Planting Trees to Fight Climate Change: Or a Massive Ponzi Scheme.

Somewhere in Northern Idaho

We all know the ancient tree axiom. I don’t need to repeat it. However, I’m going to present a new one: If a tree never provides a weary soul shade, did the tree ever really exist? You know where this story is going, don’t you? It was a vague opening. Here it goes in a slightly different way: Buy a shirt, plant five trees; buy our beer, plant a tree; buy our gear, plant ten trees. Every business these days uses the same marketing tactic: buy their product, and they will plant trees in our honor. I don’t remember the first brand I heard that made this fascinating trade. I believe it was something like “buy a piece of their apparel, and they’d plant just south of a dozen trees.” It seemed wild. 

Even thinking about all this altruistic tree planting, I’m suddenly transported back to hazy, hot, and humid summers in Iowa. As an enterprising young elementary and junior high schooler, my summer chore and sometimes “job” was mowing lawns. Most of the older neighborhoods had oak and maple trees. Maple trees are fun as a child because they have those mesmerizing “helicopter” seeds, or as I learned, “winged fruits.” Oak trees are famous for their nutrient-dense acorns. In late spring and early summer, the seeds have time to germinate in the ground. Small tree saplings will grow near their parent tree. When my dad taught me how to mow the lawn, I learned that the best strategy was to run over the budding volunteer trees. Their developing trunk was no match for the blade of our Toro lawn mower.

My fascination with trees started with the idea of climbing them. In the Midwest, one must find alternative things to climb to gain a better vantage point. I became heavily influenced by *The Lorax, * by Dr. Seuss, of course. I credit that book with influencing me to become an environmentalist. I never mindlessly chopped down helpless saplings. I may sound like I’m getting off track, but let me take pains to ensure that I am indeed on track. My point is that the trees are vulnerable. I love listening to podcasts. I like to chuckle at a lot of male-hosted podcasts that will regurgitate those super-basic thoughts and act like they dropped something profound. They will say something like, “Human babies are the most vulnerable of all mammalian species on the planet.” We all know that a baby left unattended cannot survive. But here’s the thing: trees are similar. There is some basic chemistry in the soil or geographical location so that if the environment is wrong, the tree will eventually die. Iowa is famous for planting random tree saplings in road medians. I believe urban planners were carrying on Lady Bird Johnson’s highway beautification initiatives. In the end, I often observed it's a waste of taxpayer dollars. The trees wither and die a sad death. No one is ever able to find respite in their shade. So I have to wonder when I see these tree planting schemes, is this merely a cunning ploy by the lumber industry to fund monoculture second and third growth tree plantations? A scheme to replenish their lumber stock in forests destined to be harvested in 40–50 years? Then manufactured into 2x4s.

Or, more insidiously, is this money being diverted into phantom tree planting projects, actually funding lobbying efforts to allow the harvesting of old growth forests? This is an ongoing conversation, but it’s clear that if the lumber industry had its way, they would harvest the remaining old growth forests without hesitation. Then, when they’re all gone, contractors and homeowners will lament, “We just don’t build houses like we used to.” I wonder if our profit-at-all-cost economic system is careening toward failure. I usually shy away from making bold statements in an effort to let the experts do the talking. But I do believe sustainability is more than just preserving the environment. It’s also about ensuring that we leave an economic system with substantial value for future generations.

I’m growing increasingly skeptical of these tree planting marketing schemes. This essay is my attempt to sow seeds of doubt in you, the reader, as well.

As I write this in Southern California, I often find myself longing to hike in heavily forested areas, or old growth forests. Growing up in the Midwest, one can always find some form of forest. Typically, they’re not the densest trees; one can easily see the sky peeking through the canopy or light pouring through the trees in the distance. As much as I wished or willed it, a good imagination never conjured Mirkwood. It wasn’t until I spent a summer in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho that I truly experienced old growth forests. I loved every mile of it. I loved that I could find a trail, hike a mile or two, and then make a turn and dead end into a beautiful waterfall.

One day, I spoke with a younger guy at a grocery store who was buying what appeared to be some road trip snacks. Perhaps a can of tuna for protein. It turned out he was unhoused. He divulged that he had a “spot” deep in the woods of North Idaho, having decided it was too unsafe to set up camp in “Camp Hope.” For those not aware of the unhoused situation in Eastern Washington/North Idaho, around the time of the pandemic, the region didn’t have the infrastructure to help house the growing homeless population. So they set up a large zone off the I-90 Thor Street exit that became the largest unhoused encampment in the state of Washington. It was locally known as “Camp Hope.” My roommate at the time, Guy, liked to call it “Camp Dope,” due to the prevalence of drug addiction among its inhabitants. Crime was rampant in the camp: theft, assaults, and even fires, presumably from meth labs. So this guy decided to retreat into the woods to find refuge. So deep he had allegedly even found a bear’s skull.

After that interaction, on my regular hikes, I started to wonder what lurked beyond the bush and in the shadows of the trail. I became a bit more cautious, never wanting to stumble into a rogue unhoused person’s hidden camp.

Though I felt uncomfortable with not being able to fully grasp my surroundings, leaning into the discomfort became a beautiful practice of overcoming fear.

