I was introduced to ecological international movement MeerbomenNu, in English translated to More Trees Now, by my Six Inches of Soil friend and colleague James Murray-White, who’s part of the Save The Oaks campaign. James had joined Marga Witteman and the small More Trees Now team for a harvest day in Corby, on the second stop of their UK tour, which took place at the end of 2023. More Trees Now has its roots in the Netherlands and is now expanding to Germany, UK, Ireland and France.

The premise behind the movement is to rescue excess or unwanted saplings in nature and transplant them to sites where they can grow into mature trees. More Trees Now organises harvest days and gives away saplings for free. The project started in 2020 and since then, they have rescued over 1.5 million saplings in the Netherlands and over 200,000 in Germany. In their first UK tour they saved 5000 saplings.

More Trees Now is a segment of the Urgenda Foundation, one of the leading climate organisations in the Netherlands and Marga, who heads up More Trees Now, is part of the small Urgenda team. Urgenda Foundation is famous for winning the first ever climate court case against the state. In December 2019, after a lengthy legal battle, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands in The Hague ordered the Dutch government to urgently and significantly reduce emissions to protect human rights. It was a landmark case and there’s a really powerful video that captures the moments after the ruling. I’d encourage you to find out more about the case here, it makes fascinating reading. Marga was in court for the ruling supporting her colleagues, she said it was an incredibly exhilarating moment for them all.

I spoke to Marga to find out about More Trees Now and how this initiative can be rolled out in other Northwestern European countries.

How did the idea for More Trees Now come about?
It started with a small group of people who all share the same frustration. We’re in a climate and a biodiversity crisis, we want to plant trees, we know other people want to do this too but it’s not happening at the speed we think is necessary and that we’d like to see.

Trees make hundreds of saplings every year, it’s a way for them to procreate and they do this in abundance because most of them don’t survive. In routine management many saplings wither naturally or they die through competition, they’re eaten by animals, or they’re removed by humans because they’re growing in an unwanted place or in an unsuitable ecosystem. These saplings provide a really good source of free circular, sustainable and indigenous planting material. In the winter, when the trees go into rest, you can safely save the sapling and transplant it. You can apply this method everywhere in Northwestern Europe where the winter is cold enough and trees go into rest.

Around the time we won the ruling, we came together with an ecologist, Franke van der Laan from MEERGroen, in English translated to MoreGreen, who had been trying out this sapling rescue method on a smaller scale. He manages approximately 150 acres of national natural areas around Amsterdam. When Franke removed these saplings he decided to give them away for free. He did this for a number of years making sure the project was ecologically sound, giving away almost 100,000 saplings. Then he met us at the Urgenda Foundation, he wanted to find a way to scale up the initiative so we created More Trees Now.

After we had successfully launched the project in the Netherlands in 2020, we really wanted to roll it out across the whole country, particularly following the 1.5 degrees ruling. If you want to stick to 1.5 degrees maximum global warming, the carbon reduction you need to make is so incredibly large that your reduction line is basically a vertical straight line. The only thing you can do is plant trees, capture carbon and store it in healthy ecosystems. It’s called negative emissions because you’re actually flattening that vertical line.

By mobilising Urgenda followers, we saved around 250,000 saplings in that first winter of 2020. We also saved 250,000 trees that a grower could not sell because of Covid, which meant around half a million trees were saved in that first winter. After that we had much less surplus from growers but we steadily grew the project saving approximately 390,000 saplings the following winter. The year after, we saved almost 400,000.

This is our fourth winter in the Netherlands and the success that we had mobilising the community and decentralising our organisation was picked up in other places. Last year, we had some interested parties in Germany, so we did a pilot with them and rolled out the project there saving the first 200,000 saplings. Then we came into contact with some people from the UK and Ireland, which resulted in the first tour at the end of 2023. We translated all of our manuals and our decentralized tree planter system, which we use to self-organize, we also now make Instagram and YouTube videos in English. We’re sharing everything that we know and have, so that everyone can use it to start up themselves. We do harvest events that include lectures to really try to build a community who can all get involved in the project.

Can you explain the importance of saving native species and the ecology related to those species so that people can fully understand how you harvest?
We have two systems in place to guide people on how it works. One is the tree planner, which is organisational and connects everyone together, including all the harvest places where saplings can be removed, tree hubs where they can be collected and stored, and locations for people who want them. We also have a tree finder, which isn’t yet translated into English, which is where we input all the ecological information about every tree that we’ve ever rescued. For example, is it native, which soil type does it require, does it improve the soil by fixing nitrogen, is it good for particular bird species or insects, how big does it grow, is it suitable for agroforestry etc.? People who want a tree can fill in information about their environment and get advice on the trees that fit their spot. They can use this information when searching for trees on the tree planner and sign up for events where they can collect them.

