(Updated in 2023)
My name is Jonathan Clark.
In late 2018, I "started" a new company. The goal was to plant trees to help fight against climate change. I had already been planting a small number of volunteer trees each year for the past several years, but I wanted to be able to increase my impact. I also believed that I could plant trees for environmental reasons on a much larger scale if I formalized the organization. After all, I had been receiving dozens of inquiries about this type of work every year. I've been working as a professional tree planter for a couple decades, so I figured that my extensive field experience would be invaluable in building out a large planting organization.
I decided to call the company Replant.ca Environmental.
I knew that using this name had the potential to be slightly confusing. The original Replant.ca website (which focuses on education for commercial reforestation) has been the most well-known tree planting site in Canada since I first put it online in 1998. It hosts thousands of photos, music, videos, training materials, a message board, and much more. During its tenure, the website has been visited a few million times, and it has been the reason, directly or indirectly, that tens of thousands of university/college students have found summer jobs as tree planters across the country. The name has incredibly strong brand recognition, which I felt could be helpful in establishing a new company.
As Replant.ca grew, I kept planting trees. Throughout my career, I gained a very wide diversity of experience. I've been a camp supervisor at three companies, a foreman at six companies, and I've planted for more than fifteen companies. I've planted well over a million trees, although to be honest, that's not really an impressive number for anyone who has worked in the commercial industry for several years. However, more importantly, I've directly overseen the planting of well over a hundred million trees during my tenure as a camp supervisor (that was up to 2018, but the number is still increasing). I estimate that approximately two thousand tree planters have worked for me in my camps so far. I've also been involved in lots of related jobs, including forest nursery work, lifting seedlings, brushing, spacing, girdling, and many varieties of reclamation and environmental restoration work.
The only major drawback to my previous work experience is that my regular job as a professional planter has been an industry job, much like farming. The tree planting that I normally perform is intended to fill empty cut-blocks after logging companies cut down part of a forest. To be clear, I don't work for the logging companies directly. I work (on a seasonal basis) for a few different companies that specialize in tree planting. These planting companies are hired on a contractual basis by the logging companies or by the government. I refer to this work as commercial or industrial "post-harvest" reforestation, because we rebuild forests after commercial harvesting. This is the kind of work that is done seasonally by tens of thousands of Canadians, and this is what the traditional Replant.ca website focuses upon.
It's easy for professional tree planters to be cynical and complain about our work. We protest that we're just perpetuating the entire cycle of logging, and to some extent, that's true. In many cases, we're planting trees so that future loggers can harvest them and turn them into toilet paper for our grandchildren. But there's more to it than that! Think about the alternatives. Wood IS a renewable resource, so if we're assisting the logging industry, at least it's better than working in an industry that consumes non-renewables. If we harvest trees in a sustainable manner, that's some consolation. And things could be much worse. Historically I've usually worked in British Columbia and Alberta, where the law says that any harvested areas have to be turned back into forests. I take solace in the fact that the logging companies that hire me don't just mow down the forests and walk away without replanting the land.
Even though I had tried in the past to be optimistic, and think positively about the sustainable approach that Canada's (west coast) logging industry was usually trying to take, I had always wanted to do more. I always wanted to plant trees that would be protected from future logging. I wanted to build forests that would be permanent, where people could walk underneath trees that had been living for hundreds of years.
For years, I didn't act upon those goals. But in 2018, I knew that I could make a positive change, and that it was time to act. I had planted a number of small volunteer projects over the past two decades. However, awareness of the value of reforestation was growing in the cultural zeitgeist. I'd been contacted many times by people who asked if I could plant large numbers of trees that they would sponsor, so I finally decided in 2018 that it was time to start accepting those requests more frequently. I knew that I had the background and knowledge to be able to successfully plant environmentally-based trees on a larger scale, and after a few months of research and deciding upon a sustainable business model, I started to accept sponsorships.
In 2019, quite a few individuals and organizations pledged sponsorships for trees. I brought in extra help. In the summer of 2019, not only did we plant tens of thousands of sponsored trees, but we also built a proper website, and started spreading the story about our organization and goals through word-of-mouth. We wanted to be able to capitalize on the very well-known brand name of Replant.ca, but we also wanted to distinguish the new company from the industrial/commercial reputation of the original website. We decided that Replant.ca Environmental satisfied both needs.
Over the next couple of years, we quickly grew the organization to planting well over half a million trees per year. Some of these have been our own self-led projects supported by public funders. On other projects, we've worked as a supply partner to provide the boots-on-the-ground expertise to plant seedlings for other well-respected organizations such as One Tree Planted, Veritree, and Trees For Life.
Replant.ca Environmental plants trees that will not be cut down in the future by logging companies. Our long-term plan is to acquire land, plant trees, and build community forests that the public is allowed to visit and enjoy!
Thankfully, we've had some help from several of our professional tree planting friends. They also work for part of each year in traditional post-harvest reforestation, they share the same goal of building some permanent forests that won't be cut down in the future.
You can visit our new website to learn more about our company. Here's the link:
Here are three things that you may find interesting:
1. The Replant.ca Environmental organization is not involved with commercial post-harvest work for logging companies.
2. We do not plant monocultures, and we aim for biodiversity. We aim to maximize the number of species on each project site, whenever possible. There are many good reasons to do this. Carbon capture is maximized when there is a diversity of species. If a particular species is attacked in the future by some sort of pest or disease, having many other species in the forest is a good form of insurance to make sure the forest survives as a whole. A diverse forest is also more interesting to walk through, and is much more robust in ecological and biological terms.
3. We want to make sure that our projects are transparent. Some of the organizations that do charitable planting don't identify exactly where they do their work. We want the public and our supporters to know exactly where we've been planting. You can learn about many of the sites that we've worked on by visiting our projects page.
If you want to help us out, share this post! Thanks for reading...
- Jonathan Clark
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