Wow, just what I've said here on my blog before at least a couple of times.  A planting aid, hydro-gel polymer mixed into the soil absorbs water and holds it to the roots of seedlings while they become established.  I use it even with house plants and it does work.

Now that a Nobel Prize winner says it perhaps people will actually do it.

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"Kenyan Nobel Winner: Fight Global Warming, Plant a Billion Trees
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
FoxNews

Excerpt:

NAIROBI, Kenya — A Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner called on people around the world to plant 1 billion trees in the next year, saying Wednesday the effort is a way ordinary citizens can fight global warming.

Wangari Maathai, who in 2004 became the first black African woman to win a Nobel in any category, urged participants to ensure the trees thrive long after they are planted.

"It's one thing to plant a tree, it's another to make it survive," said Maathai, who founded Kenya's Green Party in 1987 and focused on planting trees to address the wood fuel crisis here.

Maathai said the campaign is meant to inspire ordinary citizens to help the environment.

"This something that anybody can do," Maathai said Wednesday at the U.N. conference on climate change, which has drawn delegates from more than 100 countries to Kenya.

Scientists blame the past century's 1-degree rise in average global temperatures at least in part on the accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel burners. "

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,228198,00.html