Indonesia's bragging that it will plant trees in time for the climate conference is meaningless hypocrisy.  Indonesia has destroyed most of its rainforests, which cannot be replanted.  (Tropical rainforests have evolved for over 200 million years and once cut are gone forever.  They cannot be replanted because the soils are too poor in nutrients to sustain replantings; plants now grow on the remains of dead plants, not out of the ground.)

The point of my post is that we should concentrate on stopping behavior that is causing our ecological problems, not try to convince ourselves that if we just plant a few trees or take other ineffective actions everything will be OK.  It most certainly will not.

1. I did not suggest that lower population will solve the problem of deforestation.  Lower human population will solve or reduce problems caused or exacerbated overpopulation.  What I clearly said was that only changing human behavior so that humans stop killing trees will solve the problem.  I also said that planting native trees where they have been removed by humans is appropriate and certainly should be done.  The problem is that claims that tree plantings will offset deforestation or actions that cause global warming are nothing but greenwashing, which makes people think that by planting trees it's OK to continue killing them and destroying forests.

2. I did not say "do nothing."  What I said was change that we need to greatly simplify our lifestyles and have fewer children in order to actually solve the major environmental and ecological problems.  As opposed to doing nothing, significantly lowering our consumption and population would be doing more than what most people are willing to do, which is why environmental and ecological problems are not getting solved.  Instead of doing things like planting trees that take little sacrifice but provide very little ecological value as opposed to not killing them in the first place, people need to be told that we need to stop destroying the planet with our unnatural and unsustainable lifestyles.  Articles and activities like this one are nothing but greenwashing and do more harm than good by getting people to think that they need not make any significant changes or sacrifices.