Looking towards the next 50 years

A National Tree Week special ..

A Tree Council Young Ambassador and Advisory Council member, Amy Bray is also a 21 year old marine biologist and CEO of Another Way, the environmental education charity she founded aged 16. .

I write this sitting with my back to an ancient oak. It towers above me, 300 years old, wise beyond all human thought. When this tree was a sapling, George I was on the throne. The tree whispers to me in a song of deep time. Of the people who farmed the land, of how its fellow trees were slain and the air grew heavier and darker as humans turned the trees into smoke. It sings of great battles, of birds nesting in its boughs and of the species that once were its comrades but now live on only as memories laid down in the rings of its great trunk.

In the last 50 years, the oak has watched a catastrophe unfold larger than anything it has witnessed in its long life. She watched the human ego supersede the human place in ecology and expand to engulf species and habitats and ecosystems and tear them to the ground. She watched as children no longer climbed her boughs or ran around her trunk, but were imprisoned in concrete boxes. She watched as trees no longer became life, but a price tag.

While the divorce between humankind and our trees was playing out, there were those who took a stand. In 1973, 29 years before I was born, the ‘Plant a Tree for ‘73’ slogan saw people around the country planting tens of thousands of trees in an effort to combat dutch elm disease. Out of the campaign grew The Tree Council. Alongside the tragic loss of tree cover in the UK, The Tree Council coordinated the planting of tens of millions of trees and inspired thousands to care for nature and to give our trees a helping hand.

In 2019, I founded environmental education charity Another Way, to inspire everyone to take collective action for our planet. As part of our launch event, I worked with The Tree Council and hundreds of schoolchildren, farmers and locals, to plant 3,000 oaks, hawthorns, blackthorns and dog rose during National Tree Week in the Lake District. I saw firsthand the power of tree planting to help people feel motivated and hopeful, in a movement that is so often full of burnout, despair and apathy.

In 2020, I addressed the very first national Tree Forum, a 16-year-old in a room of professionals from every industry and major forestry organisation. I told them that to reach the UK’s target of planting 1 billion trees, each person in the UK would only have to plant 45. My message was and is one of proactivity and hope. We have waited too long for ‘someone else’ to save our future. It is time to take it into our own hands, quite literally; nestling each sapling root by root into the earth.

Amy with The Tree Council CEO, Sara Lom and the Forestry Commission Chair, Sir William Worsley

In the years since my first National Tree Week, I have coordinated the planting of 30,000 trees and hedgerows by volunteers. The local people are now invested in improving the quality of our landscape and connecting wildlife corridors, and we are already seeing the benefits, in reduced flooding, more biodiversity and salmon returning to our river.

I have been really excited in the last couple of years to take part in the Tree Council’s Young Tree Champions initiative, which has involved 1 million young people around the UK in caring for nature and planting trees. Truly, the power of one individual to bring about positive change is massive, and the power of a united community infinite.

As the next 50 rings of the oak tree’s trunk are drawn, circle on circle, in the marking of marching time, what stories and memories will each one tell? Will they depict more death and loss and grief? Will they signal the countdown of humanity as we know it? An epitaph to human existence? Will the acorns sprinkled over the forest floor struggle the last stand of the mighty oaks? Or will each ring tell of a transformation as beautiful as the growth of a tree? Will they tell of collective action on all levels of society in an unprecedented effort to protect our trees and to reinstall our seat in the orchestra of ecology? Will they tell of cities adorned in green, of hedges connecting our country, of young people inspired by nature and of ancient forests left to thrive?

As I touch my cheek against the oak’s wrinkled bark, I promise to be on the side of the story that rewrites the future of her children, and mine. I notice a shiny smooth acorn nestled in the leaves beside me. I pick it up, and slide it into my pocket. When I go home, I will nurture it as long as I can. But to what future it will grow into, only we can decide.

Amy Bray is a Young Ambassador with The Tree Council’s Young Tree Champions programme. She is also Founder and CEO of environmental education charity, Another Way

There are tree planting events big and small taking place across the UK this National Tree Week, find one near you at www.nationaltreeweek.org.uk. And if you can’t attend a planting event, why not host a Tree Party? Find lots of fun, informative and interactive materials here.

MORE: Sowing the seeds of nature connection by Katie Rafferty, The Tree Council’s National Schools Programme Officer