The Miyawaki Method: To Plant Trees Where No Trees Have Been Planted Before

We need the trees. They need us. But we're quickly losing them. And though we might be able to salvage some of our forests if we double or even triple the efforts to repopulate them, it might already be too late. Or is it? Maybe, there's a better way of building forests. Like the Miyawaki Method perhaps. The method was named after Akira Miyawaki.

The Blue Planet Award-winning botanist from Japan is celebrated for his very particular approach to afforestation—a soil-, air-, water-, and climate-remediating process by which trees are planted where no trees existed before.

Shubhendu Sharma, a former industrial engineer who worked with Toyota, was so enamored by Miyawaki's presentation of "afforestation" that once he tried it out and proved it works, he quit his job and set up his own forest-production company called Afforestt.

Sharma volunteered to help place over 32,000 native trees and plants like neem, mango, and teak into the otherwise industrial landscape. And from that day on, his fate was sealed. In 2011, after proving that Miyawaki’s method could work for his own experimental backyard forest, he quit his job at Toyota and opened a forest-production company named Afforestt, which practices what Miyawaki preaches: the introduction to a depleted landscape of “potential natural vegetation,” which is what would naturally occur in that particular place without human intervention.

So how is afforestation done and how does it work?

(Image credit: Lubomirkin/Unsplash)