great hi I am a long-term tree planter
and it’s great to be here today I want
to come sound nice turning down perhaps
is the sound okay okay yeah I’m a
long-term tweet banter and it’s great to
be here today but I want to be honest
with you from the start I am a complete
and utter maverick I’ve never really had
any kind of proper job I’ve basically
been moving from project to project
mostly around trees for the last 50
years or more and I now run a tropical
afforestation scheme called the
community carbon link that connects
Wales with Kenya and over there we have
about 750,000 trees planted we’re on
target to get to 1 million in two years
time now pretty soon
I’m going to be starting to make some
quite extreme claims like this you might
want to check on them you probably will
in order to do that you need to go to
our website at Carbon linked org and
there you will find a fully referenced
now a maverick lifetime of working with
trees has actually changed me and shape
to me it’s it’s given me a different
conception of trees to everybody else my
job today is to share that with you I
simply hope that by sharing this new
idea of what trees are we can offer up
some new solutions to some of the kind
of really old problems around climate
change and biodiversity loss that we
here is one that I or part of one I
planted earlier you can still see the
seedling that I put in the ground there
encapsulated within the tree it was
about this big okay now I want you to
imagine this tree growing on a Welsh
mountainside it was a spruce so think of
gigantic Christmas tree it went off
about 40 feet with the trunk and in a
dark green cylinder of needles coming
down and roots spreading out quite far
and gripping on to the ground so the
tree started off this big and then
pretty soon it became that big so my
question to you as a group is simply
this where did the stuff in the tree
come from just shout out any answer that
you think where do the nutrients come
from the soil ground well it’s that is
the kind of received wisdom so let’s
let’s see if that is in fact the case
well look at all the bits in the tree
and see where they come from water all
trees are about half water and that is
coming in through the roots from rain
which was previously water vapor or
clouds so that stuff is coming from the
atmosphere as you probably know the
carbon in the tree which typically is
about a quarter of it is coming from
carbon dioxide fixed by the leaves
during photosynthesis so clearly that is
also coming from the atmosphere now we
come on to the hydrogen and oxygen they
come into the tree mostly in the form of
water which is h2o there again they’re
coming through the roots from rain from
water vapour so you can see there’s a
pattern building up here most of its
come from the atmosphere now we come to
this little sliver that is the trace
elements they are made up predominantly
of nitrogen potassium and phosphorus
nitrogen is the biggest part of that and
that comes into the tree with the help
of leguminous bacteria and fungi around
the roots and it’s coming from little
pockets of air within the soil so even
though it’s located in
we can say that that stuff also comes
from the atmosphere
now we come on to the other trace
elements but only potassium and
phosphorus comprising less than half a
percent of the mass of a tree that is
the stuff only that’s coming from the
soil afraid that those of you shouted
out soil got it a bit wrong so we can
say that pretty much everything in a
tree is coming in one way or another
from the air even though we don’t really
conceive of it in that way and we can
look at this in Reverse you go home
you’re cold you put on your fire put a
log of wood on the fire you burn it you
get out some heat but pretty much
everything in that log goes up the
chimney as a hot gas it wants to go back
to its home in the sky after a while you
get some like weightless ashy residue
and you have to after you’ve burnt a lot
of logs you’ve got to clean out your
great so you get a pot fill it with ash
you take your pot of ash chuck it on the
soil part of ash that’s the origin in
the word potassium potash so that is
just that tiny less than half a percent
that’s going back to the ground
everything else is really going back to
the air because the tree it turns out in
fact is nothing more than solid
atmosphere but trees do something much
much more amazing than just solidify the
air through the magical process of
photosynthesis which is still not fully
understood by by our best scientists
they are somehow somehow using the light
energy from that star up there that
nearby star to to convert these
atmospheric gases into living matter
these dead atmospheric gases because the
trees are living entity so through that
process of deduction we can say that a
tree is really nothing more than
solidified vivified atmosphere I am
going to just call them sparse for short
now that’s my own little made-up math
acronym and for the next few slides
we’re gonna see some sparse one growing
out of a cliff in America as far growing
out of a rock in the desert of Boulder
one growing out of a building and
finally one growing out of the fourth
floor of a soviet-era
ferroconcrete apartment block near
Chernobyl now the thing about all these
trees is there haven’t got any soil and
the thing we have to understand is trees
don’t actually need soil because they’re
not really getting anything from the
soil because they’re getting everything
they need from the air now
trees use use sunlight to convert these
atmospheric gases into three main
