A couple of things I’ve been thinking about this week. The ninth post of a series.

After two and a half years of subscribing, this week I reached the milestone of having funded the planting of more than 1,000 trees through Ecologi. I also found this week that I could see a breakdown of where they’d be planted: 825 in Madagascar, 136 in Mozambique, 42 in the UK, 18 in Kenya, 10 in Nicaragua and 5 in Uganda.

They even have pictures of some of them: here’s a Rowan, an Alder and a Silver Birch they planted for me in Scotland last year, none of which are species I’d have a hope of recognising even once fully grown if they weren’t labelled:

You might imagine that this would produce a warm, fuzzy feeling, but in fact it leaves me a bit conflicted. Half the stuff I read seems to say “trees are wonderful and we should plant gazillions of them” and half seems to say “mass tree planting projects destroy biodiversity and mess up the planet” (which Ecologi obviously denies). Who really knows whether I’m doing the right thing, or just assuaging my climate guilt in a way which is actually making things worse? Surely trees are basically great?

There have been flyers around town this week advertising a protest with the headline “We’ve heard enough climate change bullshit.” I’m confused as to what the protest is about. Do they think that politicians have been spouting “bullshit” while taking inadequate action? Or do they think that climate change itself is “bullshit” which doesn’t actually exist?