23 Aug 2017

Make Earth Great Again

5:56 pm on 23 August 2017

Three Christchurch men want you to help plant a forest dedicated to President Donald Trump.

 

From left: Daniel Price, Jeff Willis, Adrien Taylor aka three dudes who want you to plant trees for Trump

From left: Daniel Price, Jeff Willis, Adrien Taylor aka three dudes who want you to plant trees for Trump Photo: supplied.

Trump Forest* is a crowd-funded initiative which, according to its website, aims to plant enough trees to “soak up the extra greenhouse gases Trump plans to put into our atmosphere.” 

The project’s co-founder, glaciologist Daniel Price explains: “Since Trump has taken office, we’ve seen him make attack after attack on initiatives designed to slow down man-made climate change.

“From trying to repeal the Clean Power Plan to stepping away from the commitments made at Paris; Trump has declared a war on a healthy climate for life on Earth so we’re fighting back with an army of trees.” 

The Trump Forest team has estimated that to offset the amount of carbon that will be emitted if the Clean Power Plan is repealed, they’ll need to plant a forest about the size of the North Island (113,729 square kilometres, FYI.) 

So far, $67,700 had been pledged by people across the globe to plant 364,892 trees. 

The founders reckon they need about 10 billion. 

The initiative was launched in April by Price, and co-founders Adrien Taylor - a former Newshub journalist and the entrepreneur behind Offcut Caps - and political scientist Jeff Willis.

Trump Forest now has 1246 backers.

Those wanting to join the initiative can do so in two different ways via the Trump Forest website; Either by donating to The Eden Reforestation Project; Or by choosing a local organisation of their own, making a donation in the name of Donald Trump, and uploading the receipt. 

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*Sadly, it’s not actually going to be one giant North Island-sized forest, though wouldn’t that be cool?!