How many trees does it take to offset your carbon footprint?

I searched but didn't find a thread on this.

The calculator at Carbonify shows you how many trees you need to plant annually to offset your carbon footprint. For me, husband and baby in tow, I should be planting 76 trees a year. What surprised me most was how bad driving is... That was the bulk of our carbon emissions.

Climate change deniers will surely have something sneering or nonchalant to say about carbon footprints, etc., but they're just proving my personal fave of conspiracy theories right: that big oil has led a spectacular marketing campaign to keep us consumers, when we'd be a lot better off as citizens.

Interesting.

I have to plant 4.6625 trees each month.

I'm curious if there's a calculator out there like that for hemp?

a reply to: Look2theSacredHeart

44.34 Trees per year or 3.69 per month which surprised me as there are only two adults in the house and we don't own a car and walk everywhere.

I remember a friend of mine who showed me a program he had wrote to find out a persons IQ. If I remember there were 28 questions all MultiChoice with each question having 20 choices, and 20 sub choices. It took over a hour to complete. At the end of it i pressed the result button. The answer came up, " you have spent 1hour 25mins of your life you can never get back, IQ level "stupid bastard"
I understood fully why he wrote the program, not as a joke but to show how easy it is to manipulate people, and by using the internet millions can be manipulated.

Carbon footprint, green movement, environmentalism, etc are all derivatives orbiting around the simple truth: a species that doesn't live in balance with its environment is nonviable and at best will drive only itself into extinction.

How many trees do we have to plant to overturn the toxicity and mass loss of biodiversity that occurred from the Fukushima disaster? There is no such number, and the question is meant to reveal the fallacy of looking at improving our civilization through abstract terms like "carbon footprint", because doing so doesn't call into question every aspect of our unsustainable culture. And we should question all of it.

It's as simple as this imo...most species on this planet have found a way to occupy an energetic and material niche. Their waste is someone else's food and their very presence increases biodiversity and complexity of life. The energy that flows through their body and the materials that make up it's life cycles are, for the most part, kept local and renewable.

Permaculture is the only thing I've come across that not only explains reality this way but shows us how to actually address the question of how we change our methods of living to systems that are sustainable and cyclical. It's aim is to create design systems that mimic nature and to do this it shows how to make multiple connections locally between living beings with a focus on each species' intrinsic qualities, needs and exports. The more connections you can make locally between living beings with respect to those three categories the more secure and sustainable the whole system is for all of its inhabitants.

A person who plants twice as many trees as is required to offset his/her carbon footprint will most likely still be turning on a light that is powered by a non-local, unsustainable and toxic energy system. The current lexicon is misleading and this very same person will go to bed thinking they're helping fix the world.

a reply to: imod02 Hahaha! I think his project is hilarious.

Sounds like a similar experience to calling my insurance company.

We all choose what we allow to manipulate us, and I prefer to be on the side of green, growing things.

a reply to: SlickMcFavorite The pope said something very similar in his encyclical. He talked about how unlike natural systems, we have no (safe) ways of reabsorbing waste.

My electricity comes from dams and wind farms, but I'm still aware these impact the salmon and the bats. At this point, unless we go all Jedediah Johnson, there's no avoiding the potential harm inherent in our system. But we can try to minimize it.

originally posted by: Chickensalad
I'm curious if there's a calculator out there like that for hemp?

DANG! I came in to say that, but you beat me to it.

a reply to: Look2theSacredHeart



I will read the encyclical you mentioned (May 24th?) and thanks for the heads up.

I agree that, given our current cultural inertia, the approach should be gradual. I think this method of speed will allow for those who don't match my level of interest in this subject to get on board and I also think a gradual transformation will keep the encouragement up to continue the process. I am personally encouraged by the Permaculture community as they are a beehive of thinking that is already producing low-tech methods of maintaining our creature comforts while still attaining the goal of local ethical energy/material management. A lot of the resistance you meet when pointing this stuff out is that people think we have to revert back to the dark ages to be ecologically ethical and I applaud the people who are developing designs that prove this false.

a reply to: Look2theSacredHeart

I was very disappointed to see it come in at 6.5 trees a month for my wife and I and that's quite surprising because we're both retired and don't drive more than maybe 500 miles a month. (and that's a high estimate).

Its a very good question when you get down to it though.

I've read different figures, but from what I recall, a single acre of hemp can make as much paper as 4 acres of trees. Also, that hemp breathes in as much as 4x carbon dioxide as trees during their life

We should be chasing that route AS WELL as trying to replace trees.

(Side note: My town recently won the 'Greenest City' award from Yahoo a few years back mainly because of how many trees we've kept around and how well we've integrated with the natural landscape itself. )