Life and Light

“TREES FOR TRAVEL” IS MY DIAMOND APPROACH RETREAT GROUP’s WAY OF MITIGATING THE EFFECTS ON THE PLANET OF OUR TRAVEL TO RETREAT.

We’ve set up this scheme to plant trees to offset our CO2 emissions.
A trust fund has been established to receive donations and from our recent retreat enough was deposited to plant around 500 trees!

100% of the donated funds are used for the purchase of tree seedlings which we will be planting into two protected reserves; The Buckley Road Reserve – a community environmental restoration project on Wellington’s south coast. Kate and I set up the ‘Friends of Buckley Road Reserve’ community group in 2002 and since then with the help of a small band of neighbours have planted over 6,000 trees into the Wellington City Council managed reserve.

Or at “Hou Ngahere” (New Forest) which is a 35 acre private reserve in the Kenepuru Sound, Marlborough. We purchased the land as farmland in 1999 and permanently protected it by a QEII National Trust covenant in 2004. As a reafforestation project – see the previous post “Days in Paradise”, the QEII covenant protects the trees in perpetuity regardless of changes in ownership of the land. We’ve lost count of how many trees we’ve planted there and it’s fantastic to see the forest returning!

To find out how many trees we need to plant for the offset we’re using calculations from official international and US Government Environmental Protection Agency sources. We worked out that for a return trip from Wellington to San Francisco we need to plant 44 trees each, and each tree seedling needs to grow for at least 10 years to achieve the required carbon offset – roughly!

Apart from the feel good factor of offsetting the carbon for our own trips it’s great to be able to provide a place for others to plant some trees too – we may need some help with the planting later in the year though!

Get in touch if you fancy contributing to the scheme by buying a few trees to offset your own carbon footprint, or helping with the planting….