The Importance of Planting Trees for All Living Things

Many of us are unaware of how important the presence of trees around us. Trees are not only useful to protect us from radiant heat from the sun that has been hotter due to climate crisis, but trees are also a habitat of millions living creature, more than we ever thought. It has become a well-known fact that trees are one of the biggest sources of oxygen. Oxygen is required for human breathing and producing energy. Not only for human, but also almost all living things in the world need oxygen to stay alive.

Trees are also providing ecosystem service to prevent flood that have caused many nature disasters especially in big cities in Indonesia. Big cities are often not having ability to harvest rainwater. It caused by lack of green space, not many trees in urban areas, and also poor drainage. Although, we may already know that trees and open spaces can be useful to absorb rainwater, thus natural disasters like flood can be minimalized.

In addition, heavy rainwater can also cause other natural disaster, for example soil erosion. Water tension from heavy rainfall and long rain can erode soil surface. Eroded soil surface slowly become wider and can cause landslide that endangering lives, as well harmful for humans and other living things.

If we see it from wider context, trees are also providing livelihood for other living things. Thousands of life cycle can happened in a tree. Inside a tree, a little caterpillar lives and eat its leaves, then that caterpillar become source of energy for a bird. Then the bird will become a food of other living things such as snakes.

From that example of circle of life, we can conclude that trees presence has many positive values to us and other living things.  We can imagine if the trees are not existed, then the caterpillar may not be able to eat leaves, the birds will find it harder to find caterpillar. Thus, existential of snakes will be affected due to limited amount of birds in the nature.

#KawanBelantara, from this story, we can conclude that if we take care of trees around us and plant more trees we are not only preserve the environment from effect of natural disaster like flood and landslide, but from tree planting we are also indirectly contributed to our environment and other living things.