Trees are so important for us humans. Everyone knows that. Who doesn't like to go to the forest during a hot summer day? The impact of trees on the climate is huge. I wish we all would try to protect our forest more. Planting trees is a great thing, I volunteered many times when I was younger at an charity event where we spent a weekend in the woods. One good idea would be to force companies who use a lot of wood, to plant one tree for any tree killed.
Forests are forests because trees grow there. Where trees grow, you cannot stop them from growing without a hell of a lot of continuous effort.
For a while some other plant might grow, but they tend to have all of the advantages of trees anyway. Ultimately the species which is most adapted for an environment takes over.
You guys are fighting a problem which doesn't exist. That's fine to try to get trees growing where they shouldn't and won't normally hurt anything, but it's not going so 'save the earth'. Ecologically it is probably more 'disruptive' than commercial harvest of native species, but in a practical sense a bunch of kids planting a few trees (while they get indoctrinated with political propaganda) isn't going to make much difference to Mother Gaia.
Where I'm from a commercial harvest of trees always comes with a re-plant. By law. And it's been that way for 50 years. That's fine, but what happens is that there are a lot of research programs which selectively breed Douglas Fir for fast growth optimized for mills which handle under 24" timber. The fallout of that is that vasts swaths are planted in what is very much a mono-culture of genetics which are optimized for one particular thing, and that one thing is not necessarily what nature would have selected. Mono-cultures tend to do OK until one organism comes along which can exploit a weakness then there is a sudden and massive die-off.
