Flying a drone in India require permits from multriple authorities [1] Their import is also highly regulated [2].
It may be cheaper to throw a couple bucks at a few thousand people than go through the license Raj. At the very least, it would be faster and more predictable.
>It may be cheaper to throw a couple bucks at a few thousand people than go through the license Raj. At the very least, it would be faster and more predictable.
They're just going to trample over the landscape they're supposed to be foresting. You also can't verify and trust them to actually go out there and plant things rather than just throwing their whole bag in the nearest trash can and coming back with an empty sack demanding payment.
"They're just going to trample over the landscape they're supposed to be foresting."
Really? Do you have a mental image of these people locking arms like a search party and marching around the forest deliberately stomping everything they find into a thin green paste or something? It is not actually that difficult for some people to walk into a forest without killing everything they see, plant some trees, and come back. The Evil of Man (TM) does not actually extend to laser beams of death coming out his eyes and striking down all living things within visual range.
I can't help but read this as just being contrarian for the sake of contrarianness, because this objection (being raised by some others in this discussion too) is fundamentally deeply silly.
>Really? Do you have a mental image of these people locking arms like a search party and marching around the forest deliberately stomping everything they find into a thin green paste or something? It is not actually that difficult for some people to walk into a forest without killing everything they see, plant some trees, and come back. The Evil of Man (TM) does not actually extend to laser beams of death coming out his eyes and striking down all living things within visual range.
You understand that large numbers of people walking over an area necessarily involves trampling over the ground right? This effort requires repeated plantings over a long time. Random people you pick up off the street who you're paying a pittance are not going to be invested in your actual goal, just the proximal goal of getting paid to do the thing.
Have you actually spent time in forests that are well-traveled by people? Forests are not constructed out of finely-spun cotton candy or something that melts away at the touch of rain or the slightest touch.
Again, it is not that hard to walk into a forest, plant some trees, and walk back out without killing everything you see. People manage to do this all the time, even at scale.
Perhaps you are thinking of the desert ecosystem, which in many places is sensitive enough to do serious damage to with just a footstep?
I really can't imagine that you've spent very much time in forests if you think they are literally so delicate that they can't handle traffic for the purposes of putting more trees in them. You are aware that animals tend to live in them, too, right? It's not all just The Evil of Man (TM).
These aren't forests yet. These are rocky hills with little other than grasses and scrub brush on them. The water table is low from overuse and insanely polluted besides. The rains are irregular and salinization and soil erosion are both huge problems. We're not talking about a robust ecosystem here, we're talking about rebuilding an extremely unhealthy biome. Having thousands of people stomping around in that back-country isn't going to do it any favors.
This is why national parks have trails and fences to keep people from treading on the more sensitive parts and require wilderness permits before you get to go backcountry camping. Backcountry doesn't stay backcountry when it has to carry too many people. People piss. They shit. They spit and smoke and litter. When you're paying a junk wage to random people off the street who aren't bought into your mission they will do all of these things and nobody will be policing them. It's sounding like you've never actually tried to coordinate large groups of people to do anything before. Especially if they're under-educated and not paid well, they really tend not to exercise much diligence or care.
So, because places that hundreds of people camp on over the course of years can be damaged, it's not safe for one group of people to go in once to do something to recover the environment?
Again, you seem to just have this unbelievably destructive model of the environmental impact of some people walking around, like they're some sort of Dementors from Harry Potter in real life that suck the life out of everything they pass by. And in the context of this discussion, even the fact they're going in with the explicit purpose of improving the environment doesn't make this worthwhile?
And again I can't help but see this as just being contrarian to be contrarian, because the environmental impact model you're proposing is, frankly, insane. Apparently we're going to pay some people to camp out and do whatever they want for months, and at some point, maybe get around to planting some trees after they're done grinding the local environment up and snorting it up their noses? I don't think anybody is proposing this. If you armed some people with tree saplings and deliberately paid them to damage the environment in a day I don't think they could come even close to what you seem to think is going to happen if the hoi polloi is allowed outside.
I mean, this almost starts feeling sort of racist when it gets down to it... those people can't be trusted to freaking plant some trees without destroying everything? Seriously? This is ridiculous.
FWIW, I have six years of college and I am an environmental studies major. I have also been homeless for roughly 5.5 years. I manage to camp with minimal impact on the environment with my two adult sons.
