Our Two Million Milestone (and How You Can Help)

It’s been a year and a half since we started our “Replanting Our Pages” campaign to give back by donating trees to be planted in Madagascar through the Evertreen organization. Our friend, Paul Kirch, had already started donating through the BOSS Academy group that Yvonne and I attend each Friday and invited us to join the effort.

Knowing that our industry uses a lot of paper, it felt like a good cause for us to focus on.

So, each month since then we’ve donated 100 trees. We’re up to 1,701, as I type this. That single extra tree came from an individual who saw what we were doing and wanted to help. More on how you can do the same in a minute.

The Impact

As I explained in some detail in the Replanting Our Pages post, we wanted to get some idea of how many books could be replaced by our donations. The calculation came out to 1,288 books per tree.

But it goes deeper, of course. Our focus is on books, but we don’t control what kind of trees get planted with our specific donations. It may well be that some are fruit trees, benefitting those in their vicinity as an ongoing food source.

And trees are a major factor in combatting climate change, cleaning our air, providing oxygen, and simply beautifying the land around us. Indeed, TreePeople.org lists 22 benefits trees give us.

In addition, the Evertreen program also provides jobs to those who run the programs in countries all around the world. Our small contribution has provided over 200 working hours, out of the 457,969 hours Evertreen has generated to date.

But circling back to the trees and our “book equivalent” calculation, those 1,701 trees would amount to:

2,190,888 Books!

And counting.

How You Can Help

One of the great parts of the Evertreen program is that once we signed up to sponsor our “forest” they made it easy for others to add a single tree (or a few) for just a few dollars!

Just visit our forest page and scroll down to the section “Gift trees to this account.” You can add a tree directly to our forest in Madagascar for $7 (as of today), or choose another from around the world (prices vary by location).

Then, use our forest code — 6793d8f021654 — to credit your donation to our account.

And let us know you did by leaving a comment below.

And in case you’re wondering whether your contribution makes a difference, check out this article on the impact of “microforests” from the Carbon Almanac.