Travel & Nature

Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai launched a campaign at the United Nations' Climate Change conference in Nairobi to plant a billion trees next year. That’s 32 every second—to highlight the need to fight global warming. Professor Maathai won the Nobel prize in 2004 for her involvement with the Greenbelt Movement, which she founded to promote human rights and reforestation in Kenya. The campaign is backed by Prince Albert II of Monaco, a recent convert to the green movement and the World Agroforestry Centre. As Mrs. Maathai said: "This is something that anybody can do. Anybody can dig a hole. Anybody can put a tree in the hole and water it, and everybody must make sure that the tree they plant survives. There are six billion of us and counting, so even if only one-sixth of us each planted a tree, we would definitely reach the target." Unfortunately the campaign is somewhat symbolic, since replacing trees lost by deforestation over the past decade will require planting 14-billion trees every year for the next ten years, the UN says. "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." :: UN Billion Tree Campaign via :: Hugg