"Trees sequester carbon, harvest water, produce food, and convert sunlight into energy. Those are the four characteristics I would love a city to have. The resiliency of forests is to be emulated. And that’s the reason why I picked forests as my biomimic. I want my city to be as resilient as Earth’s s. The main reason why is occurring is to make room for farms. Before there was farming, which was about ten to twelve thousand years ago, we had six trillion trees. We now have three trillion trees. We’ve cut down half of the Earth’s ability to capture carbon. We’re not going to replace all of that with new trees. But if we got back up to five trillion trees, let’s say, simply by leaving the remaining forests alone and letting them repopulate and selectively harvesting, the Earth’s temperature rise would begin to slow down. And, once you’ve slowed it down, that gives you time to reflect and to prepare for these changes that are not going to go away. Replacing three trillion trees by planting them—that’s not going to work. We’ll never be able to do that. So we have to let nature do that part. And, in order to do that, we have to return a lot of farmland back to what it used to be, which was forests."
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Academics from the United StatesColumbia University alumniColumbia University facultyBiologists from the United StatesEcologists
Original Language: English
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(interview by Jon Michaud)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dickson_Despommier
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Dickson Despommier
(June 5, 1940 – February 7, 2025) was an American medical ecologist and pioneering advocate of . He was a professor of and in environmental health sciences at , as well as a science and technology communicator. His articles appeared in ', ', ', and '.
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