materials carbohydrates which go into
the SAP of the tree and then lignin and
cellulose which together go to make the
woody tissues of the tree that stuff now
lignin and cellulose are described as
naturally occurring organic polymers
that’s what they look like in molecular
form now organic polymer is the term
that industrial chemists use for the
material that the rest of us call
plastic okay so basically plastic is
organic polymer here is the Wikipedia
definition of plastic if you doubt me
blah blah blah organic polymer so what
what I need you to understand is that
here we have some manmade organic
polymer polyethylene polythene and some
tree made organic polymer that they’re
pretty similar kind of similar
properties and that’s because they have
similar molecular structure polyethylene
is is poor thing so even though this
might be a little bit hard to take on
board it turns out the trees using that
starlight to convert this dead invisible
gas I’m holding in my hands right now
and they’re converting it into a kind of
living plastic now I know that’s gonna
be a bit hard to take on board it makes
a hold of that green world out there
plastic which is a bit of an odd thought
so we’re going to shelve that thought
and we’re going to go from difficult
carbon chemistry to kind of easier to
digest carbon history this is a graph of
the changing levels of co2 in the air
over the last 600 million years going
backwards from the present-day
trees evolved here and you see a very
rapid dramatic drop in co2 when they
come on the scene that’s
because the trees are growing up they’re
absorbing the co2 they’re dying falling
over and compacting and they’re turning
into coal and that the process kind of
gives a name to that time which is
called the Carboniferous period it’s a
big dip in the graph there was all the
co2 is dragged down underground by trees
now I want to give this some local
context South Wales coalfield just down
the road was a part of this ancient
tropical forest carbon sink and the
National Museum of Wales calculates that
at its peak
these forests on a planetary level were
removing a hundred billion tonnes a
hundred Giga tons of co2 every year
compare that to the 33 billion tons of
co2 that us humans are putting up there
it’s three times that so what that means
is if we had to those tropical forests
now we wouldn’t have any problem with
global warming would actually have the
reverse problem one of global cooling
which was quite handy actually at the
moment so I want to now go back to the
graph and consider the fun topic of
global mass extinction if we do that you
might be it might seen this icon on
social media it’s had a lot of
prominence of latest basically means
extinction I’m going to plot to the main
mass extinction events that have
occurred over the last period of time
they basically all pretty much occur on
little peaks of co2 now the scientists
argue about the reasons we don’t have
time to go into them now but I wanted to
all your attention to this the one there
on the big pinnacle the steepest
pinnacle of co2 the spike of co2 in that
graph coincide and correlates directly
with the the worst mass extinction event
the planet has ever suffered it’s called
by paleontologists the great dying and
it’s called that because at that time
between 70 and 95 percent of all land
and marine species were completely
obliterated now that probably the worst
thing that’s ever happened on our planet
was that if we go and take our attention
to the end of the graph right at the
very end we can see
slight rise in co2 that’s the the gas
that us lot are putting up there the
anthropogenic emissions of co2 looks
quite small and innocuous in comparison
with what’s gone before but what we have
to understand is that the rise in co2
today at that point in this room and
everywhere else on the planet is twenty
five thousand times worse than the rise
before the Great dying is twenty five
thousand times faster than the rise
before the Great dying so it should give
us some pause for concern because it
means that if we don’t change our ways
our fossil fuel frenzy then pretty soon
we’re heading for something that’s gonna
be potentially worse than the Great
dying it hasn’t got a name I call it the
great dying to GD to for short so much
to the bad news let’s go to some good
news how can we avoid GD 2 in order to
avoid a fate worse than death we need I
want to introduce you to the concept of
tree food it’s a new concept it’s
something that I’ve coined myself and
it’s very simple it’s just food that
comes from trees I’m an advocate of
something called the tree food diet you
will not have heard of it before because
I just made it up a month ago it’s the
great thing about the tree food diet is
that includes really nice stuff normally
diets are a problem not this one this
one includes coffee chocolate wine
marzipan avocados all the really nice
stuff now why do I want us to go to a
Thai food diet simply because it’s
become evident over the last say five
years that for most of us our biggest
environmental impact comes through the
food we choose to eat it’s like we’re
kind of creating the world or voting for
the world every time we buy a particular
kind of food say I go to the supermarket
and I buy mass-produced white poppy
bread I’m voting for this that’s the
kind of world I’m subsidizing if instead
I go to the health food shop and I get
some let’s say some organic trade craft
cashew nuts
then this is the world I’m creating
these are a family of cashew farmers
from our project in Kenya now if I buy a
