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hatrack

(59,439 posts)
Thu Oct 29, 2020, 08:35 AM Oct 2020

Armenia, The Size Of Vermont, Has Spent Decades Reforesting; It's A Slow, Complex Process

Thirty years ago, Ashot Avagyan and his family left their Baku home in the dead of night with only their passports, hoping to make it to the Armenian border safely. In their hurry to escape, they left the rest of their belongings behind in their apartment in Azerbaijan, joining the stream of ethnic Armenians crossing the border to escape from violence that was tilting toward ethnic cleansing.

After a difficult journey, Avagyan and his family settled at a refugee camp with 100 other families in Karin, a dusty gray-brown outpost in the desert outside of Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. For a while, Avagyan worked odd jobs, but his family could barely make ends meet. He even traveled to Russia to try construction work there but found the work isolating and poorly paid. Finally, he and his wife were offered work at a nearby nursery run by the Armenia Tree Project (ATP), an American-Armenian NGO. Born and raised in a city, they had never worked with plants before, but they soon learned how. “It’s so good to know that I grew those seedlings, and now they’re growing somewhere else, making this country green,” Avagyan says.

That's especially meaningful because Armenia has worked for the last 25 years to reforest after a war-torn period in the 1990s denuded significant swaths of the already semi-arid country. ATP has led the charge, providing trees for public lands in 1,200 communities around the country (which is slightly larger than Vermont), teaching basic ecology and forestry to 23,000 Armenian students, and marking its six millionth tree planted last fall. Around the same time, Armenia’s newly formed parliamentary government (the result of a peaceful 2018 revolution) committed to doubling existing tree cover by 2050.

This commitment marks a cultural transformation in a country that continues to struggle with desertification and illegal logging. As it marks a quarter century of reforestation, this “new” Armenia is beginning a slow transition away from the monoculture forestry of its Soviet past. In joining the burgeoning global effort to green the planet and fight climate change, it must reckon along the way not just the ecological but also the philosophical and cultural complexities of planting trees.

EDIT

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/armenia-reforestation-climate-monoculture/

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