Trees are symbols of hope, life and transformation. They are also increasingly labeled as a straightforward, relatively inexpensive, and best solution to climate change. Lately, society has been putting a lot of pressure on trees to get the whole world out of the climate change emergency. Accordingly, enthusiasm is worldwide popular among governments, businesses and individuals for ambitious projects to plant billions, even a trillion more, so as to help cut current emission (排放).
“Trees are having a bit of a moment right now,” says Joe Fargione, an ecologist with The Nature Conservancy based in Minneapolis. “There’s no anti-tree lobby. Trees have lots of benefits for people. Not only do they store carbon, they help provide clean air, prevent soil erosion, shade and shelter homes to reduce energy costs and give people a sense of well-being.”
Yet, as global eagerness for adding more trees grows, some scientists are urging caution. Before moving forward, they say, such massive tree projects must address a range of scientific, social and economic concerns. Poorly designed projects that don’t address these issues could do more harm than good, the researchers say, wasting money as well as public goodwill. “There’s a real feeling that forests and trees are just the idea we can use to get some unspeakable support for many, perhaps more complicated, types of landscape restoration initiatives”, says ecologist Joseph Veldmanan.
The concerns are myriad: There’s too much focus on numbers of seedlings planted, and too little time spent on how to keep the trees alive in the long term, or in working with local communities. And there’s not enough emphasis on how different types of forests store very different amounts of carbon. There’s too much talk about trees, and not enough about other carbon-storing ecosystems. And over the last decade, a diverse garden of tree-centric proposal has spread across the globe. That can lead to all kinds of problems, Joseph adds. “For me, the devil is in the details.”
【小题1】According to Paragraph 1, what is the global fever?| A．Getting rid of the air pressure of the earth. |
| B．Launching environment-based movements. |
| C．Spending more time on global tree projects. |
| D．Planting more trees to handle climate change. |
| A．Tree-planting projects might be wrongly used. |
| B．There’s no scientific basis for planting programs. |
| C．Growing mere trees is just a waste of money. |
| D．Public goodwill is surely abused to a certain degree. |
| A．Unique. | B．Precise. | C．Many. | D．Reliable. |
| A．Positive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Neutral. | D．Unclear. |