lot of cashews and you lot all copy mean
we all go and buy a lot of cashews then
they’ll get a lot of money and the first
thing they will do is start planting
more cashew trees because their business
will be working they’ll think let’s make
some more money so that’s how we we can
kind of compel them almost apart more
trees so when we eat tree food basically
a lot of good things happen as I’ve
explained we get more trees the trees
don’t draw down co2 so we get a cooler
climate we get more biodiversity because
the difference between tree food and
normally farmed food is that trees are
perennials they’re there all the time
you’re just taking the fruit nature’s
bounty the tree stays there so yeah
animals and other plants are got
somewhere to live normally in a farm
it’s an annual crop like on that wheat
farm the farm is taking everything the
humans getting everything woe betide any
animal or plant that strays onto that
field you know that’s all happens to
them so we get more biodiversity when we
kind of eat tree food
lastly we get healthier and that’s
really what I want to finish on it’s
like humans are animals of the order
primates that means that everybody who’s
in this room or who’s listening to my
words now on video is related to this
guy he’s a first primates a tree shrew
or tarsier character who appeared about
65 million years ago now the thing to
remember is that primates all of us show
our boreal adaptation we’ve got hanging
around in trees that’s because primates
mostly live in trees and because of that
they mostly eat tree food so I want to
create an imaginary timeline of primate
evolution on the ground and in our
timeline of primate evolution one
centimeter is going to equal 1,000 years
so that means this guy our earliest
ancestor he appeared 650 meters
away a long way away and then it was a
load of different primates all eating
mostly tree food tree fruit tree food
until humans developed agriculture which
was 11,000 years ago so it’s that much
on our graph 11 centimeters so what
you’ve got is our ancestors have all
been eating mostly tree food from over a
quarter a mile away to this point here
here for the end we’ve made this rapid
transit transition over the last 11
thousand years to farmed grain farmed
meat rice bread potatoes and that stuff
so to conclude Abba 2018 TEDx I don’t
want to press that I want you all I am
poor you all tomorrow morning to go into
your local shop and say can I have one
of these please it is a magic plastic
wildlife friendly star local unified
Auto creating healthy juicing solidified
atmospheric carbon and planetary cooling
tree baby if we all do that a lot more
there’s just just a chance just a slim
chance that we can turn this climate
ship around and come to a better outcome
thank you [Applause]
and it’s great to be here today I want
to come sound nice turning down perhaps
is the sound okay okay yeah I’m a
long-term tweet banter and it’s great to
be here today but I want to be honest
with you from the start I am a complete
and utter maverick I’ve never really had
any kind of proper job I’ve basically
been moving from project to project
mostly around trees for the last 50
years or more and I now run a tropical
afforestation scheme called the
community carbon link that connects
Wales with Kenya and over there we have
about 750,000 trees planted we’re on
target to get to 1 million in two years
time now pretty soon
I’m going to be starting to make some
quite extreme claims like this you might
want to check on them you probably will
in order to do that you need to go to
our website at Carbon linked org and
there you will find a fully referenced
now a maverick lifetime of working with
trees has actually changed me and shape
to me it’s it’s given me a different
conception of trees to everybody else my
job today is to share that with you I
simply hope that by sharing this new
idea of what trees are we can offer up
some new solutions to some of the kind
of really old problems around climate
change and biodiversity loss that we
here is one that I or part of one I
planted earlier you can still see the
seedling that I put in the ground there
encapsulated within the tree it was
about this big okay now I want you to
imagine this tree growing on a Welsh
mountainside it was a spruce so think of
gigantic Christmas tree it went off
about 40 feet with the trunk and in a
dark green cylinder of needles coming
down and roots spreading out quite far
and gripping on to the ground so the
tree started off this big and then
pretty soon it became that big so my
question to you as a group is simply
this where did the stuff in the tree
come from just shout out any answer that
you think where do the nutrients come
from the soil ground well it’s that is
the kind of received wisdom so let’s
let’s see if that is in fact the case
well look at all the bits in the tree
and see where they come from water all
trees are about half water and that is
coming in through the roots from rain
which was previously water vapor or
clouds so that stuff is coming from the
atmosphere as you probably know the
carbon in the tree which typically is
about a quarter of it is coming from
carbon dioxide fixed by the leaves
during photosynthesis so clearly that is
also coming from the atmosphere now we
come on to the hydrogen and oxygen they
come into the tree mostly in the form of
water which is h2o there again they’re
coming through the roots from rain from
water vapour so you can see there’s a
pattern building up here most of its
come from the atmosphere now we come to
this little sliver that is the trace
