Hi my name is Jon Chambers the founder of 8 Billion Trees. That’s Maria and I in the photo above planting in a destroyed area in the Amazon. 

But why trees? 

Simply put, trees are the superheroes of the planet. And if you’re reading this right now, chances are you already know how bad the situation is… 

Humans have wiped out 60% of animals since 1970. Put another way, humans make up just 0.01% of all life but have eliminated 6 out of every 10 animals.

But what happened? Clearly this did not just happen out of nowhere. 

Trees. 

They are vanishing from the planet at an unprecedented rate. But it’s not just affecting animal wildlife and our climate, it’s changing human life as we know it. This is because forests are home to 80% of the world’s biodiversity. 

Yes, 80% of every living animal, planet, and organism directly depends on trees. And when the trees disappear…so does everything else.

More than 50 million acres of rainforest are lost each year. For comparison, this is an area totaling the size of England, Wales, and Scotland combined.

Only 10% of forests remain in Madagascar.

The United States has less than 4% of its forests left.

The modern world we live in today is driven by mass consumption…consumption on levels that not even the Queens and Kings of previous centuries would come close to. 

Clean water. Electricity. Infrastructure. Mass food production. Medical care. Human Services.

The list goes on. 

The dark reality is all of these modern luxuries lead to a massive carbon footprint. 

The average American household has a carbon footprint of 52.91 tons of pollution. To put this into perspective, a school bus weighs roughly 12 tons. 

This means you would have to plant 572 trees for every household in America to offset these negative environmental and ecological effects. 

And like I explained above, trees are already under attack. Every single second, an entire football field of forest is erased. 

I understand this is hard to wrap your head around fully without a visual. Here is an area we found in the Northeast region of the Amazon that was completely destroyed by illegal logging.

It's clear that trees are the answer.

But I will be the first one to tell you that planting trees is hard work. And planting them where it matters most—throughout the subtropical rainforests of our planet—is even harder… 

1. Acquire government approval to gain protected status for devastated areas 

2. Sign contractually-binding agreements with local officials to obtain permission to start planting trees 

3. Begin collecting seeds from native tree species in the area to ensure animals and wildlife are not harmed by planting the wrong species 

4. Launch a nursery network and build a team of planters that are certified 

5. Spend weeks in the field researching the most bioavailable and impactful locations to plant, analyzing science reports from many sources to form a forest modeling report 

6. Travel to the planting sites to create project boundaries and negotiate with any nearby landowners to ensure the trees are not harmed 

7. Assemble the requires tools and machinery for planting and coordinate the logistics to make sure everything is prepared for planting 

8. Travel with hundreds of planters through dense vegetation, dirt roads, and even boats to the remote planting sites 

9. Begin preparing the land, removing debris, and conducting a wildlife survey to honor animal habitats throughout the planting exercise 

10. Plant the trees, often in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees in the humid Amazon Rainforest 

11. Monitor the perimeters of the planting sites and employ a full-time monitoring team to check on the trees every month 

12. Conduct post-planting analysis and submit the required documentation to governments and monitoring organizations to ensure the planting is successfully healing the planet and saving endangered wildlife

You’ve taken the time to read this, and it’s clear you know something needs to be done.

But maybe you also don’t have the time or the ability to plant hundreds of trees every single year. That’s where 8 Billion Trees comes in. 

Every single month we will plant YOUR trees needed to offset YOUR carbon footprint, erasing the bad and replacing it with life-giving trees. 

This isn’t paying it forward. It’s paying it now. 

If you are the average American, you are in the top 1% of global carbon polluters. This means I am too. These are the facts. But facts don’t have to be scary or tense... 

What matters is what we do with the knowledge we have…how we choose to live the life we are given.