The Power of Nature

Price does four things

1. Price Creates Choice
2. Price is a Mediator of Cooperation
3. Price forces Change
4. Ultimately, Price Expresses Humanity’s Opinion of itself.

So what does that say about us when the default price we put on nature is Zero? It means we must enlarge the spirit of Capitalism.

C2I was founded in 2003 to bring scale to conservation and drive impact by putting a price and value on natural capital. Starting in 1996, my business partner, Carey Crane and I began working in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley to develop the carbon market. Today, C2I’s, ACRE Investment Management platform, led by our CEO, Jerry Van Voorhis, is reaching a scale not seen in the private sector — — and its just the tip of the iceberg.

Here are the numbers:

120,000+ acres reforested

42 million trees planted on 450+ landowners lands

475,000+ forested acres conserved

5 mitigation banks

Now lets put this all in a Global Context

• William Petty in the 1600s set forth a revolutionary idea that “land is capital and to release its value requires labor.” This notion coupled with the industrial revolution set in motion events that have forever changed the landscape of our planet.
• From 1750 to Today, 1/3 of all carbon dioxide emissions are attributed to land use change, mainly deforestation as man sought to control nature.
• The clarion call about this struggle first came in 1850s by George P Marsh’s seminal book entitled Man and Nature. Marsh’s book was heavily influenced by Alexander von Humboldt who while on the top of a mountain came up with the notion of a web of life.
• Marsh’s book and Humboldt’s legacy influenced major thinkers from Thoreau to Muir to Teddy Roosevelt to Pinchot.
• And while the conservation ethic thrived and developed as our economy and innovations catapulted to new heights, our landscaped continued to be altered as the March of Progress proceeded on.
• Today, we have entered the Six Extinction. What this means is the decline biodiversity and the rate of the extinction is accelerating to a dangerous point that it endangers us all.
• Our climate is seeing an unprecedented trajectory of carbon emissions. What was previously thought to be a 100 year problem is now a 20–35 year one.

That is the context we find ourselves in today. So what does this mean? It means that a scaled problem requires a scaled solution!

Jim Rogers, former Chairman and CEO of Duke Energy, an investor in GreenTrees, once told me — — there are two forms of IP — — 1) technological IP and 2) how you bring it to scale. Most technologies fail because they do not know how to bring something to scale.

So with 20–35 years before irreversible Climate Change sets, Governments around the world are trying to figure this out. Publicly traded companies are facing reporting pressures to disclose shareholder risks as the environment is deemed a “material risk.”

But we cannot wait, nor risk, waiting for governments to solve this problem. They will only continue to debate, decree and study whether a carbon tax or cap and trade will change the behavior fast enough, deep enough to bend the climate curve to stabilized levels.

The answer, for now, relies on how to hook the transactional power of the marketplace, the velocity of capital to the most deployable technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere in order to create a scalable solution.

Inside this iPhone box is a machine that harnesses solar energy to:

• Sequester carbon from the atmosphere
• Store and Purify water
• Create Biodiversity Habitat
• Change micro climates
• Provide Flood Control
• Prevent Soil Erosion

In fact, the National Academy of Science studied all the technologies in labs or commercial development and deemed this technology as the most scalable, lowest risk solution to combating climate change. Yes that technology is Trees!

You see there is a genius to nature. Nature is not something to be tamed or thwarted as in the past. Nature is a source of wonder, inspiration for the marketplace and solution to our pressing problems of today. For example, the silk of a spider web is many times stronger than any manmade material. The point is Nature can be our guide.

What we must do is hook the transactional world to the biological one and tie the velocity of capitalism to the most scalable climate technology — — tree planting.

This is where our company, Forest Green, comes in and here is how we are going to do that.

Take this Smart Phone and this acorn and what you get is a Micro Transaction.

Forest Green has built a mobile platform for both the consumer and business facing sectors. This platform enables a price and value to be attributed and block chained linked to the growth of forests.

This, in turn, stimulates more tree planting, creating a flywheel of restoration.