elements they are made up predominantly
of nitrogen potassium and phosphorus
nitrogen is the biggest part of that and
that comes into the tree with the help
of leguminous bacteria and fungi around
the roots and it’s coming from little
pockets of air within the soil so even
though it’s located in
we can say that that stuff also comes
from the atmosphere
now we come on to the other trace
elements but only potassium and
phosphorus comprising less than half a
percent of the mass of a tree that is
the stuff only that’s coming from the
soil afraid that those of you shouted
out soil got it a bit wrong so we can
say that pretty much everything in a
tree is coming in one way or another
from the air even though we don’t really
conceive of it in that way and we can
look at this in Reverse you go home
you’re cold you put on your fire put a
log of wood on the fire you burn it you
get out some heat but pretty much
everything in that log goes up the
chimney as a hot gas it wants to go back
to its home in the sky after a while you
get some like weightless ashy residue
and you have to after you’ve burnt a lot
of logs you’ve got to clean out your
great so you get a pot fill it with ash
you take your pot of ash chuck it on the
soil part of ash that’s the origin in
the word potassium potash so that is
just that tiny less than half a percent
that’s going back to the ground
everything else is really going back to
the air because the tree it turns out in
fact is nothing more than solid
atmosphere but trees do something much
much more amazing than just solidify the
air through the magical process of
photosynthesis which is still not fully
understood by by our best scientists
they are somehow somehow using the light
energy from that star up there that
nearby star to to convert these
atmospheric gases into living matter
these dead atmospheric gases because the
trees are living entity so through that
process of deduction we can say that a
tree is really nothing more than
solidified vivified atmosphere I am
going to just call them sparse for short
now that’s my own little made-up math
acronym and for the next few slides
we’re gonna see some sparse one growing
out of a cliff in America as far growing
out of a rock in the desert of Boulder
one growing out of a building and
finally one growing out of the fourth
floor of a soviet-era
ferroconcrete apartment block near
Chernobyl now the thing about all these
trees is there haven’t got any soil and
the thing we have to understand is trees
don’t actually need soil because they’re
not really getting anything from the
soil because they’re getting everything
they need from the air now
trees use use sunlight to convert these
atmospheric gases into three main
materials carbohydrates which go into
the SAP of the tree and then lignin and
cellulose which together go to make the
woody tissues of the tree that stuff now
lignin and cellulose are described as
naturally occurring organic polymers
that’s what they look like in molecular
form now organic polymer is the term
that industrial chemists use for the
material that the rest of us call
plastic okay so basically plastic is
organic polymer here is the Wikipedia
definition of plastic if you doubt me
blah blah blah organic polymer so what
what I need you to understand is that
here we have some manmade organic
polymer polyethylene polythene and some
tree made organic polymer that they’re
pretty similar kind of similar
properties and that’s because they have
similar molecular structure polyethylene
is is poor thing so even though this
might be a little bit hard to take on
board it turns out the trees using that
starlight to convert this dead invisible
gas I’m holding in my hands right now
and they’re converting it into a kind of
living plastic now I know that’s gonna
be a bit hard to take on board it makes
a hold of that green world out there
plastic which is a bit of an odd thought
so we’re going to shelve that thought
and we’re going to go from difficult
carbon chemistry to kind of easier to
digest carbon history this is a graph of
the changing levels of co2 in the air
over the last 600 million years going
backwards from the present-day
trees evolved here and you see a very
rapid dramatic drop in co2 when they
come on the scene that’s
because the trees are growing up they’re
absorbing the co2 they’re dying falling
over and compacting and they’re turning
into coal and that the process kind of
gives a name to that time which is
called the Carboniferous period it’s a
big dip in the graph there was all the
co2 is dragged down underground by trees
now I want to give this some local
context South Wales coalfield just down
the road was a part of this ancient
tropical forest carbon sink and the
National Museum of Wales calculates that
at its peak
these forests on a planetary level were
removing a hundred billion tonnes a
hundred Giga tons of co2 every year
compare that to the 33 billion tons of
co2 that us humans are putting up there
it’s three times that so what that means
is if we had to those tropical forests
now we wouldn’t have any problem with
global warming would actually have the
reverse problem one of global cooling
which was quite handy actually at the
moment so I want to now go back to the
graph and consider the fun topic of
global mass extinction if we do that you
might be it might seen this icon on
social media it’s had a lot of
prominence of latest basically means
extinction I’m going to plot to the main
mass extinction events that have
occurred over the last period of time
