Replanting And Growing Mangroves With Hank Dearden Of ForestPlanet

Welcome to Care More Be Better, a show for people like you who care about the planet and want to build a better, brighter future. Our guest is one of my favorite collaborators. Thanks to our partnership with ForestPlanet.org, we’ve committed to funding the planting of 24,832 trees this year alone. We’re just getting started. Every subscriber to this podcast or our newsletter helps make this happen. Hank Dearden III is the founder and executive director of ForestPlanet.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that supports large-scale, low-cost reforestation projects across the globe.

Since 2018, they’ve planted over 2 million trees, all for just $0.15 a tree on average, with an emphasis on planting in regions where the trees will do the most good for local ecosystems and communities in peril. We’ll dive into the power of mangroves, the impact of reforestation, and the beauty of building global partnerships that get to work to build a better, brighter future for all people.

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Hank Dearden, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me. It’s great to be a guest once again.

I know when we last connected on this show, I think you were approaching the one million mark. That’s where I stumbled in your intro, but you shared with me before we started recording that you’ve crossed the two-million hurdle and things are accelerating. That’s lovely to see, and a small part of that is our collaboration, too.

We cannot do it without people like you.

How Hank Dearden Started ForestPlanet

Let me ask you my first starter question here. For those new to our collaboration, could you talk about what inspired you to start ForestPlanet?

My background has always been in business development, sales, and marketing, but I have an engineering degree in more systems theory, where we studied how complicated things work together. As a personal passion, I care about the little speck that we all live on, the little green marble. I love trees. I had an agency for a while. I was involved with business development and sales of fairly complicated things, semiconductors, websites, speech recognition technologies, and more consultative cell in my experience.

I hooked up with another NGO, about twenty years ago, that was planting trees. They talked about the agroforestry model, which is a very systemic approach and highly integrated, where you’re not just planting trees. You’re intercropping. You’re planting trees at three levels. It’s not really about carbon, even though that’s why a lot of people are motivated to support the organization.

Carbon is being sequestered, but it really is about economic development. My dad was a social worker, so community development and service are baked into my DNA anyway. I understood what they were doing, and it brought everything together. What was needed was a higher level of awareness about how intricate these systems are, but how powerful and resilient they are as well, and the benefits that they can deliver for not a whole lot of money.

The thing about being an engineer is you want to solve a problem, and you come in and it’s a big, complicated problem. It’s got a lot of different moving parts. Everybody has their hair on fire, running around. Your first thought is, “Where can we apply the least amount of pressure and get the biggest bang for the buck?” Leverage is the magic word. As I was looking at things, things kept coming back to the trees in terms of being the point of an inverted pyramid, where if you want to check a lot of boxes and solve a lot of problems, trees are the best way to do it.

I would submit that if you go around the world and look at all the plethora of societal problems, pick one, start pulling the rope a little bit, pull the string, and you’re going to run into deforestation fairly quickly, and how it impacts us. We wrote a blog about how trees help prevent wars in terms of their economic development and their economic support, and their natural resources, not just soil retention, revitalization for agricultural pursuits, but also water. The impact of trees on the water cycle may be more significant than the impact of trees on the carbon cycle.

That’s where we talk about desertification. When you remove trees, you essentially create desert conditions.

Care More Be Better | Hank Dearden | Mangroves — Mangroves: Mangroves are the most incredible creatures in the world.

You start down that path. Soil is organic, good soil. Soil is alive, but dirt is inert. Soil has a certain amount of organic material in it. The other thing it has in it is air, whether it’s space or air to come down, and water to trickle through. Tree roots are great at creating that space and creating that air for water, air, oxygen, and CO2 to be absorbed by the soil as well. When you take that away, you’re taking away that catalyst. You’d better put something in there that delivers that same overall benefit, or it’s just a matter of time.

That’s certainly right.

You go down slowly, and then you have dirt.

Hanks’ Journey To Fulfillment

You’ve also described your path as a journey to fulfillment, your personal Ikigai, as we could call it. Ikigai is a Japanese word that means you’re living your life at the intersection of your desired skills and purpose. How did that lead to this pursuit?

It was unconscious. I was in my late 50s before it dawned on me that I had to put all these things together. Fulfillment means different things to different people, and people get fulfillment from different places. There are plenty of people who do a job, and they’re good at it. They more or less like it. It feeds their family, and that’s fine, but maybe they don’t get a fundamental fulfillment from their job. That’s okay. They get their fulfillment from other places. They get it from their family, their church, their community, their passions, singing in the choir, fishing with the guys, whatever it is that they want.

