The Skakagrall

Simon,

Excuse me for being so bold as to inquire, but why is it necessary for there to be 99 others who agree also to plant 10 trees before you will have this done yourself? Will your total carbon emissions be affected in any way depending upon whether others do this or not?

Of course I support your general aims, but just wonder if, before I cast my vote, you could set me right on this. Many thanks.

Bill, that is a reasonable question.

To some extent the Pledge Bank provide their own answers, but there are different kinds of undertakings and campaigns there.

In my case, I could probably save myself a lot of trouble and simply give my credit card number to the Woodland Trust, buy 10 trees and leave it at that, however 1,000 trees will make more difference to the environment than 10, and it seems worthwhile to try for the larger target. (We already have one third of the 99 signed up in one day, so I am optimistic about making the target.)

Maybe a larger campaign will develop out of this. I've discovered that it's possible to make some rough calculations of our individual emissions of CO2 (based on official figures), and take some personal responsibility for them, instead of expecting central or local government to do it (or not do it) all for us. In my view, this raises a lot of interesting possibilities for the future.

Simon

Thanks for your speedy and frank response. I have to say I am innately suspicious of this kind of 'gesture' politics; people either want to do this, or not, and whether others choose to do so or not should make no difference. Obviously the more people who do decide to participate, the better. I shall be casting my own vote in the pledge shortly, but whether or not the requisite number specified actually materialise will make no difference to my decision to support this cause.

Thank you, Bill. With 36 people already signed up, I am hoping that this will result in concrete action.

I am intending myself to donate to Abriachan Wood, on the west side of Loch Ness. This is quite near you. Do you know this woodland?

www.wt-woods.org.uk/abriachanwood/description.asp

Well, I don't know the wood itself, but the whole area around Abriachan is quite special. BTW, I tried to log onto the Woodland Trust website earlier this evening, but it may perhaps be overloaded at present as it wouldn't load.

I cannot get woodland-trust.org.uk to work, although a check with WHOIS reveals it is indeed a valid address for The Woodland Trust.

However the address woodlandtrust.org.uk (i.e. without the hyphen) has also been registered, according to WHOIS, and this works fine.

I think their official site is www.woodland-trust.org.uk. This works. I have set up skakagrall.com so that it works with or without www. but perhaps they forgot to do this.

They seem to have other woods in the Inverness area.

It now works for me, too. There must have been a problem on their server yesterday.