tree planting party

There has been a lot in the New Zealand papers lately about carbon emissions and carbon footprints (I'm sure there have been similar articles in North America). They talk about how your Carbon Footprint is a measure of your impact on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, based on your activities and lifestyle (like driving cars, flying, buying non-locally produced food, purchasing processed and manufactured goods, etc.). As you can imagine, my carbon footprint is rather large this year, what with all the buses and planes and stuff (not to mention all the travel/activity brochures collecting in my bag).

I read a story the other day about how people are doing things to offset the carbon they produce . One of the obvious things is to plant trees. When I get back to Canada, I'm going to owe a lot of trees. I also felt a strong compulsion to plant a tree after I finished grad school to make up for all the trees I killed in pursuit of that final piece of paper (don't even get me started about how many have suffered once I started working in the hospital).

So, as I am wont to do, I have spent a good deal of time contemplating my carbon footprint. First, the plane - Unlike all the paper from school and work, one could argue that the plane was going anyway so I didn't really make it that much worse. Second is the whole concept of planting trees to offset my carbon footprint (although I didn't have the cool phrase to use before), and this is the one that really confuses me more - How can the tree I plant be a 'new' tree? Since, technically, the tree I would plant already exists, isn't it more like tree transplanting? Do you get credit for 'planting a tree' if it already exists? My thought is I could get credit if I try to find one that would otherwise die if I didn't intervene. I assume that the tree people don't say, well if we haven't sold you by the time you are 6 feet tall then it's into the mulcher with you (or do they)? So those trees already in the shop probably don't need rescuing. Does that mean I have to go and find one at the original nursery stage where they weed out the crowded and unwanted ones (shades of apple thinning here) and rescue some of those? Hmm.

[Now, before you get all pedantic on me and ruin my contemplation, I have heard of the option of compensating for the emissions produced by buying the equivalent ‘carbon offset’ credits from emission reduction projects such as retiring corporate emission credits or tree planting in Kenya (apparently if you plant the trees in Kenya there's no problem with the whole space-time continuum problem of trees that already exist).]