April 2001: Plant Trees pilot program starts

Planting Trees: pilot program starts

April 6, 2001

Tho te! Tho te! Rock!

I looked around and saw, to my horror, a cannonball sized stone skittering down the mountain. People working on the slope below scattered right and left, and the stone rolled safely past them.

Heart beating fast, I heaved a sigh of relief and turned back to my teacher. "This," said Tseten Gyantso, "is called tonga in Tibetan, yunsan in Chinese." It was to me by any other name still a spruce seedling, and he was showing us newbies how to plant it. He continued: "If the seedling is small, the hole should be shallow; if it's big, dig deeper."

"Build a wall around it," said one of the villagers, "so the water won't flow away."

There isn't a lot to this business of planting tree seedlings, and so by mid-morning Shiyin, who is the program director, and I, were fully in the swing of things. Working side by side with twenty Tibetans from Oro (Orlong) Village in Nyachuka (Yajiang) county, we used big picks to cut through roots and pry out stones, then our bare hands to shape each hole, insert the seedling, and cover up the roots. The villagers, whose aim was surer than mine, used the back side of the pick to pack down the dirt around the plant. "If you can pull it up with two fingers," said Tseten Gyantso, "then you didn't do it right."

This project started in 1997 when a Tibetan friend named Li Guiguo asked me to find a way to reforest the slopes around Oro Village, his birthplace. The trees in the valley had been destroyed by a wildfire in 1994. According to law, only areas that have been logged commercially are eligible for state-sponsored replanting. The people of Oro village were therefore stuck. Wildlife and medicinal herbs that once sheltered under the pines were gone, and their supply of firewood was dwindling. Last year Shiyin Siou, a Kham Aid Foundation volunteer, took charge of this program. Traveling at his own expense, he has come out to Sichuan three times, visited the site, and met the villagers. Back home in Silicon Valley, he built a website for the program and talked it up among his friends, eventually raising a modest sum (about $4,500) for a pilot project.

Now it's April, planting season is here, and we're putting our first seedlings into the ground. Our baby spruce trees, which range in height from 6 to 20 inches, were incubated for four years at the Kangding Nursery before we bought them. At the elevation of our planting, about 3700 meters, trees grow slowly, so it makes sense to import them from lower climes. Although we had originally planned to plant a variety of species, forester Zhang Heping, our consultant for this project, advised that shrubs and scattered small pine trees already on the slope would provide sufficient variety for a healthy forest. Before we arrived, the villagers prepared the slope by making crude terraces by arranging fallen logs in rows. This way, the planting work will be unimpeded by debris, and erosion will be minimized.

It was a hard climb to get here from the valley floor, but it was made easier by the high spirits of the villagers climbing with us. They sang songs, kidded each other, and hammed for my camera. At first they were puzzled about why two foreigners were up here with them on the mountain. But when Shiyin and I rolled up our sleeves and got our hands dirty, our foreignness was forgotten. Shiyin said later, "The most memorable thing about this whole project was when I went up there, dug a hole, and put a plant in. That's when everything became real. The difficulties, the frustrations -- it's all worth it."

On that first day, our work team planted one thousand trees. The villagers will keep going until 20,000 seedlings are planted over 130 mu of slope. Shiyin plans for this program to continue for at least four more years, in which time we will restore the entire burn area. Now we are building an environmental education program to offer at the local primary school. That way, by the time the children and trees are both grown up, they will be able to live together sustainably. .

This project will grow next year, and it needs both manpower and funds. If you have any suggestions about where we can get them, please write to Shiyin Siou at planttrees@khamaid.org.

Thanks for reading!

Pamela Logan
President, Kham Aid Foundation