Our Trees For Life Grove

GOAT cares immensely about the future of the planet. We are striving to make GOAT a carbon negative digital marketing company.

With this in mind, we recently set up our own corporate ‘Grove’ with Trees For life, a leading conservation charity dedicated to rewilding the Scottish Highlands.

Our donations to Trees for Life will help offset our carbon emissions, while helping in a small way to re-wild the world, transforming open hillsides into healthy woodlands and supporting a greater diversity of wildlife.

Will be adding to our grove over time, plus if you choose to work with GOAT we will plant a number of trees in your name 🙂

A bit about Trees For Life

Trees For Life is a conservation charity dedicated to rewilding the Scottish Highlands. They have established 44 tree planting sites and planted nearly two million trees. They have a vision of a revitalised wild forest in the Highlands of Scotland, providing space for wildlife to flourish and communities to thrive.

The Caledonian Forest was once home to great herds of grazing animals – including wild cattle – which were preyed upon by lynx, wolf and other predators. It was home to an intricate web of life and humans had little, if any, influence over it.

Sadly, by 1950 only 1% remained, the consequence of centuries of felling trees for fuel, buildings and later to make way for farming. Since 1993 the charity has been working tirelessly to restore the Caledonian Forest and the nature that depended on it.

Trees For Life has returned red squirrels to forests where they had not lived for over 50 years and sought to bring beavers back to their natural home of rivers and lochs. Rewilding landscapes is more than simply planting trees; without the full web of life that makes up the forest, it cannot thrive and grow naturally. 

Why planting trees is needed

The following nine reasons planting trees is important for our future, are cited from Trees For Life’s ‘Plant a Tree’ page. 

1. Help fight the climate crisis – Trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it up, thus helping to combat climate change. Recent studies have found that trees may be the best way to stabilise our climate.
2. Preserve native trees – Trees For Life grow and plant rare and endangered trees such as aspen, dwarf birch and woolly willow. These trees are not usually commercially available because they are hard to propagate and demand is low.

    

3. Create wildlife habitat – Trees provide important habitats for wildlife and are fundamental to the survival of many species

    

4. Trees bring people together – Clearly it would be missing the point to travel to Scotland to plant a tree, trees will likely be planted by Trees For Life volunteers, some of whom join us from mental health charities who aim to bring people together in nature to improve wellbeing.

    

5. Wildfire recovery – Scottish hillsides have been ravaged by fires in recent years. Young, healthy forests can help to suppress wildfires and increase the speed of recovery.

    

6. Flood prevention – Trees hold water, prevent flooding, restore underground reservoirs and maintain water vapour in the air, increasing the chance of rainfall and reducing drought and desertification

    

7. Trees clean the air – Humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, trees do the reverse – cleaning the air that we breathe. Trees also absorb pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulphur dioxide and ozone

    

8. Protect endangered wildlife – Species like the red squirrel have found their last stronghold in the Caledonian Forest. Planting trees will help create a stable habitat for the red squirrel and other similar animals

    

9. Create a seed source for the future – Natural regeneration of trees is only possible where a viable seed source remains. Planting in areas without a seed source means the forest will be able to succeed itself once established.

What are you waiting for? Get involved with helping to restore nature and our natural world to thrive!