Helping to make the Camino Greener
To make the Camino greener is in your hands. The foundation “+ Árboles” is planning to hand out this fall 150 000 seeds in small balls of clay to pilgrims. The idea is that pilgrims take these balls of clay with them and plant it on their way.
This reforesting campaign has been baptized as the “Green Olympics” and is being supported by Pau Donés, a singer in the band “Jarabe de Palo”. They are taking good care of every detail, for example the seeds delivered will not be the same for the whole of the camino. Only seeds of trees that belong to a certain zone will be handed out.
The city of Santiago de Compostela is also evolved in this initiative, were they expect that thousands of seeds will be
El Ayuntamiento de Santiago de Compostela también participa en esta iniciativa, con la que se espera que miles de semillas sean esparcidas por el Camino antes de final de año para que las lluvias luego hagan el resto.
You might not have heard of theses balls of clay before. They contain the seed but also fertilizers that help the seed grow. They clay also protects the seed form birds and other animals that would otherwise eat it. It is the rain that dissolves the clay ball with this mixture, leaving the seed in the grown surrounded with the water and the fertilizer.
This method of planning threes was created by a Japanese microbiologist named Masanobu Fukuoka , who decided to change these large plantation to be more efficient that the traditional re-forestation projects. About 2% of the seeds planted with the clay balls do set seed, compared to 0,2% using the traditional method.
This campaign of re-foresting along the Camino is part of a larger plan that the “Fundation + Arboles” are working on. This plan is a plan to plant more than 100 million trees on the Iberian Peninsula before 2011 to protect the peninsula from land drying up and turning into a desert type landscape.
The idea is that pilgrims can pick up these clay balls at the albergues along the camino. The rest is up to Mother Nature.
