Today’s post is inspired by an Instagram advertising that I saw last night. It reads ‘Why gift flowers? Nothing says “I love you” like gifting a forest’. Oh yes, it’s Valentine’s day weekend.. First of all, to me, there are many more things that say ‘ I love you ‘ , like..
bringing me coffee in bed in the morning, taking care of everything in the house during a busy work week, being actually listened to while I rant about a paper not being accepted, being supported when injured, receiving help navigating through insurance policies… the list could go on. It doesn’t even have to include material things, but in this gift giving world, receiving a pair of decent earphones to run with so I didn’t have to get annoyed at mine not working, well, it was up there towards top of the list. Because I was listened to and I was gifted something I needed but would have never consider getting for myself. So, while I have my doubts about Valentine’s day and never really celebrated it, I think there are much better gifts even for the most sustainable minded of us out there, if you are into gift giving (get some ideas for a sustainable valentine’s day here) But let’s go back to the forest gift. It really annoyed me. And not just because of the misinterpretation of the things one should give for love, but it annoyed me for what they offered in itself : ‘Our gift guide gives you the option to choose between supporting tree planting and reforestation projects in Madagascar and Ecuador, safeguarding the Amazon, and supporting renewable energy projects in India’ - a lot of promises and big words for a sentence. With very little details and just big statements. I decided to give in and give them a click through, to look around in their website to see if I could find more details. For 30 euros you could buy a complete package: 60 trees planted, 4 tonnes of CO2 in 6 months. Their sort of ‘basic’ package. But you know, if you are cheap or maybe just started dating, you could just spend half the money (16 Euros) and get 20 trees planted. Or, maybe, is your 50 years anniversary so you can splash a bit more and for 680 euros you could plant 1000 trees ‘symbol of your perennial love’. Or maybe you are a millionaire and well in that case you could spend 6000 euros and plant 10000 native trees species in Ecuador and Madagascar (see, if you pay more they even tell you where they get planted, approximately and more or less what trees, at least that they are native), and..wait for it.. you also get a monthly newsletter.. woop woop! Maybe, most customers are satisfied with this amount of information. But this leaves me with more questions than answers. Nowhere it says what kind of trees are planting, how big, where, how, who they employed for planting them (is it helping the local economy? for 50 cents a tree I really doubt it!).. And NOWHERE there were information about the carbon standards, or the carbon verifications employed (go back to my Carbon market post for a refresher). How can they guarantee me an offset of 4 tonnes of CO2??? All I could find in their ‘about’ was a beautiful quote from Barack Obama and a few other pointless things that just made them look good. The website was super pretty and definitely curated, there were images of the team members (but who are them? again, aside from some fancy descriptions there was very little about their competencies in this sector..). We knew already that the carbon sequestration theme is blooming, and since I am working on it an it is up there with one of my most searched keywords and posts on social medias, it is obvious that I am getting more and more targeted. Little they know that I am actually studying in big details the subject and if I open their pages is most often to find flaws.. so keep on targeting me, go on.. To conclude this rant, I want to finish with some words of caution. Please read this part carefully. Carbon storage is becoming the new fashion, both from industries becoming ‘carbon neutral’ (which means nothing, for example the cruise sector can become carbon neutral just by neutralising the emissions from their offices, not necessarily the ships.. see the problem?) but also from the many ‘projects’ and ‘groups’ popping up day after day like mushrooms after a good period of rain, which are just industries in disguise, capitalism with a mask on, and are there just for profit. So. Be careful. Take off your blinds and put on a real good pair of reading glasses if you want to embark in offsetting your emissions. I promise, there are groups out there that do it for the good, but are hidden in this mix. A little hint: probably it will be more expensive than 1 euro or less per tree. Maybe much more expensive. But that’s the real price.
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