TED "Willie Smits" Post

I'm Dylan, the Cleantech Kid. I'm in fifth grade. This blog is about cleantech and environmental topics which I hope other kids will look at and enjoy.

This posting will be about a talk from TED (www.ted.com), a conference and a community my mom and dad taught me about. It's called "Willie Smits restores a rainforest."

This is a great video. Willie Smits is amazing! He restores a huge rain forest by changing the whole climate. He was like his own weather machine, as in "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs."

He began because he was worried about Orangutans being sick and not having a place to live where he lives in Borneo in Indonesia. There used to be a rain forest there with plenty of food and water and places where they could live. But mining and "slash and burn" agriculture wrecked it and drove away and killed the wildlife.

Willie Smits figured out a recipe to bring back the forest and make everything work again.

He got control of ownership of the land. He ended the fires, including the coal fires underground. He planted 1,000 trees a day, trees of all different kinds, and lots of other things. All of this created conditions which could feed people and Orangutans, and provide bioenergy. He got the local people very involved. As he got the forest working right and balanced, the temperature got lowered, the humidity raised, and the cloud cover increased. The birds and reptiles and wildlife came back.

I was very excited by his dream and determination, and what one man could do to push all this and make it happen.

Future postings will include interviews with cool people, stories about green things I read about and places I visit, awesome videos and info from other blogs, and guest bloggers. There will be postings every 2 weeks and sometimes more often.

Here is the talk:

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