In today's world of dwindling resources, creating a perpetual forest isn't as simple as just buying land and leaving it alone. For a forest not to be threatened, it has to have control of the land that is its habitat. Nothing can be allowed to take precedence over the needs of the forest.

Sadly, often a person will have nurtured a forest for all their lives just to have the land sold at their death. Unless they were very lucky, the land itself will be cleared, because land for homes is much higher priced than land for forest.

In the neotropics, there is a serious problem with poaching. Even with parks, the land must be protected. Although Costa Rica has placed 27 percent of their forest into national parks, there is not enough money to protect those parks adequately. This means that poachers continue to remove trees, sometimes in broad daylight.

And when it is a government institution doing the protecting, the will of the people can change the usage of the land. As we see in the USA, what one administration protects, another administration can harvest.

Here in Costa Rica, a single older tree can be worth as much as a farm worker would pay for a home. And of course, that tree is just sitting there taking up space. Often the thought goes as well: If I don't cut it, someone else will, and they will then get the money for their family.

Not only is it necessary for the land to be protected, but a forest needs to be a contributing member of the community. It is going to be very difficult to protect a forest if the neighbors resent it. To the community, the trees have to be worth more alive than dead.

A forest can be managed so that it can pay for the taxes on the land and for the protection of the forest. Our plan includes having what we call Tree Shepherds forever with the land whose job it is protect the forest. So how does a forest pay for that?

Every year, a percentage of trees die from various causes. In a rainforest, these trees don't last long, but will soon go back to the soil, and new trees spring up in the opening in the canopy that has been made. There are a few trees that will last for many years, but not many. It isn't a long-term strategy for anything to use a dead tree as a home, because, unlike in the North, that tree is going to come crashing down rather quickly.

By extracting the boards from the trunks of these trees using low-impact methods, we can pay for the maintenance and protection of the forest. We cut up the trunks where they fall so that the rest of the wood stays in the forest and we only end up removing around 30 percent of the mass of the tree.

There are times when we have to remove live trees, but only to improve the forest. Two examples are promoting diversity by removing a type of tree of which there are too many, and removing trees to stop the spread of a disease. By regenerating much of the forest in this way, it remains relatively young, which means it will house much more wildlife.

Under normal circumstances, about 30 to 40 percent of the forest will always remain virgin – this is the area around the waterways. Usually there is no reason to cut in those areas, and in Costa Rica, it is prohibited.

The perpetual forest will not be a perpetual plantation. It will contain many trees and plants whose only purpose is to be part of the ecosystem, trees that produce food and habitat for the other members of the forest. This will allow us to protect and preserve many species that are in danger of extinction. Who knows, the forests of the Tree Avalanche may preserve plants that some day will be discovered to have compounds needed by us to live longer, healthier lives.