Jenny Smith, a.k.a. Tree Jenny, is an environmental lawyer turned founder of Community Carbon Trees Costa Rica, a nonprofit & scalable model where they have planted over half a million trees while providing living wage jobs to Costa Rican men and women. Reforestation approached this way lifts people out of poverty , empowering Costa Rican land owners to make money off reforestation and tree product cooperatives AND giving companies the ability to offset their carbon footprint by sponsoring tree planting. Community Carbon Trees is over halfway to their goal of a million trees, and this deep dive with founder Jenny is uplifting and inspiring! Jenny and this work is also the subject of the documentary One Precious Life.
Sponsor a Tree and offset your carbon footprint at Community Carbon Trees
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See the Documentary Trailer
Show notes:
- About community carbon trees: Creates sustainable jobs paying living wages, planting and reforesting degraded land for local Costa Rican land owners, transitioning it to food/productive forest (the land owners choose their species), and funded by companies sponsoring trees to offset their carbon footprint.
- Educational, collaborative, hand-holding vibe with land owners allows for the addressing poverty as the reason for deforestation, and fixing it by creating jobs
- Proper financial management & transparenty as an essencial part of an ethical nonprofit
- Being a scalable model as a major part of CCT: resources they have available include manuals of communication trees and consulting remotely or online to mentor/help other small tree planting groups
- Jenny’s journey from working as a lawyer to direct action with reforestation and CCT
- Constellations of signs, dreams, signals and resonance as ways our destiny calls us! It hurts more ot not get up and do the work and show up for the thing that futhers us than to do the work.
- Things open for us with persistence and bravery - trust that slow growth and continuing on will grow for us in the way trees grow and fruit
- Inexhaustible faith and early environmental awakenings
- Jenny’s recommendations for remaining positive and activated in 2021: meditation and kundalini yoga
