Gran Canaria — Planting trees

Most people seem to be engaged in picture-taking, but still

According to Wikipedia, the whole area of Gran Canaria is 1,560 square km. The density of forests vary. I found the following piece of information: when planting, you need to leave three meters between seedlings (assuming square grid for simplicity), which will make, should they all survive, 100 000 trees per square km. So, to cover whole of Gran Canaria with forests, you need to plant 156 million trees.

Well, now consider that some areas are forest already, some are fields and pastures, some are dunes; they don’t need or can’t be planted. So, once again, for simplicity’s sake, let’s say you only need to plant a half of this amount (I’d say even less, but a half is nice *). So, 78 million trees.

Now, the population is 848 thousand. It means that if every single person goes and plants 90 (approximately) trees, the job is done.

Now, why do I try to figure it out, you might well ask.

It’s because this over the last month I have been to two reforestation events and only planted eight trees in total, and the planting season is over this year, so... it’ll take me ten to twelve years to make my fair share of planting :)

Freshly planted (by me) Canarian pine

Anyway. Soon after the forest fire of last year I made an attempt to put myself on Cabildo’s (island council) volunteer list. My application seems to have fallen into a black hole of bureaucracy — I didn’t even get a confirmation email. (I must say I wasn’t surprised, it seems to be a trend: put your name on some list or other, never hear from them again. My name might still be our there somewhere and one day they might call me — let’s hope I will not find myself inscribed to voluntary army service or something due to crossed wires.)

Barranco de La Mina five months after the fire of September 2017. Compare with the penultimate photo here.

So, to the events themselves. The first was organized by my favourite tour company Arawak. The planting was a part of the hike program for that day: we did a hike first and then planted some laurisilva species and tree heaths close to Valsendero village.

Erica arborea, tree heath

The planting site assigned to our group was small, so we didn’t even manage to plant all of the seedlings we had. We took the water from a nearby waterfall, and one of the walkers brought an enormous lemon cake with her. It was all very agreeable.

The second planting was arranged through the Cabildo of Gran Canaria. There was an announcement on Twitter asking for volunteers; I filled in the form without having any hopes (and, once again, without a confirmation email). But I did get an email in the end — and it was to postpone the planting due to storm Emma skirting Canary Islands.

So, one week later than planned we finally got to plant some Canarian pines. The planting was done on the east slope of Caldera de Tejeda, not in areas of pine forest affected by fire, but in between the burnt retama bushes close to Cruz de Tejeda.

glaucous seedlings prepared for planting

Well, we did plant some trees, and quite a bit more this time; but I must say that the whole event was not what I expected. Can’t tell you why, but I assumed it was a “real” volunteering where you work hard for something you consider important. But it was staged more like a group bonding exercise (build a raft, hug a tree, you know): there were a few kids and even one small dog, we were way too many for an area assigned to us, the supervisors were mostly concerned with everyone’s safety (and it’s no joke, what with kids running around, hoe at the ready). The whole active planting was maybe an hour and a half, they gave us sandwiches and T-shirts at the end. So the general feeling was that somebody (well, Cabildo, probably) wanted to keep us well amused and off the street, rather then extract some value out of our good will.

Freshly planted area. You can see well-spaced holes, each containing a seedling in black protective tube, in between burnt retama bushes.

I did some research afterwards and discovered that the company that was arranging the planting indeed does them commercially, so if your school or company wishes to do planting, you have to pay. They do reforestation themselves (much more efficiently I hope). Overall, they do a lot of good — apart from the obvious, i.e. planting of trees, they create jobs and cooperate with biologists working to restore and protect some rare bird species. Besides, people who do participate in these events end up informed about all things green. Hopefully, we are less likely to throw cigarettes out of car windows now.

So I am prepared to admit it was a clash of my expectations and the reality which produced “oh no, it is all wrong” feeling.

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* Bloody frustrating that I can’t find this information easily. I am sure it must be available somewhere. By now I am sort of used to the fact that everything can be found, you just need to pose the right question. Maybe I am not posing it right then.