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

Olive Branch Restaurant

The Olive Branch restaurant, which I used to own, has just recently reopened in Sackville.

Please note that I am no longer affiliated with that business. I sold the assets to the new owners, and I am not working there, nor do I own any interest in the name or venue. A lot of people have contacted me over the past week, assuming that I opened it back up because the Pub is closing, but I am 100% uninvolved with it.

I wish the new owners the best of luck in their new venture.

Sackville Fire in 2006

Two years ago, on the night that I returned to Sackville from my summer on the West Coast, there was a large fire in downtown Sackville, my hometown. The date was August 11th, 2006.

It started out fairly innocently. I had just arrived at the Pub minutes before, when someone came into the bar and said that they had just been kicked out of Ducky's because the fire alarm went off. This was (and still is) a fairly frequent occurrance. Everyone assumed that it was a false alarm. This was still fairly early in the evening, shortly after 9pm.

An hour later someone else come up to the Pub and reported that the building really was on fire. Fifteen minutes later, another call came in to tell us that it was a major fire. A couple of us decided to walk down to see what was happening, and I grabbed the video camera.

When I arrived, we immediately realized that this was definitely a major fire, it didn't take long to realize that the building would be destroyed. I stayed at the scene for about an hour, and the police officers, recognizing who I was, allowed me close enough to get some pretty good footage. A lot of my video footage was used on a couple of the regional news networks the following day.

Anyway, I also took some of the more interesting shots and put together a short video, about seven minutes long, and we put a copy of it online on the Pub website, so alumni and students from out-of-town could see what happened. The Pub website had over three thousand visitors in the following 24 hours as word got around. I was also happy that we were able to use the video later that same year in putting together a fundraising/awareness video for the Sackville Fire Department.

Anyway, I found a copy of the video yesterday, so I put it up on YouTube. A lot of students at MTA right now (everyone in first or second year) won't have ever seen what the downtown used to look like before half the block burned down. Here's a copy of the video:



Here's a direct link to the YouTube page, for Facebook readers who can't see the video as an embedded object:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ZoR4N7hlM

Eastlink Advertising

The people at Eastlink are out of control.

I advertise my restaurant on their television station, which has worked out pretty well. We get a lot of dinner guests who mention that they heard about the restaurant on the television ad, so it is definitely worth the expense.

Anyway, I get billed on a bi-weekly basis (as in once every two weeks). The funny thing is that usually I get two copies of the bill, for the exact same amount, but the format of the two different pages is slightly different. I didn't really think that this was very odd, until I checked the mail yesterday. This time round, I got a total of SEVEN letters from them, for the last two-week period. There were the normal two copies, then a third one in a different format that I've never seen before, then two more telling me to ignore the first two because the tax was calculated incorrectly, then two more saying the exact same thing again.

Luckily, being a tree planter, I can appreciate this absolutely ridiculous waste of paper. I think of it as job security.

University Exams and Garbage Cans

We're in the middle of end-of-semester exams here at Mount Allison University, so most of my friends are stressing out about how hard their lives are right now. But really, when you're 80 years old, will you look back and say to yourself, "Man, I can't believe I missed that question about Dirac's Constant on my exam back in 2006. That pretty much ruined the rest of my life."

Let's be serious for a minute: is that exam really going to make the difference between you spending the rest of your life doing sub-atomic particle research versus being "the fry guy" at the local drive-through? I thought so. So it isn't worth getting that stressed out. Study, but don't stress.

I agree that exams can be pretty hard sometimes, but do you want to know something that is really hard? Try throwing out a garbage can. I'm not kidding. I have a broken garbage can, so every week, I put it out on the curb with the rest of the garbage. But do the garbage collectors ever take it away? No. It's always left standing there, lonely and unwanted, as they drive off into the sunset. It's becoming a war of attrition between me and PBS Waste, but unlike Bush and the war in Iraq, I know that someday I'm going to win.