Planting Trees On Roads & Why Christ Was Born Before Christ!

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

25 December 2005

In last week’s article, I suggested that a two-shilling per litre levy on fuel can be enough to plant trees to clean up the carbon dioxide emitted by all the cars in Kenya. A few readers have asked where these trees would be planted – in the forests or along the roads?

Lets try along the roads: Kenya has 177,500km of roads – including the unclassified tracts that you may find in the villages. From last week’s calculations based on national fuel consumption, we require 386 million trees to remove the carbon dioxide emitted by our cars.

If the trees were planted along the roads, we would have to fit over 2,000 plants per kilometre, that is, over 1,000 on each side! Is that practically possible?

If the trees were planted in a single line, 1,000 per kilometre works out to a tree every metre. That would be too close. In a forest there are about 250 trees per hectare. A hectare is 10,000 square metres. Therefore, each tree takes about 40sqm. Thus the average separation of the trees is about 6.3 metres.

If we maintain this average distance for the trees along the road, one line would have 160 plants per kilometre. To get 1,000 trees per kilometre would require at least 6 lines. These lines would be 6.3m apart. Therefore we would need a 38-metre reserve on each side of the road for the trees.

What if this plan was restricted to only the classified roads that join major towns and trading centres. The total length is only 63,000km. Therefore we need to plant 3,000 trees per kilometre. This works out to a reserve of over 100 metres on either side of the road.

This may sound too much but it can be an interesting addition to the roads construction standards in Kenya. Alternatively, all the trees can be planted in the forests. This would require 1.5 million hectares (3.8 million acres). That is, we would have to increase the forest cover from 3.5 million to 5 million hectares. That’s not a bad proposition.

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To day is Christmas day, and I feel compelled to tackle a question that keeps coming up every year: Is Christmas really the birthday of Jesus Christ? The answer is NO. All historians and theologians agree than Jesus was NOT born on 25 December of year 1 AD. It is also known that Christ was born between 6BC and 4BC (Yes; Christ was born “Before Christ”!). His birthday is know to be somewhere between the months of September and October and definitely not in the northern winter season (December to February). Indeed, I have seen one source that puts it on exactly September 11 at about 7pm, Jerusalem time!

So why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25? This date was arrived at after a miscalculation attributed to Dionysius Exiguus, a monk who lived 1,500 years ago. Nevertheless, that does not make today any less important. It is the day to commemorate the birth of Christ; much the same way that the United Kingdom observes the Queen’s birthday in June even though she was actually born on April 21.