As I hiked these forests of the Inland Northwest, I thought about Jedidiah Jenkins' reflections on varying landscapes and the people who inhabited them:

“From Pismo, we biked away from the coast, into the golden hills of central California. The farms and dusty oak trees and gentleman farmer’s ranches sprawled on both sides of us. Born and raised in Tennessee, I have always wanted hills and trees. I trust land like that. Flat land and barren deserts threaten my sense of understanding. I cannot get my bearings. I have no point of reference, and can't wait to leave. But around hills, trees, streams, and valleys, I want to linger… I think it must matter where you were raised. I have friends from the Mississippi delta who can’t stand land like this. Because they can’t see the sky behind the hill, they don’t trust it. They need sky and land wide open. And I have friends from the desert who feel claustrophobic around too many trees. They want land to be flat and honest, with no secrets.”

Eventually, I learned to trust the forest. When I stare out into the vastness of the deserts of Southern California, or the less majestic elfin forest, I long to return to forests like Mirkwood. But I acknowledge that this may stem from growing up in places where there were no secrets around switchbacks. We often use the term “trigger” or “activated” when something bothers us. Sometimes I have gone so far as to avoid a certain activity to avoid being activated. But the better move is to identify our triggers and then lean into them. I do not want to be activated by the potential virtue signaling of tree planting schemes. But I would like to be free to question it. In the future, I will lay out options that may be better than planting trees.

But as I navigate this modern world, where every purchase seems to come with a promise of tree planting, I am reminded of a deeper connection to the land. The trees, the trails, the forests—they are not just backdrops to our lives, but essential elements of our shared heritage. To truly sustain them, we must look beyond the easy marketing ploys and embrace a holistic vision of sustainability, one that honors both the earth and the economy we pass on to our descendants.

I can personally vouch for some companies that claim to plant trees. I believe they are doing it for good reasons, perhaps out of ignorance. But genuine ignorance. My exploits in the outdoors have been well documented, in this essay no less. So it needs not be mentioned, many brands I love, tend to also plant trees as carbon sequestration or carbon offset measures.

There’s an unsettling feeling that starts to form when I think about carbon offsets. It’s that startling feeling when you’re deep in the wilderness and inspect a fresh gushing wound. I look in my pack and all there is to dress it is a tshirt or liquid bandage. A temporary solution, at best. Instead of deep in the wilderness, carbon offsets are devised in boardrooms by shadowy corporate figures. I imagine they would look like ringwraiths to the undiscerning eye. Sitting in their lofty ivory tower boardrooms, buying goodwill with the public by purchasing carbon offsets. Oftentimes these board meetings set their sights on tree planting schemes in far-off hinterlands where land is seemingly plentiful and “cheap.” Land is never cheap though. At the risk of sounding woo woo, land should be viewed as sacred. I pull a lot of my wisdom from my upbringing on the banks of the Mississippi River. I don’t expect anyone outside Eastern Iowa or Western Illinois to go, but if you find yourself there. You can go check out the Gold Coast neighborhood in Davenport, Iowa. There you will find old mansions on the river bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. They were built by rich lumber barons in the late 19th century. Now they’ve been retrofitted to be multi-unit apartments or worse, falling into disrepair. Who knows who owns them? Relics of a gilded age. The memory of these lumber barons is barely whispered. The only homage is the rare occasion it's mentioned in local high school history classes. Or if you venture to Clinton, Iowa, you can check out a single A baseball game for the Clinton Lumber Kings. But all of these are relics of a bygone era. At one point in time, residents of this blue-collar community created great wealth by clear-cutting the land of old-growth giants. I drive by and ponder where those families went, what became of their wealth after the last tree fell. It's a stark reminder that exploiting the land for short-term gain often leads to emptiness in the long run. Native Midwesterners will tell visitors that the acres of corn fields add to the intensity of the humid summers in the Midwest. I despised humidity like a curmudgeon despises a yappy teacup dog. One summer, I was fed up with humidity. My solution was to wear an all-black sweatsuit to mow the lawn during the hottest part of the day. I didn’t wrestle. But since my predecessors cleared the trees, I had to grow up in the shadow of legends like Dan Gable. In Iowa wrestling culture runs deep. I dawned all black sweats like a wrestler trying to make weight. My weigh in was simply trying to give a middle finger to Iowa humidity in the dog days of summer. The land cleared of trees made way for acres for row cropping of what has kept Iowa (kind of) famous, corn. 

Incidentally, acres of corn contribute to the humidity of Iowa. Plants release water vapor through their leaves. Corn, with its tightly planted rows and large leaves, are more efficient at churning out water vapor than a just-in-time peak 1980s manufacturing plant. Hyrdrologists call this phenomenon, evapotranspiration.

Their monuments to the plundering of Midwestern lumber and the spoils they brought in. No one speaks of this part of America as being a lumber epicenter anymore. We think of the Northwest and Canada now. But I ponder the thought of what happened to the old Lumber Barons when their businesses dried up? Lumber is the perfect example of the law of diminishing returns. Most agree that second growth trees are not as durable as their older ancestors. This is how I arrived at the more insidious side of this story. Carbon offsets are what large polluters claim to buy and, often times in order to continue to pollute our air and waterways. These companies are working with carbon offset firms to devise tree planting schemes in areas with “cheap land.” But that’s not the case. Much of the land in Subsaharan Africa is native grasslands. And just going in, and planting trees can alter the landscape and ecosystem for the worse. The word “colonizer” gets thrown around with such ease these days. But I will admit, in my comfortable neoliberal zone, large multinational corporations greenwashing their tree planting in developing nations in a public relations message to offset their degradation of our planet feels like what I’ve learned Gen Z would call “colonizer energy.” As a decidedly geriatric Millennial, I do believe in this case, the shoe fits.

In future musings, we’ll delve deeper into better and more sustainable alternatives.