There is only one goddess Gaia and Al Gore is her only prophet...

[kandrathe]

What you can do personally is great. But, contra the hippies, the earth is not going to be saved one person at a time. You could have a million, ten million, a hundred million, even a billion people doing their best to save the environment, and yet still have their efforts more than washed out by pollution elsewhere in the system.

I have a couple of thoughts here. Leading is best done from the front of the pack, and I want to instill the same values of citizenship into my children. I have tended to question the status quo, but I sense that most (95%) of people do not.

Our government controlled and run education system has extended the adult political stalemate into the education of children where they are mostly taught to parrot the progressive mind set. Rather, children need to be taught that each of us is a cog in the larger wheel responsible for the outcome of the whole. Also, there are corporate and government environmental issues that also must be dealt with, which "exposure", both good and bad, seems to help handle. Our expectations of products and services should be that they are produced and distributed according to our shared values. However, people are also very trusting of propaganda, both from corporations, and the State. State and Federal governments are actually the largest polluters, but are not held to account for their negative actions against their own citizenry. So teach the children better citizenship, and raise our expectations of what each of us must do to "Save the Planet" and create a sustainable future.

Another step is to address levels of unsustainable consumption at the corporate and State level. It matters little what the commodity is in question, but when the wall is hit (demand exceeds supply) then shortage and crisis will follow. You can choose one (e.g. Oil, Iron, Copper, Food, Molybdenum, Uranium) and follow through what happens with the known supply vs demand curve and when the "crisis" occurs. It would seem the intelligent action would be one where this sustainable future is planned, rather than driven by the profit motive or more primal urges.

A solution has to be systemic, or close enough that it doesn't make a difference. If there's someone cutting down forests in equivalence to the ones being planted, then there's no gain. And there's almost always a short-term economic incentive to cut down a forest, be it in British Columbia or Brazil. Until that damage incorporates the costs, people are going to keep doing it. They're doing it now, despite the hippies asking nicely (and not-so-nicely) for decades. You'd need about a thousand Arbor Days a year to match a farmer torching rain forest for grazing land.

It's hard to influence your children, let alone your neighbor, but the citizens of other nations would be even harder still. We somehow need to stop deforestation both here and elsewhere, in North America it has been done by Federal and State Forestry, allocating huge areas as National Parks, and by teaching farmers better agricultural practices.

The moment the trees are cut down, or burned, or die, and the land returns to an unforested state, the carbon sequestered there is on its way back into the atmosphere. Only permanent forests sequester carbon. I don't know how rows of windbreaks vs. forested area works in terms of sequestration - I'd suspect it would be lower, since you don't have a large layer of decay sinking down into the soil. But I'm no forest ecologist. I'm sure planting is better than not planting, but I'm really not seeing this as a solution to an entire industrial economy running on fossil fuels for everything from heating to transportation to production

No, not when they are cut. Only if they are burned or rot. Forests do not need to be permanent, but the wood should be sequestered in permanent structures. So, cutting down, and replanting forests to build permanent wooden structures in formerly unforested areas would sequester more than the permanent forest alone. What we do is a small thing compared to the amount of consumption, pollution, or release of CO2 even along the roadways we "reforest". But, then again, how many people really understand their actual "ecological debt"?