A friend recently sent me a 1-minute video that was so impressive I was doing cartwheels. It was about the brilliant work being done by an Australian company, BioCarbon Engineering. It showed how 2 drones can plant 100,00 trees per day, via “bullet-like” capsules fired precisely from drones into the ground. Each capsule contains all the essential nutrients for planting in areas that are unreachable by humans. With 10,000 drones they expect to plant 5 billion trees per year. It’s a start.

A little research online quickly showed this issue in perspective. Our planet is losing about 46 billion trees per year. If my math is correct, it will take about 100,000 drones to get ahead of the problem of tree loss on a global basis. Will that stop global warming? Not in a world where governments, and industrialists, the super-rich, and consumers with huge ecological footprints are doing their best to fill our eco system with CO2 and various other pollutants. We need to clean up more.

I’m a “macro” guy who sees most issues from the “top down,” rather than from the “bottom up,” as the micro thinkers do. So, my brain fogs up when anyone starts talking about “photosynthesis,” and the workings of the sun, and tree leaves at the molecular level, and how carbon dioxide gets sucked in and oxygen flows out in a magical transformation. It’s all a mystery to me. But I get the idea well enough to understand just how important trees are to our survival. They clean the air. We need them a lot more than they need us. At best, it's a symbiotic relationship.

But clean air is only a part of the set of issues related to global warming, and energy mis-use, and our survival. When we consume faster than we produce, and we pollute faster than we clean up, bad things happen—to us. The planet has its own self-correcting ways. It will survive. We may not.

We know who the polluters are. And we also know that it is so easy to pollute, and very difficult to get anyone’s attention about the effort and the cost of getting out in front of the pollution issue. The answer is to look inward, and to decide that big issues require big thinkers and doers—that tiny minority of “movers and shakers” who seem always to be the persons who must come and rescue us from ourselves. We need more solar and wind energy sources, less fossil fuels, more clean-up crews, and smaller eco-feet at work. We need to think and to act smarter; to stop relying on prayers, and governments, and big business; and karma. We need to tap into our small brains, think big, and produce simple plans for all others to follow.

Writers also need to carry their share of the burden. We cannot repeat this story too often. It will not go away on its own. We need to be relentless, and stop using pencils and paper made from trees. It's a start.

Watch this 1-minute video: Tree Planting with Drones