In Alaska the week of April 20-24, 2009, a cloud of butterflies flapped their wings. The world didn't notice. But in time, we will all feel their effect.

The fluttering took place at a gathering of 300 Indigenous People in Anchorage. Representing millions, they came from the scorching plains of Africa, the abundant forests of the Amazon, from small islands glittering in the South Pacific, lush hilltops in India and the icy wilds of the Arctic. They came to discuss climate change.

It was the first such gathering – and I was privileged to be there for the whole week. It was clear from the outset that global warming is now the single greatest threat to the survival of Indigenous Peoples, whose already precarious existence is intimately entwined with the fate of the planet they call Mother Earth. Although their communities are scattered widely, they had much more in common with each other than with the newcomers now running the show in their respective countries. Living in a symbiotic relationship with nature, they are being hit first and hardest by the rapid changes to global weather systems that the rest of the world has only recently woken up to.
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An effort to fight climate change through reforestation, seeded at the grassroots level, has now blossomed into a woodland of over 3 billion trees, with the confirmation that over 300 million were planted in Turkey in 2008, the United Nations announced May 4, 2009. In response to its success, the Billion Tree Campaign, which is under the patronage of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Kenyan Green Belt Movement founder Professor Wangari Maathai and Prince Albert II of Monaco, has already set a new target of 7 billion trees to be planted by the UN Climate Change Conference to be held in December 2009.
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