I have seen what other homeless people can do to the same area. About three years ago, some group began camping near us and what had been a narrow trail, not readily visible from the road, began looking like elephants on hashish had trampled it. Plants were broken and the trail became obvious. They were loud, rowdy and doing drugs. We soon relocated.
Just because it is possible for someone educated who cares about the environment to carefully walk in and walk out with minimal impact does not mean you can actually trust anyone to do the same. I concur with the remarks being made here by naravara.
Anecdotally: My ex was career military. While in Germany, there were strict rules about not harming the environment. They threw a track on their track vehicle. He wanted to walk it back onto the vehicle, but this would have involved backing over a tree. So someone else overroad him and called in a vehicle to rescue their track vehicle in order to protect this tree, as per guidelines. The rescue vehicle was even larger and you could hear it coming as it mowed down tree after tree after tree, cutting a path to their location.
Stupid is as stupid does. It is everywhere and it rarely benefits the environment.
When the CCC worked on reforestation in the US, they did a lot of planting by first cutting furrows with tractors (many are still recognizable).
I know someone who works as a commercial forester, often managing plantings of trees in the US. They take a trailer full of trees and imported labor and go out and stick them in the ground. It's backbreaking work, one of the steps is to stomp the hole cut for the tree closed with a boot.
Both are a bit unfortunate, leading to monocultures, and in the case of many CCC forests, poor future management, so the trees are crowded and fragile.
Of course, those areas are not as protected as US National Parks, but they are much, much vaster.
>I mean, this almost starts feeling sort of racist when it gets down to it...
I'm Indian myself dude. It's not a race thing, it's basic human nature. If you use uneducated and underpaid people who don't care about the mission you ostensibly want them to do (which is what you'd be doing if you want to make it cost-effective against just flying some drones up there), they're not going to actually act to fulfill the mission you're transactionally hiring them for.
They're not going there with the "explicit purpose of improving the environment." They're there to collect a paycheck according to whatever terms you gave them. If those terms are "Go up there with a sack full of seeds, scatter them around, and come back down with an empty sack" they'll figure out a way to do that by the most efficient (for them) means possible.
This is basic human nature. If you're also not policing them to make sure they're not also causing ecological damage while they're there (through litter and leaving lots of traces) you could easily end up being pretty counterproductive. If you want to put them through a lot of training to make sure they don't do any of that, you're going to have to have oversight and training which, again, starts to eat away at its cost effectiveness relative to drones. And this is even setting aside the fact that people need to rest and drink water if you're expecting them to go mountaineering with a pack full of manure and seeds on their backs.
>those people can't be trusted to freaking plant some trees without destroying everything? Seriously? This is ridiculous.
The fact that you make planting trees in the backcountry sound like a brainless and easy endeavor makes me wonder if you've ever actually been in the wilderness or so much as gardened before. It's not so simplistic, especially when you're dealing with a place that does not currently have any trees. Even parts of forests that get burned out by huge fires or flooding have trouble getting tree-growth back for a long time because grasses and shrubs outcompete them, and that's despite not having people periodically stomping around there.
And not just that, but you expect people to go out doing this even though it involves having to go mountaineering (without trails) through brush in South Indian heat with a pack full of manure and seeds on their backs. (And they wouldn't be giving them ultralight gear here or anything. It's gonna be a burlap sack if you're lucky, but plastic bags are more likely).
>Again, you seem to just have this unbelievably destructive model of the environmental impact of some people walking around
You seem to have a very naive model of the kind of impact that people operating in fragile wilderness has. Grass is one of the hardiest and stubborn plants out there and even that gets trampled into dirt with surprisingly few people going over it. You said animals have to function in forests too, yeah they do. But if their population isn't [kept in check by predation](http://www.yellowstonepark.com/wolf-reintroduction-changes-e...) they also do a lot of damage to the ecology. A forest isn't just a bunch of trees close together. It's a whole biome you have to build and it's not going to be helped if it's being trammeled by people, even if those people are dropping a backpack's worth of seeds with each trip. One pack of seeds won't make up for the damage they'll do just by being there unless they're extremely attentive to the principle of leaving no trace. (And believe me when I say that underpaid, uneducated random people off the street in India will not be).
And we need to go over again, since you don't seem to be getting it, the fact that we're not talking about a healthy or robust ecosystem here. We're talking about an area that has already been destroyed which they are trying to re-forest.
This is a cheaper and better alternative.