I keep coming back to this thought experiment, and it refuses to leave me alone.
What if everyone over the age of 10 in America ate one apple every day and planted the seeds?
Not as a perfect plan. Not as a coordinated orchard project. Just as a habit. An apple. Seeds in the ground. Done casually and imperfectly for ten years.
So I ran the numbers, using the most pessimistic assumptions I could justify, because reality is brutal to seedlings and I don’t want this to be fantasy math.
How many trees would we actually get?
Let’s say there are roughly 300 million people in the U.S. over the age of 10.
One apple per person per day:
- 300 million apples a day
- About 109.5 billion apples per year
Now assume a deliberately low average of 5 seeds per apple, because not every apple is packed and not every seed is viable.
That gives us:
- 547.5 billion seeds per year
- About 5.47 trillion seeds planted over ten years
Most of those seeds will fail. They will get mowed, dried out, eaten, trampled, frozen, diseased, forgotten. That’s normal. That’s how ecosystems work.
So let’s assume a worst case survival rate of 0.01 percent. One seedling out of every 10,000 survives long enough to become a real tree.
Even with that assumption:
- 5.47 trillion seeds at 0.01 percent survival equals about 547 million apple trees
Would half a billion apple trees actually feed anyone?
If we assume the surviving trees are reasonably early-bearing, then by year ten a lot of them would be producing fruit.
Seedling apples are unpredictable. Some will be sour or bitter or tannic. But no apple is poisonous.
So instead of asking if they are grocery store apples, the real question is whether they can be used.
And they can.
Even bad apples can become applesauce, cider, vinegar, jam, dried fruit, fruit leather, or animal feed.
Let’s stay conservative and say an average producing tree gives about 150 pounds of apples per year, just existing.
That gives us:
- 547 million trees times 150 pounds
- Roughly 82 billion pounds of apples per year
Calorie-wise, apples average about 236 calories per pound.
That works out to about 19 trillion calories per year.
Real food grown where people live, food that can be preserved and stored.
What does this do to the landscape?
Half a billion trees sounds impossible until you remember they would not be planted in one place.
They would be scattered. Yards. Fence lines. Roadsides. Parks. Field edges. Abandoned lots. Places that already exist but are underused or ignored.
Using loose orchard spacing math, that many trees might translate to roughly 2 to 5 million acres of perennial canopy spread across the country.
That means more shade, more roots in the ground (less erosion!), leaf litter for increased fungi activity, spring flowers for pollinators, more habitat and food for wildlife.
More life where there used to be bare ground.
Carbon
Trees help with carbon. Sequestering carbon needs to be our goal to halt or reverse climate change.
If you use a middle-of-the-road estimate of about 25 kilograms of CO₂ per tree per year, then:
- 547 million trees would pull roughly 13.7 million metric tons of CO₂ per year
Project Drawdown talks a lot about carbon sequestration not as a single solution, but as a necessary counterweight to the carbon-heavy systems we already rely on. We are not going to shut off every emitter overnight. So part of mitigating climate change is creating sinks that quietly pull carbon back out of the atmosphere while we work on the larger transitions.
Even in the worst-case apple-tree scenario, about 13.7 million metric tons of CO₂ sequestered per year is roughly equivalent to powering 1.8 million U.S. homes with zero-carbon electricity every year. Sustained over a decade, that’s ten years of clean electricity for a housing stock larger than many entire states.
No new technology. No grid overhaul. No massive capital investment. Just living systems doing what they already know how to do, at scale, using a waste product that already exists, for free, while also providing real food and environmental benefits.
This is exactly what a real climate solution looks like, powerful precisely because it’s simple and repeatable.
Superior New Varieties!
Here’s where this gets really interesting.
Apples grown from seed are not true to type. Every single one is a genetic experiment.
Most will be mediocre. Some will be awful. But a small fraction will be special.
I define a “winner” as an apple that:
- survives without spraying or human intervention
- resists disease and pest pressure
- tolerates local climate conditions
- and is either pleasant to eat fresh or excellent for cider
Then we can use another conservative estimate.
Apple breeding programs often cite about 1 in 10,000 seedlings as truly exceptional.
Apply that to 547 million surviving trees and you get around 55,000 winner apples.
Tens of thousands.
Not copyrighted by corporations (another late stage capitalism BS that anyone can copyright a plant variety). Apples perfectly suited to produce without human intervention wherever they land.
Some would be incredible cider apples. Some would be tough backyard eaters. Some would thrive in drought. Others in cold. All of them would represent resilience we currently do not have.
This is not a new strategy. It’s how apples survived and spread across America in the first place.
Johnny Appleseed, didn’t travel the country planting tidy orchards of named apples. He planted apples from seed everywhere, along rivers, near settlements, at the edges of towns. Thousands upon thousands of seedlings, most of them unpredictable. (See The Botany of Desire for more info)
Early Americans weren’t looking for perfect apples. They were looking for apples that worked where they were planted, producing fruit while shrugging off local pests, diseases, winters, droughts, and neglect.Trees that could be turned into cider, vinegar, or stored food even if they weren’t pretty.
That’s how “winner” varieties were found. Not by controlling genetics in advance, but by scattering seeds widely, watching what survived, and keeping the rare trees that combined toughness with productivity.
In other words, resilience came first. Flavor came later. And the apples that endured were the ones shaped by place, pressure, and time, exactly the traits we are desperately trying to breed back into our food systems now. Resilience is the key!
Why
I know a lot of people feel frustrated and overwhelmed when they think about climate change. It feels like nothing you do as an individual could possibly matter. You are already stretched thin. You are busy just trying to stay alive and well in this horrible late-stage capitalism, sliding-toward-fascism era.
You do not have the time, energy, or money to fix the world. And you are constantly told that if you do not fix it yourself, you are failing.
I want to say this clearly: that feeling makes sense.
But it is also not the full picture.
Real change does not always come from heroic individual sacrifice. It often comes from millions of people doing small, imperfect things consistently, within the limits of their actual lives.
“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I have found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”
— Gandalf, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Millions of people pulling on a rope in the same direction can move the dial.
This thought experiment is not about guilt or purity. It is about scale.
Apple seeds are a waste product. They come free with food people already buy. Planting them does not require special tools, certifications, or lifestyle overhauls.
You can throw your apple core into the woods.
You can bury it in a vacant lot near your apartment.
You can tuck it along a fence line or the edge of a yard or a park corner.
Most of them will fail. That’s fine. Some will live. A few might become something remarkable.
This is not about fixing everything. It is about refusing to treat the future as disposable by default.
A seed planted is a possibility.
Half a billion trees is what happens when small actions stop being isolated and start being shared.
Maybe we do not need a grand, top-down reforestation plan to begin changing the landscape. Maybe we just need permission to do what we can, where we are, with what is already in our hands.
And once you see it that way, it becomes hard to stop looking at everyday waste and wondering what else could quietly grow. So many fruits come with free seeds- citrus (lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit) and stone fruits (plums, peaches, apricots), things like pears and dragon fruit and berries… you can even replant a pineapple top. Plant everything you can get your hands on! It’s free!
Permaculture is all about closing the loop, so let’s close it.
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