About Replant.ca Environmental

Earlier this year, I "started" a new company.  The goal was to plant trees, on a volunteer basis, 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 make it more official.  I also believed that I could plant trees for environmental reasons on a much larger scale if I formalized the company.  After all, I had been receiving dozens of inquiries about this type of work every year.  Also, 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.

 

Now I knew that using this name had the potential to be confusing.  After all, the original Replant.ca website has been the most well-known tree planting site in Canada since I started it 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.  But the name also has incredibly strong brand recognition, and I felt that was going to be helpful in establishing the new company.

The only drawback to my main industry experience is that my regular job as a professional tree planter is just that ... a job.  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, and those companies are hired 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.  It's the work that Replant.ca focuses upon.  To learn more, go to this link:

www.replant.ca

When I started Replant.ca Environmental, my goal was to become more involved with a different and "better" type of reforestation.  I wanted to plant trees that wouldn't be cut down in the future by logging companies.  Replant.ca Environmental meets that goal.  Our long-term plan is to acquire land, plant trees, and build community forests that the public is allowed to visit and enjoy.  In fact, the public is welcome to visit any of our properties right now!  We're still early in the process of building our first community forests, next month (November 2019), we'll start creating complex trail systems on our first property, to enhance recreational enjoyment for the public.  These trails will be open to recreational users for year-round hiking (and cross-country skiiing during the winter).  Our goal is to have three community forest properties completely developed within three years, with each individual property being over 100 acres in size.

Thankfully, I've had some help from a few of my professional tree planting friends, including Laura, Karla, and Jon.  Although they also work for part of each year in post-harvest reforestation, they too share my goal of building permanent forests that won't be cut down in the future.

To really learn more about our company, you should visit our new website.  We launched it officially at the start of September, but we're adding new content every week as we finish building it out.  Here's the link:

replant.ca/environmental

Here are three quick facts:

1.  The Replant.ca Environmental company does NOT work for or with logging companies.

2.  We aim for biodiversity.  We do not plant monocultures.  We planted five different species in 2019, and are aiming for twelve species in 2020.

3.  Our three-year goal includes planting over 100,000 trees in 2020, and developing three complete Community Forest properties in Atlantic Canada by the fall of 2022.


If you want to support us, share the link to our website! Thanks for reading...

  - Jonathan Clark