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“Hannah Lewis describes a gift to a desperate world… There may be no single climate solution that provides a greater range of benefits than mini forests…[and] anyone, anywhere can do it.” –Paul Hawken, from the introduction

Mini forests are straightforward to create, rewarding, and can bring us closer to improving our climate and future. Read the author’s foreword Paul Hawken below about the importance of establishing mini-forests in the fight against the climate crisis.

Below is an excerpt Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World by Hannah Lewis. It has been adapted for utilize on the Internet.

Featured image courtesy of Gaurav Gurjar.

The Mini-Forest Revolution: Foreword by Paul Hawken

It’s scarce for a book about climate solutions to flow like honey and read like silk. It’s equally scarce to find an activity that everyone can do. Hannah Lewis describes a gift to a desperate world, a way to change the Earth in a practical, regenerative and substantive way, a basic act that creates beauty and charm: a mini-forest.

If planting a mini-forest seems inadequate to the climate task before you – reversing global warming – remember that forests are thousands of mini-forests under one canopy. The extraordinary boreal and Congolese forests have never been planted. You can plant mini forests You.

What is a mini-forest?

Forests can cover huge areas, such as the Amazon and Borneo. A mini forest can cover empty islands, a roundabout by the highway, or a compact part of a kindergarten playground.

One of the benefits of the Miyawaki mini-forest that Hannah Lewis describes so brilliantly is its potential ubiquity. There are hundreds of millions of potential houses for mini forests. And unlike the Amazon, they won’t be burned and replaced with soy and cattle.

There is a call to plant a trillion trees to “fight” climate change. The goal is to alleviate the climate crisis as quickly as possible. In these scenarios, trees are objects, forest “things” that capture carbon above and below the ground.

Tree plantations can resemble ghost towns, hushed because there are no birds there. No birds because there are no insects. No insects because there are no flowers, nectar or worms.

Mini forests: a solution to climate change

Gaurav Gurjar planted the Maruvan mini forest in 2019 in the desert of Rajasthan, India. Courtesy of Gaurav Gurjar.

Standing armies of trees are the opposite of a forest. Trees are like us. We are a society, just like the trees. They develop as they interact with various other trees, shrubs and plants. Miyawaki method They were created as a result of observations of old forests.

Dr. Miyawaki saw them as a living, interactive being, not a collection of trees. Mini-Forest Revolution takes us around the world to explore the extraordinary impact that mini-forests have on different types of terrain, climate and location. Hannah is your guide.

There may be no single climate solution that provides a greater range of benefits than mini forests: water, shade, coolness, pollinators, food, birds, biodiversity, water storage, carbon sinks, spotless air.

If given space, mini forests grow sideways, not just upwards. They germinate, spread, expand. In open spaces, these are forest “seeds”. They generate themselves and all life.

Most of what we hear about the climate crisis is the rate at which threats are growing and the lack of sufficient action at all levels of agencies. We are saturated with messages about problems, probabilities and consequences. It’s almost too much to take in. What’s missing from the news is opportunity.

Every problem has a hidden solution, otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem. Miyawaki method is crucial because it is an opportunity that can be implemented by people all over the world and, as Hannah points out, communities, classrooms, cities, clubs, families and, if they wake up, even countries. We don’t have to wait for nations, banks and corporations to act.

Fighting the climate crisis

Torkamana’s mini-forest farm in 2021, after almost five years of growth. Courtesy of Bahram Torkaman.

To fully understand the potential global impact of the Miyawaki mini forests on the climate crisis, we can experiment a bit and do some carbon calculations. It is estimated that there are 3,300 billion tons of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems. That’s four times more carbon than is in the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

If we escalate the amount of carbon stored in the ground by 9 percent over the next thirty years, we will bring back to earth all the carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, gas and oil, deforestation and extractive agriculture since the 1800s.

This would mean increasing the amount of carbon on our lands by 0.3 percent per year. We know how to do this through regenerative agriculture, wetland restoration, managed grazing, mangrove planting and reforestation.

These practices are at hand and being implemented, but are impractical for an individual, family or neighborhood. Everyone, everywhere can make mini forests. There are five billion acres of degraded land on Earth. The mini forest will escalate the amount of carbon in this land by at least tenfold, and probably much more. If one-fifth of our degraded lands were turned into mini-forests, we would achieve the goal of returning all the carbon emitted into the atmosphere from 1800 to the present.

Mini forests are places where we touch life. We explore our place, discover what is native, restore our soil, nurture a compact ecosystem that brings life back. Watching the mini forest grow several feet a year, watching it become more complicated and handsome before our eyes, knowing that it has a direct impact on the biosphere and the atmosphere – these relationships nourish us.

They feed our longing to make change, our need to connect with what is restorative and act. Facts don’t change our minds. Actions change our minds. When we engage in the acts of regeneration that Hannah depicts, our sense of ourselves and what is possible is transformed. A mini forest of ideas and hope is also born within us.

—Paul Hawken

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