Carbon dioxide

For the first time since DDT and hair spray cans, the environment is on the tips of everyone's tongue. It's a wonderful feeling to know that something you are passionate about is changing the way people live and behave every day. Each day I hear of a few more people near and dear to me altering their lifestyles to save the environment, the natural world we so adore. Perhaps you're not a hiker or a rock-climber, a boater or a fisherman, but would you want to see all of these places with trees disappear and the water turn to sludge or disappear altogether because you're not an active user of it?

To my surprise, I recently learned that deforestation contributes 20% of the CO2 emissions a year. That is well over the amount that the entire transportation industry and people contribute. Don't let me sway you that you can personally make an impact and that it is very important that you do everything you can to lower your emissions, but that definitely changes the way I think we should be saving this world.

One woman online had an excellent idea to this effect--plant a tree for every human baby born. A native hardwood tree planted in the southern United States that survives for 70 years will pull around 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air. During that same timeframe, an average American living to the age of 70 will produce on the order of 1,400 tons of CO2. In other words, you would need to plant over 1,000 trees — not just one — to remove the same amount of CO2.
One of our projects is to plant one billion trees in the Atlantic Forests of Brazil, one of the world's finest forests, that currently stands at 7% it's original size. I got very sad realizing that these 1 billion beautiful bountiful trees would only offset 1% of our population growth in the next year (928,000 people out of 74 million).