SUMMER 2022 / REAL-LEADERS.COM 17 “ONE MOSQUITO CAN’T DO ANYTHING AGAINST A RHINO, BUT A THOUSAND MOSQUITOES TOGETHER CAN MAKE A RHINO CHANGE ITS DIRECTION.” — Felix Finkbeiner CHANGEMAKERS How Trees Can Help Us Save Our Future Felix Finkbeiner / Germany FELIX FINKBEINER WAS STANDING BEHIND THE STAGE at the United Nations. He was about to speak in the UN General Assembly Hall, on the very podium that is normally used by the presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors of the world. “I was incredibly nervous,” Felix says. “Right before I went on stage, I just wished I was in school,” says the 13-year-old. In the audience was a woman who was very special to Felix. Her name was Wangari Maathai. She was an environmental activist, and the first female professor in the East African nation of Kenya. For the past 30 years, she had worked together with local communities to plant 30 million trees in African countries. “These trees had provided many women with their own income for the first time and protected the soil from erosion. But they also store carbon,” Felix says. “Every tree extracts CO2 from the atmosphere.” When Felix was 9 years old, he gave a presentation in elementary school about the climate crisis, and in preparing for it, tried to learn about possible solutions. That’s when he first read about Wangari Maathai. Inspired by the work she was doing planting trees in Kenya, at the end of his presentation, Felix came up with a proposition for his classmates: “Let’s plant one million trees in every country on earth!” he said. That was in 2007, and it was the beginning of his organization, Plant-for-the-Planet. A couple of weeks after his presentation, Felix and his classmates planted their first trees. Two local journalists reported on the event, and other schools heard about it and decided to join in. “Someone built a little website for us,” Felix remembers. “It was basically a ranking of who had planted the most trees.” Soon more schools joined the effort, and it became a competition. One year later, the students had planted 50,000 trees. After three years, they hit one million! That is how Plant-for-the-Planet started to grow. “Every tree that we plant absorbs about 10 kilos of CO2 per year,” says Felix. With current levels of emissions, Felix came up with a very ambitious goal: He and his organization are mobilizing the world to plant and restore a trillion trees. A trillion is a thousand billions — an almost unimaginable number. In March 2015, Plant-for-the-Planet started planting trees in the Yucatan peninsula, in Mexico. Already at 6 million trees, their ambitious goal is to plant a million trees every year, and to look after each plant to make sure that it thrives. Of course, they need a lot of workers for this project. “In Yucatan, we are already the biggest employer,” Felix says. To date, Plant-for-the-Planet has organized more than 1,600 training academies and trained more than 91,000 children and youth in 75 countries. “Whoever dares, later gives a speech to entrepreneurs, governments, and other children, to get them on board,” Felix says. Before she passed away in 2011, Wangari Maathai had started the One Billion Trees Campaign. Now it is up to the next generation to continue her legacy. “We took it to the next level,” says Felix. “It’s now the One Trillion Trees Campaign, and we still have a long way to go.” n Marianne Larned is the founder of The Stone Soup Leadership Institute, a nonprofit organization that invests and trains young people around the world to become leaders in their communities. These stories are from her latest book, Stone Soup for a Sustainable World: Life-Changing Stories of Young Heroes. StoneSoupLeadership.org
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY3Mjcw