So, will consumers and business engage? Research says yes. In a recent National Academy of Science study shows when your customers are faced with this very choice, anywhere from 50–70% of them are opting in.

Today, we are giving the power back to the consumer. Let the governments continue to make their decrees. Let consumers create the change they want to see in the world. With our partner, AppEdgy, the developer of a Cab Dispatch and Driver mobile technology app, we are providing people with the option to offset their rides. We are doing this is in 9 cities across the United States. Through our Carbon Transaction Platform, we are enabling more and more partners to leverage this tool to connect with their customers, creating lasting landscape change.

Every Micro Transaction scales up to carbon sold, putting a price on nature and creating the momentum to restore our river systems around the world.

This is where our GreenTrees and Conservation+ companies enter the picture. Lets start first with GreenTrees.

GreenTrees partners with landowners to reforest lands. The faster the trees grow, the faster they earn a climate dividend. Utilizing our cottonwood hardwood interplanting, the landowner can grow a bottomland hardwood forest much faster. You see, when we developed our planting approach, we looked to nature as our guide. What we did was mimic what nature would do on her own over many years by compressing time and space.

Our reforestation design has processing power. Think of our design as the Intel Chip for Reforestation of Bottomland Hardwoods. We can grow a hardwood forest 8 times faster than any other design.

Our Big River Cottonwood Nursery, the largest cottonwood nursery in the United States, provides us with 15 different clonal types that are matched to soil and conditions. Our nursery gives us the capacity for scale.

With processing power and capacity for scale in place, we apply our technology to a river system approach to drive maximum impact with our landowners. Our initial river system is the Mississippi Alluvial Valley. Why?

The Mississippi Alluvial Valley is America’s Ark of Biodiversity or as we like to call it, America’s Amazon.

As we continue to scale, we will adopt new watersheds, both domestically and globally, giving new tools to locals to create an apparatus for change — — cleaning the air, purifying the water and providing habitat to all kinds of species.

Further, our Conservation+ company is working with large blocks of lands to create layers of income in terms of carbon, wetlands, stream, nutrient, species banking and much more. These large blocks coupled with our reforestation create corridors of conservation and scale of supply.

And we are not stopping there. Our Advance Carbon Restored Ecosystem (ACRE) mechanism sweeps up all the rights associated with the restoration and/or conservation of each physical acre of land. ACRE is becoming a currency more and more. Think of ACRE as a derivative unit from land thats value appreciates over time. The ACRE mechanism becomes a tradable instrument, leading to more investment dollars flowing into this market.

You see, a scaled response needs a scaled solution. And that solution is the ACRE and millions and billions of Micro Transactions.

Through our partnerships, a landowner equity model, the mimicking of nature by compressing time and space, our nursery leadership capacity, our river system approach and the ACRE mechanism, culminating in micro transactions through our mobile platform for the transportation, energy and retail sectors, we are Repricing The Earth and putting a value on Nature’s services that are greater than the current price of zero.

With each tree, tens of millions of them going in the ground each year, we are scaling. But to go further, to go faster, we need you as partners.

We are fortunate to have many partnerships. One of those partnerships is with the Arbor Day Foundation. We have created an innovative tree fund with Arbor Day that helps to finance some of the front end costs of restoration, creating a carbon coupon in return. So Thank You to all our partners for all you do!

Our aim is restore One Million Acres in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and to bring our approach to other watersheds around the world to change the map. We have a 120+K acres restored and 880K to go — — and other river systems to touch.

Scale and Speed to scale. That is our charge!

Governments can debate and decree, the private sector and the velocity of capital, if aimed right, can Replenish the Earth.

We invite you to join us!

By Chandler Van Voorhis, Co-Founder of C2I, LLC and ACRE Investment Management (AIM) platform, a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and author to numerous chapters in books and articles on conservation, environmental markets and energy.

www.acre-investment.com

Other Videos

The Value of a Tree

Trees and Trains: The GreenTrees and Norfolk Southern Partnership