The Making of a Forest — Part 6 — Epilogue and New Beginnings
The Making of a Forest — Part 5
The Making of a Forest — Part 4
The Making of a Forest — Part 3
The Making of a Forest — Part 2
The Making of a Forest — Part 1
A few years ago, motivated by the need to do something about the climate crisis, we set out to plant a forest. Reality hit us — we didn’t know anything about forestry, and we didn’t have any land or trees. By being transparent and sharing our ideas, our paths crossed with someone that did (they had land and green investors), so we decided to donate our skills and time to help them.
The fight between good and evil
Our journey led us to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, where we met our two points of contact. We shared accommodation, food, stories, as well as hopes and dreams for a better future. A genuine connection. In an unexpected Star Wars plot twist, one of them was not able to stay on the light side. He disappeared, and so did the remaining funds for the project.
150.000 trees were planted, some of them açaí palms as pictured below, but for now, this specific project ends here.
It’s not quite the forest we imagined, but at the same time, it’s way more than we dared to dream about. Our other point of contact described the ending in a more poetic way:
“I feel that maybe the Amapá project was actually just a part of something larger. And that something larger has not ended — it is a growing and evolving story. Amapá was just a chapter in it, or maybe just a paragraph”
Lessons learned (from an agency point of view)
- If you reach for the stars, you increase your chances of going further than you thought you could.
- You don’t have to do everything yourself. Initiatives can be amplified when you connect with people that share the same ambitions.
- Don’t give up. There are always new ways to use your creative skills for good.
New beginnings
For some reason beyond our ability to comprehend, conservationism and particularly trees have become a returning element on our own journey as an agency. Hollow, Future Library, and the tree-planting project in Amapá are examples of that. Recently, we’ve embarked on a new tree journey with an organization in Chile that uses LiDAR data from satellites to create an atlas of the biosphere on Earth.
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) works by sending hundreds of thousands of laser pulses every second, and because we know the speed of light and its refractive index, it’s possible to measure distance by calculating the time it takes for light to go and return from the trees.
With this technology we can identify, measure and calculate things like canopy height, biomass and leaf area of a forest biome. When coupled with AI and deep learning artificial vision, we obtain detailed censuses of the number of trees and their biomass to help us decipher the amount of carbon captured from one season to the next, or distinguish species, detect patterns and discover correlations.
The goal: to create a new and more democratic way of engaging in conservationism by unleashing the value of Earth’s ecosystem through a digital platform. And through that, help revert the environmental crises.
Stay tuned here: https://le.mu/
We hope that our story has inspired anyone, anywhere, to take a stab (small or big) at solving one of the many challenges the world is facing. We sometimes forget it, but our collective creative skills reach beyond screens.
Lots of love from Hello Monday
