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Miniforests deserve widespread replication not just because
they’re relatively easy to create, and have such outsize climate benefits, but
also for another reason: While climate policy is so often vulnerable to suspicions
that elites are stealing our pleasures—some people love revving the gas engine,
driving big cars, eating meat—the miniforest is pure delight. Everyone at the
planting was having a wonderful time. People waited in line to plant a tree,
and then they got back in line to plant another.

The miniforest designer, Ethan Bryson, knows something about
the deep satisfactions we can find by dwelling more often in greenery. In
architecture school, he told the assembled crowd, he used to spend long hours
on his computer, looking longingly at his screensaver, which depicted a lush
bucolic scene. “I realized I didn’t want to be sitting at my computer,” he
recalls. “I wanted to be in the forest.” He now brings the forest’s screenless
pleasures to other urbanites every day.

We seem mired in an ongoing debate about whether climate
optimism is OK. Hannah Ritchie’s new book, Not the End of the World, has
drawn praise
from Bill Gates but skepticism and irritation from critics; a
Guardian reviewer found the “determinedly upbeat tone” to be
“infuriating.” But these debates over what our affect should be toward the
climate crisis may miss the point. Maybe we need neither hope nor pessimism—we
need joy.