Planting Fruit Trees

When we created our vision for the annual The Lissome print edition, it was our aim to bring to life a new and regenerative kind of fashion magazine, and at the same time explore uncharted ways of funding that allowed us to work with an authentic, independent voice and without having to compromise our artistic vision.

Words by Dörte de Jesus, photography by Matthias Ziegler

We came up with was the idea of offering sponsored pages (instead of traditional advertisement) to kindred-spirited partners who would support our publishing work whilst at the same time help and highlight grassroots environmental initiatives.

For each of the sponsored pages, we planted a diverse selection of native fruit trees in a renaturalization project in the village of Börnicke outside of Berlin. It is the first project that we have supported directly (with our hands and shovels), and it is small-scale, hyper-local, and close to our hearts. Initiated by Ludger Haller, a neighbour of The Lissome’s fashion director Sophia Schwan, a formerly derelict piece of land in the village outskirts is being restored gently and transformed into a long-term village oasis with a renaturalized lake and native fruit trees.

Renowned documentary photographer Matthias Ziegler chronicled our joyful tree-planting day on 1 November 2020, with members of the Lissome team, friends and family.

We would like to thank our sponsors Armedangels, Calida, Dr. Hauschka, Druckhaus Sportflieger, pinqponq and Weleda for their generous support of our work and vision. 

Regrowing and expanding existing forests as well as growing new forests are good ways to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere. But in addition, we would like to point out that reforestation is a long-term mitigation strategy and only effective if done in ecologically minded and holistic ways with the right locations, diversity of plants, and forest management in mind.

While there is an increase of commercial monoculture tree plantations globally, the ancient forests of our world continue to disappear. But what we truly need are natural, biodiverse, old-growth forests. Natural forests store more than three times as much carbon as monoculture plantations and the carbon-storing potential of forests grows as they age.

At the same time, forests are so much more than convenient carbon stores. They are precious habitats for endangered wildlife and highly intelligent ecosystems full of life and beauty that have the resilience to withstand the fires, droughts, and pests brought on by the climate crisis.

References:
Heather Plumpton, “How to design a forest fit to heal the planet”, The Conversation, 9 December 2019. 

Greenpeace, “Wege aus der Waldkrise. Vom Forst zum natürlichen Klimaregler”, September 2019. 

Daniel Bastardo Blanco, “We Can’t Just Plant Billions of Trees to Stop Climate Change”, Discover magazine, 10 July 2019.