they basically all pretty much occur on
little peaks of co2 now the scientists
argue about the reasons we don’t have
time to go into them now but I wanted to
all your attention to this the one there
on the big pinnacle the steepest
pinnacle of co2 the spike of co2 in that
graph coincide and correlates directly
with the the worst mass extinction event
the planet has ever suffered it’s called
by paleontologists the great dying and
it’s called that because at that time
between 70 and 95 percent of all land
and marine species were completely
obliterated now that probably the worst
thing that’s ever happened on our planet
was that if we go and take our attention
to the end of the graph right at the
very end we can see
slight rise in co2 that’s the the gas
that us lot are putting up there the
anthropogenic emissions of co2 looks
quite small and innocuous in comparison
with what’s gone before but what we have
to understand is that the rise in co2
today at that point in this room and
everywhere else on the planet is twenty
five thousand times worse than the rise
before the Great dying is twenty five
thousand times faster than the rise
before the Great dying so it should give
us some pause for concern because it
means that if we don’t change our ways
our fossil fuel frenzy then pretty soon
we’re heading for something that’s gonna
be potentially worse than the Great
dying it hasn’t got a name I call it the
great dying to GD to for short so much
to the bad news let’s go to some good
news how can we avoid GD 2 in order to
avoid a fate worse than death we need I
want to introduce you to the concept of
tree food it’s a new concept it’s
something that I’ve coined myself and
it’s very simple it’s just food that
comes from trees I’m an advocate of
something called the tree food diet you
will not have heard of it before because
I just made it up a month ago it’s the
great thing about the tree food diet is
that includes really nice stuff normally
diets are a problem not this one this
one includes coffee chocolate wine
marzipan avocados all the really nice
stuff now why do I want us to go to a
Thai food diet simply because it’s
become evident over the last say five
years that for most of us our biggest
environmental impact comes through the
food we choose to eat it’s like we’re
kind of creating the world or voting for
the world every time we buy a particular
kind of food say I go to the supermarket
and I buy mass-produced white poppy
bread I’m voting for this that’s the
kind of world I’m subsidizing if instead
I go to the health food shop and I get
some let’s say some organic trade craft
cashew nuts
then this is the world I’m creating
these are a family of cashew farmers
from our project in Kenya now if I buy a
lot of cashews and you lot all copy mean
we all go and buy a lot of cashews then
they’ll get a lot of money and the first
thing they will do is start planting
more cashew trees because their business
will be working they’ll think let’s make
some more money so that’s how we we can
kind of compel them almost apart more
trees so when we eat tree food basically
a lot of good things happen as I’ve
explained we get more trees the trees
don’t draw down co2 so we get a cooler
climate we get more biodiversity because
the difference between tree food and
normally farmed food is that trees are
perennials they’re there all the time
you’re just taking the fruit nature’s
bounty the tree stays there so yeah
animals and other plants are got
somewhere to live normally in a farm
it’s an annual crop like on that wheat
farm the farm is taking everything the
humans getting everything woe betide any
animal or plant that strays onto that
field you know that’s all happens to
them so we get more biodiversity when we
kind of eat tree food
lastly we get healthier and that’s
really what I want to finish on it’s
like humans are animals of the order
primates that means that everybody who’s
in this room or who’s listening to my
words now on video is related to this
guy he’s a first primates a tree shrew
or tarsier character who appeared about
65 million years ago now the thing to
remember is that primates all of us show
our boreal adaptation we’ve got hanging
around in trees that’s because primates
mostly live in trees and because of that
they mostly eat tree food so I want to
create an imaginary timeline of primate
evolution on the ground and in our
timeline of primate evolution one
centimeter is going to equal 1,000 years
so that means this guy our earliest
ancestor he appeared 650 meters
away a long way away and then it was a
load of different primates all eating
mostly tree food tree fruit tree food
until humans developed agriculture which
was 11,000 years ago so it’s that much
on our graph 11 centimeters so what
you’ve got is our ancestors have all
been eating mostly tree food from over a
quarter a mile away to this point here
here for the end we’ve made this rapid
transit transition over the last 11
thousand years to farmed grain farmed
meat rice bread potatoes and that stuff
so to conclude Abba 2018 TEDx I don’t
want to press that I want you all I am
poor you all tomorrow morning to go into
your local shop and say can I have one
of these please it is a magic plastic
wildlife friendly star local unified
Auto creating healthy juicing solidified
atmospheric carbon and planetary cooling
tree baby if we all do that a lot more
there’s just just a chance just a slim
chance that we can turn this climate
ship around and come to a better outcome
thank you [Applause]
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