Greetings,
This site is different from the areas where I usually plant acorns beneath pine trees.
We're standing on a mountain that, from roughly 1920 until about 1980, was heavily used by the surrounding communities. Four villages depended on this mountain for their livelihoods. Families kept large herds of goats, which grazed continuously across the landscape. People also harvested wood to make charcoal, to cook their food, and to heat their homes in winter.
The
mountain was an essential resource that helped generations of families survive. They did what they needed to do, and no one told them the land was being overgrazed and overharvested. As a result, the vegetation gradually disappeared.
An elderly man, now nearly eighty, told me that when he was a child and a young man, this mountain looked almost barren. Looking across it, you could hardly see anything green. The goats consumed nearly every plant that emerged, leaving behind little more than exposed stone and rock.
Over the last twenty-five years, though, things have started to change. Most
people have stopped raising goats, and the remaining oak shrubs are no longer cut for firewood. Modern fuels and changing lifestyles have removed the need to harvest every available tree, and nature has slowly begun to recover.
Below this mountain lies a fertile valley. Unfortunately, the last forty to fifty years haven't been kind to the local ecosystem. Around 1980, people tell me groundwater could be reached at depths of only twenty meters — plenty of water beneath the soil. But no limits were placed on pumping, and no one restricted the number of wells being drilled. Farmers extracted water faster than nature could replace it.
Today, in 2026, we face a very different reality.
Groundwater levels have dropped dramatically. In many places, wells now have to be drilled more than 250 meters deep to find water. Some communities are already worried about their drinking water supply. If current trends continue, there may come a time when there isn't enough water to irrigate crops — or even enough to meet basic human needs.
It's a troubling picture, but it isn't hopeless.
If this mountain were
covered once again with a healthy forest of large trees, it could provide
enormous benefits. Trees cool the land, protect the soil, and help rainwater soak deep into the ground, replenishing underground aquifers. Forests store water like natural reservoirs. They also release moisture into the atmosphere, helping to create clouds and encourage rainfall.
Trees aren't merely part of the landscape — they're part of the water cycle itself. Without trees, rainfall declines. Without water, there is no life.
There are also things we can do right now. One of the most important is
changing how we farm. Agricultural fields should stay covered with living plants year-round.
Green manure crops, cover crops, and permanent ground cover protect the soil, reduce evaporation, increase organic matter, and help water infiltrate the ground. We need to move away from leaving bare soil exposed and from excessive tillage. Keeping the land green year-round takes a new agricultural mindset, but it can bring immediate benefits — for the environment, for local temperatures, and for water conservation.
I hope we can still make meaningful changes. The next generation deserves better than what we're leaving behind. We've used up much of the groundwater that belonged not only to us but to those who come after us. We've removed many of the trees that purified the air, protected the soil, and supported the water cycle.
The good news is that nature can recover, if we give it the chance. The sooner we restore our forests, protect our water resources, and regenerate our soils, the better the odds that future generations inherit a healthier, more resilient landscape.
The conditions here are very difficult. In places we have
only a thin slice of soil, and in others none at all — spots where it's hard to even find enough soil to bury an acorn, with solid rock just beneath. It's critical to plant the acorns near spots where their roots can find a path down to the moisture trapped between the rocks. Oak shrubs clearly find these pathways to reach deep underground and survive.
One approach is to plant acorns near the mountaintops and hope that, over 100, 200, or 300 years, they spread and cover the whole mountain — the acorns falling and germinating downhill by gravity over generations. It's difficult because the subsoil here is so poor. When we plant beneath pine trees, the young oaks are protected in two ways: by the shape of the pine canopy, and by the pine's own root system, which they can follow to find moisture and nutrients. Here, we don't have that advantage.
One idea worth considering is
controlled burns — clearing a section of the mountain at a time and, where the oak shrubs are, planting acorns along with other tree seeds like almond and apricot. Different oak species will likely respond differently to these conditions. It will take time to evaluate the right approach, and it will take more people getting involved — forestry departments and universities should be studying this site, and the government needs to allocate funding to address a real problem we're facing here. In the meantime, we'll keep trying.
Kostas
