if we care it, earth will respond

Great example. A lot of us here try to tread lightly. Most of us could do more, though, including myself. :/