Website of the Day: The World Land Trust

The feelgood factor from being an investor in Triodos Bank is marvellous, knowing that your money is helping only really inspiring organisations with a positive ecological and social benefit, and not arms dealers, the manufacturers of nuclear power stations and other unconscionable things.

But tops in this respect has to be The World Land Trust. It’s a charity that doesn’t just talk about things, it gets right on and does them.

Its purpose is to buy up habitats of major ecological importance that are under severe threat just as fast as it can. As there are a lot of these, it has a lot to do.

Since 1989, the WLT has helped protect over 350,000 acres (142 hectares) of tropical forest, coral reefs, arid coastal steppe, and ancient beech woodland.

Just £25 buys half an acre of rainforest that typically holds more than 220 species of tree. Compare that with the ‘singularly impoverished’ native tree population of the entire British Isles which consists of just 36 species. You can pump up the number to 65 by adding 8 ‘larger shrubs which occasionally reach tree size’ and 21 naturalised species if you are embarrassed, but its perilously close to cheating. Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trees_of_Britain_and_Ireland


All due to the speed with which the North Sea filled up after the last Ice Age, apparently (Collins Tree Guide, 2004, p7).

Then you really feel you have done something extraordinarily worthwhile with your money. And that is before you take account of all the things that live in them!

If that doesn’t appeal, instead invest in a piece of a corridor for endangered Indian elephants to put their trunks in. Seems they are getting into big trouble with – you guessed it – humans, for doing no more than tramping the ancient migratory trails they have always followed, so there is a need to buy them up fast before the inevitable outcome plays out.

And the nice thing about elephants is that, unlike those two-legged animals, they are happy to share with all the other species, so everyone gains - with the exception of a few misguided people.

Patrons this time around are none other than David Attenborough, so you can have absolute confidence in science and the utility, and, for some reason, David Gower. Bill Oddie is also on board, and we even have a lawyer as one of the trustees. He is Simon Lyster, qualified in both the UK and USA, who is Chief Executive of LEAD International, an international network of folk whose shared mission is to inspire leadership for a sustainable world. He’s a former Director General of the Wildlife Trusts and worked for 10 years with WWF.



As the Wild Law workshop is currently in full flight, the proposition is that all participants should consider buying half an acre this weekend to do something positive, concrete and instantaneous that really makes a difference, and to help to offset the impacts that are an inevitable consequence of gathering together, no matter how worthy the cause.

Most of all for the sheer elation. To know that today you saved a big chunk of rainforest and all the things that live in it, for little more than the price of a round of drinks, has to be one of the best things you can do with money anywhere. The kids will love you for it, too.

http://www.worldlandtrust.org



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