Better than planting a tree

We definitely have nothing against people planting trees – planting trees is our business!  However, we can plant trees and still end up with a deforestation problem.

Strange as it may seem, it isn’t the tree that is important in reforestation, but the land. Deforestation in reality is not the removal of trees – it is when the use of the land changes from being a forest to some other activity – like farmland, roads, housing, or a business district.

So, to reverse deforestation, we must change the land usage back. Trees have a life cycle -- 25 years, 50 years, 200 years -- it doesn’t matter how long; eventually they will die, and the important question is after they die, what replaces them?

By helping with the Tree Avalanche, you not only plant trees, you help purchase land and enable securing more land in the future. Yes, it is more expensive than simply planting a tree and leaving it to survive as long as it can, but lasting change is always more expensive.

The pioneer trees planted with money you donate to the Tree Avalanche are planted and maintained in such a way that they will produce lumber when they are harvested. All trees will produce wood, but not all trees will produce lumber that can be sold for a good price. Instead of some corporation getting rich off the labor of the trees, the forest itself will benefit by being able to expand. It used to be that for a forest to expand it just needed to produce seeds, but in today’s world, to expand requires money for land, too. The forest gets that money from the pioneer species.

When you think about it, for years we have been benefiting from the products of the forests, but the forests themselves have not received anything as compensation. This is one of the reasons why we are finding that most of the wood from natural forests is becoming unavailable. The wood is removed and rarely is the forest helped to recover.

What the forest needs is to be able to lock in the land for its own use and to be able to acquire more land by using its own assets. Your contribution to the Tree Avalanche does that. You could consider your contribution to the Tree Avalanche as a payment for all the wood products that you have in your home for which the forest was never compensated.