How To Grow A Tiny Forest Anywhere - Shubhendu Sharma

Source: TED

A forest planted by humans, then left to nature’s own devices, typically takes at least 100 years to mature. But what if we could make the process happen ten times faster? In this short talk, eco-entrepreneur (and TED Fellow) Shubhendu Sharma explains how to create a mini-forest ecosystem anywhere.

Related article: Industrial engineer quits job to plant mini-forests everywhere – http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/industrial-engineer-quits-job-plant-mini-forests-everywhere.html

“From Van Jones to Majora Carter, TED has brought us some inspiring environmental heroes and important perspectives.

But any time a speaker starts talking too much about “new” methodologies or solutions for the pressing environmental problems we face, I try to keep a critical head on my shoulders. (The temptation to look for silver bullets can be pretty strong in times like these.)

So when I read a blurb for a TED talk by industrial engineer Shubhendu Sharma, an industrial engineer who quit his job at Toyota to plant “mini-forests” populated entirely by native species which he claims are 30 times denser than a plantation, and grow 10 times faster than a naturally recurring forest would, I confess I was skeptical.

Based on the reforestation techniques of Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, Sharma’s for-profit business Afforrestt grows mini-forests on barren land at locations ranging from schools to police stations to residential buildings. The idea, he says, is to turn restoring and reforesting large parts of the world into a significant industry.

Here’s how he described the proposition in an interview with Ozy:

“Social entrepreneurship is overhyped,” said the 2014 TED fellow. Instead, he wants to make afforestation — the transformation of bare land into forest — a full-fledged industry that “should be taken as seriously as building roads and making software.”

The specifics of the Miyawaki method appears to be based around intensive nursery cultivation of key native species, careful selection of species to include pioneer plants that will support the growth of other species, as well as unusually dense planting and the use of organic soil amendments where necessary. The methodology has already been used to in massive reforestation schemes in Thailand, Japan and India, and Sharma is adding his engineer’s mind to expand the methodology to small-scale, often urban applications. Among Afforrestt’s own innovations are an open source platform for learning the methodology and selecting species appropriate for your own bioregion, as well as hardware for remote soil monitoring and diagnosis…”