and another thing ...

Seed bombing is about to jump to a whole new level of awesomeness. A fleet of unused and decommissioned C-130 Hercules cargo planes, originally created to drop land mines, will be recommissioned as foresters. Lockheed Martin — the quintessential military innovation company — has taken a 25 year old idea from former UK RAF pilot Jack Walters and turned it into a reality. The planes will be outfitted to each drop up to 900,000 trees in one day and with 2,500 C-130’s sitting unused in 70 different countries, this idea could make for a lot of little saplings.

“The possibilities are amazing,” Peter Simmons told the Guardian. “We can fly at 1,000ft at 130 knots planting more than 3,000 cones a minute in a pattern across the landscape – just as we did with landmines, but in this case each cone contains a sapling. That’s 125,000 trees for each sortie and 900,000 trees in a day.” The cones in question are expertly formed to bury themselves in the soil of a deforested area at the same distance that one would want them to be if planting the trees by hand. The tree bombs don’t explode on impact but rather their casing dissolves over time and they contain a measure of fertilizer and enough moisture to ensure that the tree takes root.

(via Old Military Planes to Tree Bomb Deforested Areas | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World)

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    fucking into this.

13. steveboswell reblogged this from wolfmank and added:

    Make trees, not bombs....about to jump to a whole new level of awesomeness. A fleet of...

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    .. AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (And why aren’t we doing this already?!)

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    This is one example of what we should be using our amazing technology for: Drop bombs to grow trees, not to destroy...

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    ENEMY AC-130 SPOTTED!

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