Room for restored forests in Ethiopia, and in Ethiopians a sense of limitless capacity.

Shouldn’t all the headlines look like that? The people of Ethiopia planted 353 million trees in 12 hours on July 29. The kind of story that makes you feel like there isn’t a problem in the world that can’t be solved… doesn’t it.

Forget, for a moment, the heartbreaking fires raging from Bolivia to Siberia, forget this month being on track to become the hottest July in recorded history — perhaps the hottest month in recorded history (update: true.). Instead, turn your eyes again toward a country whose peace deal with neighboring Eritrea is still fresh in the world’s mind (update: and still holding). Ethiopia is restoring its lost forests.

Ethiopia is no stranger to innovative projects that can help show a path toward sustainability. We’re watching progress in the highlands of Tigray and in Adisghe County, where earlier this decade, the government and farmers collaborated to cut through a historic drought to reverse desertification and save farmlands by slowing the flow of water to make better use of natural irrigation.

Today, mindful of the reduction of tree cover from 35 percent a hundred years ago to just four percent today, a reported 23 million Ethiopians mobilized to plant these trees, part of a much larger project that intends to plant four billion seedlings duiring this rainy season.

If confirmed, this collective effort would beat the previous record for a one-day tree planting; in 2017, 1.5 million Indian citizens planted 66 million trees. We’ll follow these projects in the future to see just how many seedlings planted in the excitement of record-breaking human endeavor are actual viable trees; how many of the thousand sites planted on July 29 become actual forests. But however effective the tree planting, we’d argue that the more important statistic is unprecedented public engagement: 23 million Ethiopians planting seeds of hope and effort toward restoring its country’s forests and the world’s climate.

Let’s follow that.

August update: The BBC’s “Reality Check” team has investigated this further and thinks, well, it’s possible they reached these numbers in Ethiopia. Their new article adds more interesting information about how this effort was organized, how more than 300 million seedlings might have been distributed and planted, on perhaps a million acres of land. It’ll be fertile territory for further study.

Meantime, a new study by Swiss University ETH Zurich reinforces the power of tree planting to mitigate climate change. As CNN reports, the study suggests that “restoring the world’s lost forests could remove two thirds of all the planet-warming carbon that is in the atmosphere because of human activity.”

We’ll come back to this later. In the meantime, plant trees.