This is what the future looks like
STANDING on the edge of a windswept Cornish field, surrounded by primary schoolchildren all carefully packing soil around the 400 saplings we were planting, I felt an overwhelming sense of positivity and pride.
This, I thought, is what the future looks like: children proactively doing something to protect and nurture the planet they’re inheriting. And gosh, how enthusiastically they were going about it.
Many of the children who came along earlier this month, bringing their parents and grandparents with them, are classmates of my daughter, Ezra, who’s five and goes to Boscastle Community Primary School, a village school with some 70 pupils. As well as her daddy, Alex, and me, Ezra was planting alongside her paternal grandparents, Steph and Chris, and her great-grandmother, the human rights and environmental campaigner Bianca Jagger, who has been a source of great inspiration for me growing up.
Talk about a cross-generational call to arms. There were at least 40 of us, all mucking in and having a great time in the process. Together we planted birch trees, holly, hazel, blackthorn and oak, all donated by the Woodland Trust.
How wonderful, then, that thanks to the Daily Mail’s Be A Tree Angel campaign – which this week received an incredible boost in the form of a £100,000 donation by the philanthropist Richard Caring and now a further £100,000 from another future-thinking anonymous donor – planting sessions like ours can now take place at schools up and down the land.
The children who’ll get involved, joining the band of Tree Angels, will gain a sense of having invested in their own futures and that of our planet. There’s been lots of talk at my daughter’s school about the environment recently, but not in the doom-laden terms that seem to paralyse so many adults with a sense of hopelessness about the future.
Instead, the focus has been on the kind of positive actions that will make things better – avoiding waste, reducing carbon emissions and taking action, such as planting trees in order to help our beautiful planet keep on producing the oxygen we need.
The Daily Mail’s Tree Angel campaign helps show children there is something practical they can do to help. It makes them feel empowered and see things like recycling, cutting back on single-use plastic and reducing unnecessary car journeys as the minimum they should be doing as we look for ways to preserve and protect the environment.
Planting a tree really is only the beginning.