Last night started the one-day holiday of Tu B’Shevat – it’s the ‘New Year of Trees’ that I posted about last year. This year we had JNF plant two trees in Israel, one for the new baby.
From the JNF website: (A) joint effort between JNF and the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. Contributions from this certificate establish a forest in Israel in memory of the 1.5 million children who lost their lives in the Holocaust. Our hope is that the young people and children of today will honor the memory of these children with their lives by planting trees in our forest. The forest will be “dedicated to the 1,500,000 children whose lives were stolen from us in the Holocaust. They did not have the chance to grow but, in their name, our forest will. We will ensure that these children live on, through living things…in trees…in us…in tomorrows.”
For Shug, the tree planted in his honor for Tu B’Shevat is for the Children’s Forest.
Tropical forests like this one play a particularly special role in the fight to end global climate change. And this reforestation effort to Plant a Billion Trees in The Atlantic Forest will remove 10 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year — that’s like taking 2 million cars off the road.
Besides having trees planted, the Nature Conservancy also has programs to adopt acres, like the Appalachians, or coral reefs. Maybe we’ll do something like that next year.