Do you ever think about the quality of the air you breathe?
The oxygen we breathe is something we take for granted as its something that our body does on autopilot, but what if there were no trees?
If we could survive at all, someone would have to invent and develop a clever gas mask that manages to capture and filter what oxygen is left in the air and they'd definitely only be a small fraction of the world population left.
Isn't that a scary thought?
And this is just one of the many reasons trees should be of utmost importance to everyone of us and why we should spend a little time dedicated to saving them.
Trees are essential in maintaining the quality of air, as they are part of Earth's crucial carbon cycle. The mass of a tree is not built from the nutrients from the soil, but the greenhouse gas C02 it pulls from the air. Trees cleverly take the C02, process it and do something really awesome, they take away the C and they release the 02 part back out.
Trees are truly amazing organisms as they take out poisonous C02 from the air and turn it into a form that doesn't create chaos in our climate. They lock away the C02 in their leaves, trunks and roots.
When rainforests, or any forests or trees for that matter, are burnt the C02 that the trees have stored is released right back into the atmosphere.
One mature leafy tree can create as much oxygen in a season to support the breathing requirements of 10 people for a whole year.
Here is some math for you...
There are 400 billion trees on earth and the the population of the world is 6.7 billion, which means every person has 60 trees to rely on.
How much oxygen do you think that we will have if the population keeps growing and the trees keep decreasing?
It won't be long before those numbers become critical.
But you should also know...
It's not just C02 that they cleanse from the air...
Trees really are soldiers on the environmental frontline.
They don't just remove carbon, they get rid of a whole lot of other unpleasant stuff, you would not want to breathe in.
On top of C02, trees also absorb pollutants like carbon monoxide, sulfer dioxide and nitro dioxide through the respiration process. This process lowers the air temperature – it could be up to 12 F with no trees.
There are so many objects in our homes and workplaces, as well as the construction materials used to make them that emit pollutants like trichloroethylene, benzene and formaldehyde, to name a few. Plants and particularly trees use a process called phytoremediation to rid the air of these toxins by absorbing them, pushing them down to their roots, where the toxins are broken down by microbes.
On top of this, trees can cleanse the air by intercepting tiny airborne particles by depositing them on the underside of their leaves.
These tiny particles of dust can become entrenched in our lung tissue and lead to respiratory infections and asthma.
Recently, the World Health Organisation stated that air pollution (indoors and outdoors) causes 7 million deaths each year and is the number one environmental cause of death in the world. Just imagine how high this number could go if trees disappeared completely from our world.
Let's all make saving trees a part of our day and at the same time we will be improving our world. I wrote this post what seems many moons ago about little simple things we can do to save trees everyday: @hopehuggs/save-a-tree-before-tea-time-some-simple-things-we-can-do-to-treat-our-trees-like-kings
Here is a beautiful story by Mita Myhal and her own journey to a love of trees:
“Sunlight drapes itself on this little tree, amorously dripping from scarlet petals to green leaves. Who could have ever imagined a dry little piece of brown wood, picked up randomly and tossed in the air for a game of catch, had so much life in it?
I had brought it home without much thought and left it lying on the coffee table. It was a glorious hot summer afternoon and my mother brought me some freshly squeezed lemon juice with ice and a sprig of mint to quench my thirst.
She saw the piece of wood and her eyes lit up and she thanked me for bringing it for her. Embarrassed, I tried to tell her it was just a dead branch someone must have wrenched off a tree.
She would hear none of it! She showed me the end where it still looked a little green and told me, all this needs is a little care and a lot of love. I almost felt bad for her, thinking this time she might just be disappointed with this one.
I forgot about that piece of wood. I lived in a different city than my mother’s and had been visiting her during my holidays. Once I left and got back to my every day work routine, I got busy with my life and even though I loved having trees and plants around me, I had someone else water them every morning.
I used to get a lot of potted plants and if one died, I used to just replace it with another. I did not have my mother’s green thumb, nor did I have her evergreen spirit. She loved nature and I grew up watching her care for all the plants as if they were her children.
But they are, she used to laugh and tell me! Can’t you see? Just as we all are Mother Nature’s children, the plants are ours. Every life is precious, every life has soul, and every soul is a gift from God. When we tend to another life, another soul, we serve God by helping him preserve his creation.
A few months later, I went to visit her again. When it was time for me to leave, with suppressed excitement, she said she wanted me to take back something with me.
She held my hand and led me to the balcony. There, in a mud brown earthen pot, was a plant, barely two feet, defiantly sprouting tiny leaves of the tenderest green I’d ever seen. I looked at her, too emotional to utter a word and she just smiled and nodded.
Yes, it was that little piece of wood I had thought was lifeless. Keep this with you, she said. She taught me how beautiful it was to believe, to nurture, to breathe hope where there was none and to realize the abundance of nature also lay within our hearts.
My mother passed away some years back, but the plant, a bountiful bougainvillea, has grown to be a mid-sized tree and has the prettiest scarlet flowers all year round. Since then, I have been growing and nurturing and saving as many plants and trees as I can. And, at those magical moments, when the sunlight is at play, I can feel my mother smiling down at me.”
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