Want some affordable and trustworthy carbon karma?
Every rainy season, I plant trees, and this year will only be exceptional in that the trees I’ll be planting are mostly ones I’ve been rescuing from trails, fields, and orchards, rather than ones that have been propagated on purpose. This year, I’ve decided to go out and transplant trees from areas where they’ll be cut or burned, to the Sacred Sueños reserve and Sierra y Cielo homestead.
It’s time consuming, but I thought that maybe some people might value what I’m doing and financially support the endeavor. If I receive enough, I can spend less time working elsewhere for $, and more on this planting and sequestration project!
Whether you want to make up for all that driving or flying, or just want to be part of a proactive attempt at sequestering carbon, you can be assured that this project will do the job. I don’t just plant trees and forget about them. I have a management program that coppices most of these trees regularly (cuts the main trunk to promote new trunks to sprout back), which maintains vigorous growth, maximizing carbon sustain. I then bury the wood so that it slowly rots under the ground, significantly adding the carbon to the soil (and helping the land retain moisture and nutrients).
And your support doesn’t just get you carbon karma. You also get biodiversity karma, because the intention isn’t to transplant into a plantation, but actually to promote forest succession, spaced to allow a multitude of wild plants to flourish throughout. Many of the species, like Aliso, are nitrogen fixers, promoting the lush growth of its community. Others, like Nispero, produce a delicious fruit that attract many birds and animals who, on top of their individual contribution to biodiversity and ecological complexity, will deliver even more natives through their poop! The best reforestation is planted by nature. I just like to give a humble hand.
For those of you who want to feel a more substantial connection between your support and these trees, you can explicitly ask to adopt them. For $5, you can know that there’s a tree planted “on your behalf” that will be absorbing your carbon emissions. This is a limited offer, because I probably won’t be able to plant more than 50-100 trees this year But I’m facilitating nature to plant so many more on her own.. And, I’ll be coppicing hundreds of trees that I planted years ago, keeping them vibrant and fast growing, and bringing that carbon into the soil. I would be overjoyed to receive donations for this work.
I will be very accountable for any donations that I receive. Our family wants to share a monthly newsletter to keep you updated on all our work, and I’ll send a rainy season end report detailing the trees that were transplanted, as well as estimates of the cubic meters of wood that have been coppiced. And, of course, all donors are welcome to come for a visit and see the work for themselves.
Whether any of you help fund the project or not, I’m going to plant these trees, and manage them in a way that sequesters carbon into the soil, and promotes biodiversity and forest succession. But I’d love your support, so I can do more. I’d love to believe that this kind of work could be as valued at least as much as the jobs that pay you. I’d love to feel that there doesn’t have to be a compromise between providing for our planet and providing for my family.