These saplings haven’t needed anything to grow, their abundance comes from nature, they haven’t needed fertilizer, extra land or any other resource. There are saplings that are in excess in nature and some that aren’t, and if they aren’t you need to leave them there because you want to leave the ecosystem as beautiful as you found it, preferably better. You only take the saplings that you can justly take and for the other species that you might not find in excess in nature, nurseries are the perfect answer. Pioneering species are the ones that will mostly appear in excess in any given natural area. In the UK this is often Willow, Beech and Birch. These species also provide the base for building a new ecosystem.

How does the project make you feel? The enthusiasm from you and the people at the harvesting events on your videos is infectious.
It makes me feel hopeful. And it allows me to channel my energy somewhere where I know it will have a result. If you look at the science of the biodiversity and climate crisis that we’re in, it’s so overwhelmingly negative and scary. Everybody responds differently but it can make you feel hopeless, angry and sad. You have to find a way to channel that into something positive if you don’t want to be paralysed by all of those emotions. I’ve found a great way to channel it in this campaign and to do something that other people have responded to so positively only gives you more energy and hope. If everyone saved some saplings, even just one day every winter it can make a huge difference. One person working for just a few hours can save 100 saplings that can become potential mature trees. It has huge scaling potential.

The community aspect of the project also comes across strongly in your videos. How important is that?
It’s the driving force because everything is decentralized and run by volunteers. In the Netherlands, we have about 15,000 participants who are responsible for over half a million saplings each winter, which is only four months. If the community doesn’t spring into action nothing happens. Because we’re a small team we can’t do this by ourselves. We also don’t want the project to be dependent on a few people because that makes it vulnerable, we need each other if we want to make something happen. Not only is community necessary, but doing a project like this together reflects the power that the community has back to the community.

Once you’ve finished the harvest days do you hear back from the people involved in the project?
Absolutely, we know that some initiatives in Ireland have already organised their own harvest day saving some willow trees and taking cuttings from elder trees. We have a WhatsApp group including everyone that we’ve visited. We’re also going to host Zoom calls to help volunteers organize their own first harvest. The feedback from the UK tour was amazing.

Can you explain how people can get involved?
Foresters, landowners, municipalities, anyone who has a plot of land that has trees on it that has saplings in places where they cannot mature, can sign up on the website as a harvest location. Tree hubs are also signed up to there, which are community projects where the saplings are collected and stored. Everyone who wants a free tree is also signed up to that system. They can then talk to  other participants and organise events on their land with the Tree Planner. Signup links are then generated, which they can share with their neighbours who can also sign up. After the harvest, they can register which trees were taken where, for example they could note that they gave 100 Birch trees to their neighbour who came to pick them up for their forestry project. We also have a downloadable app that works in a similar way where you can view and sign up for events.

This project really connects people to nature again how important is that for you?
It’s so important. It comes down to the way you view nature. Do you see it as a net cost deficit that needs to be managed and kept in check? Or can you see the systems, wealth, richness and everything that it provides for us. We take children into nature who don’t realise that every little twig they see coming up from the ground is a potential big tree. We harvest with kids and they pull a sapling out the ground for the first time and they say, “whoa it has roots”. With Franke we’re able to really look at the ecological aspect and think, is this tree in a place where it’s ecologically sound? Most people start with the desire to save the saplings that are going to be mowed down, then the more ecological knowledge they gain you see a shift. They say, I’m going to transplant these saplings so that they’re in their optimal spot so they can flourish and support the ecosystem that they’re in.

Do you think this would have been something our ancestors would have done?
I think the same type of attitude of really looking at nature can be found in the food forest movement. They cleverly put together certain types of trees and plants that are edible. That of course has roots in indigenous cultures everywhere. That’s what our ancestors did. They worked with nature to cleverly put the right plants together to be nourished by them. And this is this just another branch of that.

On the first UK tour at the end of last year More Trees Now organised harvesting events at Wakelyns in Suffolk, Weldon Woodland Park in Corby and Northumberland Woodland Burial in Morpeth. They travelled to Dublin, Ireland with Easy Treesie, an organisation that’s planting one million native trees with Ireland’s one million school children and their communities. Easy Treesie has now set up More Trees Now Ireland. In Scotland they did a harvest day at Leadburn Community Woodland. The next event in the UK is on Sunday 28th January, at Chapel Brampton, Northamptonshire. You can sign up here.

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