A man sharpens his scythe before cutting a field of grass next to the Armenian nuclear power near Yerevan on June 5, 1995. Rouben Mangasarian/AFP/Getty Images
In southern Armenia, not far from the Turkish and Iranian borders, the village of Paruyr Sevak straddles a strip of arid, treeless no man’s land between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The border village was settled in 1978 as just a smattering of Soviet-built houses named after Armenia’s esteemed 20th-century poet, killed in a car crash farther up the road. Before the village was founded, Azeri shepherds had wandered there freely with their flocks, but the outpost helped define and delimit the land.
In 1988, a six-year war with Azerbaijan flared over nearby Nagorno-Karabakh, the self-declared autonomous region that is historically Armenian but under Azerbaijani control. The same period saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the redrawing of regional maps. Protracted territorial disputes eventually slowed into a daily drum of Azeri sniper fire, and the village needed more than aging buildings to signal its status as Armenian.
“For the land to be yours, it’s not enough just to have a signpost. You have to cultivate the land. You have to plant trees,” Edik Stepanyan told me on a dry, sunny afternoon this past October. He’s the village mayor and moved there 40 years ago from the city of Ararat, named for the white-capped mountain considered sacred to Armenians, which now sits on Turkish soil.
Planting trees is just what the area is doing. Running through the desert plains, on one side of a dusty two-lane thoroughfare, a towering dirt bulwark protects villagers from Azeri gunfire. (“If we didn’t hear the shootings, then we’d be worried, because we’re so used to it,” joked the 60-year-old resident Mesrop Karamyan.) On the other side, poking through the red, parched soil, still five or six years away from providing any shade, sit close to 5,000 green saplings—the makings of a community forest.
A white sedan sputters by with a treeling strapped to its roof. Nearby Khosrov Forest, a protected nature reserve, is home to bears, wolves, ibex, and a handful of endangered Caucasian snow leopards, but sunbaked Paruyr Sevak, lacking any rivers or streams, has virtually no tree cover. The mayor hopes the new park will soften the harsh climate, with the bonus of doubling down on the village’s claim on the vulnerable stretch of borderland.
“We always have to be alert. That’s the only choice we have,” Stepanyan said. “We either keep these borders or we lose everything.” Besides, he added brightly, “it will be a heavenly place.”
Stepanyan is one of many Armenians looking to transform the landscape. Riding high on the heels of a peaceful revolution that swept out years of corrupt oligarchy, Armenia’s new reformist government, led by the former journalist Nikol Pashinyan, has pledged to double the country’s tree cover by 2050 as part of Armenia’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement goals.
There is a lot to unpack in the plan to “,” as tongue-in-cheek comedy duo Narek Margaryan and Sergey Sargsyan have coined it. More than an environmental strategy against climate change, illegal logging, biodiversity loss, and desertification, in Armenia tree planting is suffused with cultural survival.
Since 1994, the Armenia Tree Project (ATP), a Massachusetts-headquartered nonprofit staffed by Armenians and Armenian Americans, has led the country’s reforestation efforts. ATP nurseries, greenhouses, community forests, and planting sites dot virtually every corner of Armenia, from the lush, leafy Georgian border down to disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. Their forests often memorialize; they’re named for genocide survivors or are dedicated to patriotic themes. In 2001, ATP planted the poplar and fruit trees skirting the roads around the 13th-century Noravank monastery to honor Armenia’s 1,700-year anniversary as the world’s first Christian nation.
Scaling up that model, in October at the country’s inaugural forest summit—Forest Summit: Global Action and Armenia, convened by ATP and the American University of Armenia—Pashinyan announced that doubling the tree cover would begin with 10 million trees planted by Oct. 10, 2020—representing the global population of Armenians. To put that number into perspective, after 25 years on the ground, ATP celebrated its 6 millionth tree planting only late last year.
Reforestation, a popular talking point in climate change adaptation efforts, is tricky that way. It does have the potential to reduce air pollution, increase rainfall, and absorb harmful carbon emissions. It is equally valuable in terms of symbolism (even the reelection campaign of U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken of planting a trillion trees), whether it is for shoring up borders, committing to cleaner air, or self-aggrandizement. But the danger in symbolism is that it can favor tidy, fast solutions in place of messy complexities, much like the identical rows of trees often planted to replace eroded forest cover.