TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO ABOVE
Ru Hartwell: Hi there, I’m Ru Hartwell from Treeflights and we really just wanted to show you something of what we do here. We are standing in the main planting site and we’ve got a couple of thousand trees planted. This is a 2 year old ash tree and we’re simply just going to show you how easy it is to stick one of these beauties in the ground. We dig a little hole with minimal disturbance to the soil to try and minimise the release of carbon. We are really going to show you just how easy it is to get these trees to help us suck up some CO2. We don’t normally plant in the summer but because this tree is in a container we can get away with it. Just give it a gentle firming in like that . A very fast-growing tree this one, an ash, ultimately we expect it to fix at least half a tonne of CO2. That will take it, I dunno, maybe 30 or 40 years to do that. Stick a little tree guard round it and…. that is one ash tree planted.
Tom O’leary: So Ru, a lot of people have heard a lot about Coldplay and the attempts they made to offset a tour they made by planting mango trees in Northern India which promptly all died. How do you know that your trees wont die?
Ru: This is another criticism that we hear a lot of. ‘The tree is going to die’. I mean, the trees want to live and you can see that all the trees in this field are doing pretty well. It’s about having the right tree in the right place. These are grown from seed that is local, it’s adapted to growing here. Wales is brilliant for trees. We get a lot of rain. We’re not subject to the same droughts that they are in India but beyond that, I’ve planted 20,000 trees in Wales since about 1976 and today 20,000 trees are still alive so I can’t give a lot of credence to this criticism.
Tom: There’s a lot of talk in the media about how, when a tree dies it rots down and releases all it carbon to the atmosphere. What do you say to this?
Ru: Yes, when a tree grows in a natural forest environment, dies, falls over and decomposes, it will definitely release all its absorbed carbon back to the air. The thing to understand is that what we are creating here is not natural woodland. It’s managed woodland and we’ve chosen the species, specifically for timber to be used for construction when they mature. When you put timber into the roof of a house for example, you can lock up it’s CO2 for many hundreds of years.
Tom: Don’t trees take ages to grow, though?
Ru: Not as long as you’d think. We put these baby oaks in at about 2 years old and look how big it is after about 40 years. That oak tree behind me is younger than I am now and in its short life it’s probably fixed a good ¾ of a tonne of carbon from the air. That’s a pretty rapid fix.
Tom: Someone who buys a tree from you. Aren’t they simply trying to expunge their guilt so that they can carry on flying regardless?
Ru: You can look at it in one of two ways. You can either say that this young forest is an expression of people feeling bad and guilty about what they’re doing or you can look at it more positively and say it’s actually an expression of human altruism. People are voluntarily putting their hand in their back pocket and voluntarily paying to clear up some of their mess. It’s entirely up to us how we interpret things and we choose to see this as a really positive thing.
OUR PROBLEM IS SIMPLE – WE’VE GOT TOO MUCH CO2 IN THE AIR
TREES HAVE EVOLVED TO BECOME INCREDIBLY EFFICIENT AT ABSORBING CO2
THIS IS THE JOB THAT NEEDS DOING RIGHT NOW.
THANKS TO ALL OUR SUPPORTERS! |
