In recent days an Instagram post about planting trees has been making its way, like the darkest of dark horses, up the list of most liked posts in the platform’s history. As of this writing, it’s tallied 14.3 million likes, more than Justin Bieber’s engagement photo with Hailey Baldwin, and more than any picture Kylie Jenner has ever posted of her daughter, other than her first photo. (Duh—look at that tiny well-manicured hand!) The Great Instagram Tree Post of 2019 currently sits in fifth place, just behind a picture Selena Gomez took with her friends.

The meteoric post is from the eco-friendly apparel company Tentree. Peppered with a healthy helping of tree emoji, it promises that for “every TEN LIKES this post gets, we will plant ONE TREE” in Indonesia. And who’d turn down an offer to help the planet when all it takes is to read a few words and tap a little heart.

Tentree, of course, has a business interest in going viral: It gains followers, exposure, and presumably sales. That said, if a company is volunteering to plant trees, then by all means they should help reforest the world. Except that reforestation isn’t so easy as liking an Instagram post, and it’s not so easy as just planting lots of trees and walking away. Because as with any celebrity’s carefully orchestrated photo on social media, the reality is much more complicated.

Conservationists have a few ways of restoring forests. One is known as natural regeneration, in which some deforested areas regrow on their own if protected from further logging. “You don't need to plant anything, you just stop whacking the system,” says Bronson Griscom, director of forest carbon science at the Nature Conservancy. “Stop burning it, stop plowing it, stop cutting it.”

A variation on this strategy is called assisted natural regeneration, in which conservationists strategically plant certain species, like fruit trees, to kickstart the system. “Then the birds will start coming and they'll bring species from elsewhere,” says Griscom. Their poop carries seeds that can over time add variety to the area. “You don't have to plant all the species—you just plant some key species that bring the system back into a diverse form.”

But that’s just the beginning: Deforestation will keep happening in a given area unless there’s a bigger intervention. This means reining in unsustainable logging operations, which also isn’t that straightforward—the livelihood of local peoples has to factor in too.

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Take, for instance, work that the Nature Conservancy does in Brazil. A major threat to Brazil’s forests is ranching, both from big and little players: Smaller outfits raise calves, which they pass on to larger ranchers to raise as adult cattle. Conservationists can work relatively easily with the big ranchers and convince them to better mind the forests, “but it's this larger group of people that have smaller amounts of land that's hard, because they don't have as many options,” says Griscom.