How Do We Know We Can Do This?

Tropical ReforestationFinca Leola S.A. grows trees in Costa Rica for people around the world. People buy trees from them that they take care of for 25 years. They receive the value of their wood at every thinning and at the final harvest, but they plant a succession forest of slower growing trees in between the trees they grow for people. They are placing all the land that they are planting, whether owned by them or by someone else, under an ecological easement that will protect the resultant perpetual forest forever. The ecological easement is crafted to make sure that the entity that is served is the forest. The easement rides in perpetuity with title to the land, and as the trees will always keep producing money, they will always be able to pay to enforce the easement and pay for the guardians of the forest.

The idea for the Tree Avalanche started when someone asked if they could buy trees to help with reforestation, but they didn't want the money back from the wood harvest. We were excited when we realized that we could use the money that came out of the trees to plant more trees. When we did a simulation of the impact of that, we were astonished, and the concept of the Tree Avalanche was born.

Amazon Honor System

So as you can see, for us to produce a Tree Avalanche, we just have to keep doing our job. We already have people contributing to it, but we would like to invite you to help push the Tree Avalanche faster.

Look around your home and see all the wood that is in it. Some you cannot see, because it is within the walls, but it is still there. Everyone got paid for that wood - except the forest itself. Please help the forest (and ultimately ourselves as well) by donating to accelerate an avalanche of trees.

We will all breathe easier because of your help.

The value of Tropical Hardwood lumber has been a curse to the rainforests. Loggers have been known to bulldoze their way through miles of rainforest, killing everything in their path, to get to a stand of valuable hardwoods. After harvesting the valuable trees they often leave the area decimated and barren. Short term profits rule their world.

The irony is that if they took the time to replant the area after harvesting the trees, there would always be plenty of trees for the world's needs.

An alternative to harvesting trees from the rainforests is tree plantations.

Trees have been grown for profit for decades if not centuries. Unfortunately most of those tree plantations have been monocrops that are clear cut then replanted with the same type of trees again and again. A good example of this is pine trees that are grown for pulp wood to make paper. These monocrop plantations can't even really be referred to as forests because of their lack of biodiversity. They have even been called "Green Deserts."

There is such a huge demand for tropical hardwood lumber that many Asian nations have completely destroyed the rainforests to get to it. More that 100 BILLION board feet of tropical hardwoods are being bought and sold every year worldwide, and the demand is growing.

Billions of dollars are being made, millions of acres of rainforest are being destroyed in the process.

Fortunately there is a system for harnessing that demand in a way that benefits the rainforest and the communities within them.

Tree Avalanching is a simple but powerful concept of leveraging the value of harvested trees to buy more land and plant more trees. Instead of pocketing the profits from the sale of SUSTAINABLY harvested hardwoods, we use the profits to buy more land, create more jobs, and plant more trees.

On deforested land (and there are millions of acres of it on the planet) we begin by covering the land with pioneer trees; fast growing and valuable. Since our intent is to recreate a forest that is rich in biodiversity, we don't just plant one type of trees. We always begin with a balance of trees that will be harvested with trees that will provide habitat (food and shelter) for the animals in the area.

When you think about the fact that a hardwood sapling might cost a few dollars to plant and nurture to maturity, when harvested that tree could be worth thousands of dollars.
Now multiply that by thousands of trees to start with and it's easy to imagine how powerful the idea becomes.

We use all of that profit to buy more land, plant more trees and continue the process of creating Sustainably Managed Permanent Rainforest Habitats TM.

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