Sunday, April 03, 2005

A draft letter...

The following is a draft of a letter we are sending to the owner of a potential location of our carbon sink. This draft provides good background on the project and our progress so far. The letter was written by Francis a 9th Grader.

On behalf of the Vermont Commons Co-op we would like to thank you for volunteering your time, energy and land to our cause. The purpose of this letter is to propose to you our plan and the complications involving the amount of trees needed and the type of soil that can support the trees.

There are three possible types of trees that we are willing to plant, although one of them would be the best. We would like to propose maple trees when it comes to planting although pine and oak would work as well. The reason for this is that as the trees mature they can be used for sugaring and more profit can be made off of them.

After plugging in our data, we figured out that we are emitting approximately 75 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. To completely absorb that amount of carbon over twenty years we would have to plant up to 1,500 trees this year. The amount would be much greater than this if we are going to absorb all of that carbon in one year. To do that, the trees would all have to be planted at the stage in their life when they absorb the most carbon and the number of trees needed would be around 10,000. This is an unreasonable number, so we have settled on planting the additional trees every year and slowly working up to that number. We are only asking to use about five acres of your land, and we will find other sites to use in the future. As for the labor involved, we are going to be planting the trees ourselves, and only need to know which areas would suit your purposes the best.

Once again we would like to extend the most profound thank you for this opportunity. We would have been hard pressed to find the number of acres needed somewhere else. Please let us know when we can meet with either or both of you to work out the details on where to plant, and what kind of trees you prefer.

Sincerely,
The Vermont Commons Co-op.

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