They have a church and state there. There are things I have to do every day to keep alive, and I go through them. It’s important. God loves them. The people who are the mechanics for buses. Are they personally fulfilled by that? Maybe not. That’s okay. It needs to be done. They do a good job, and I hope they’re well paid because it’s necessary. Not to cast aspersions whatsoever, I’m wondering if they’re personally fulfilled by it. I’m going to guess that they’re not. They get their fulfillment somewhere else, and that’s fine.

They have a well-rounded life, and they’re happy, and life is good. I wish them every happiness and great success. It dawned on me that my fulfillment has to come from my job. Maybe I have the luxury because I don’t have a spouse and don’t have kids, and I can hold out if you will. I don’t have to make those kinds of choices. For me, it’s like the Venn diagram where fulfillment is the middle of the four circles. The four circles for me are you’re good at it, you like it, it’s important, it makes you money, and it gives you a living.

Where those four integrate in the middle overlap in the middle, for me, that’s fulfillment. I’m insanely grateful to all the Gods that you can name and a bunch that we cannot, that I’ve got maybe 3.2 out of 4. The money is starting to come in, and we’re starting to deliver. I hope that answers that question, but it didn’t dawn on me.

I want to say that I think this focus on finding that sweet spot in your life as much as possible, especially if you’re somebody who might be that A-type so-called potential workaholic. I’m guilty. I have thought a lot about that over the years. This is what has connected me to persistently staying in the natural products industry because I know that my work is also producing good in the world.

What has led to the pursuit of this show? It brings me joy and fulfillment to be able to connect with other do-gooders like yourself, to be able to participate in the planting of all these trees. When I first built this plan with you, I thought we might be spending about $500 a month. That $500 a month would plant what? It’s about six trees per dollar on average, or maybe a little more than that. We’d be planting a significant number of trees.

I thought we would have a goal for the entire year of planting 20,000 trees. We crossed that mark in June. I’m both thrilled and also want people to understand that I plant up to four trees per listener, because if you follow us on Spotify, on YouTube, on Apple podcasts, and subscribe to my newsletter on CareMoreBeBetter.com, I’ve agreed to plant a tree. I do have some super users out there who have emailed me and said, “I wanted to make sure that I’m being counted because I subscribed to your newsletter. I subscribed to Spotify, and did all these things.” I’m like, “Yes, I’m planting four trees on your behalf.”

For the last quarter, that investment is over $2,000 cash from my hands into yours to make sure that we plant all these trees together. I’m thrilled with that. I’m hoping I can keep this going through the end of the year. I’m lucky to have had a few of the sponsors who have come on the show over the past few months to be interviewed, who are entrepreneurial. I recommend a donation. They’ve helped to cover some of those costs.

Mostly, we aren’t monetized. I’m doing this show particularly because I want people to have access to the important information that we cover to guests like you who understand deeply that important work has to be done every day, that it’s going to take more of us working in mission-driven ways to help preserve the future of our planet so that our kids and grandkids and all the wonderful species on this planet can survive and thrive. I want to talk about mangroves.

Fulfillment means different things to different people, and everyone gets fulfillment from different places.

Thank you for your support. I wish all the other podcasters would take a page. Obviously, it takes a lot of effort, but it takes a lot of bandwidth too. We’re chewing up a lot of photons here, and you’ve now got up to 40,000 subscribers across all your platforms, which is amazing. Congratulations. I’m very jealous and I’m very impressed, and to help us get the word out there, but that takes a lot of energy.

Mangrove Planting Project In Tanzania

If I only had the energy to also throw at social media. The social media followership might be paltry. It’s the subscribers to the show. This is a long-form content podcast. People pick it up all over the globe, dominantly in the US. I even have some listeners in Tanzania, where you’re planting these mangroves. Let’s talk about what you’re doing there in Tanzania. This year, so far, we’ve supported 24,832 trees. One check is coming to you. At the end of the next quarter, I’ll send you more for the listeners who have come to the podcast. I want you to talk about why mangroves are so vital to those local ecosystems and to coastal resilience.

Mangroves are the most incredible creatures in the world, I feel. Let’s do a quick backup. The business model for ForestPlanet is that I do what I do, and other people on the ground around the world do what they do. We come together and we focus on our respective strengths. I do this. I have these types of communications, I have lots of events, I set up other corporate partnership arrangements, and all day long, type A, work hard to make money. It’s that simple, and get the word out.

When it comes time to plant a tree, I partner with groups that are on the ground in their various communities. They’re established, I vet them, I do background checks on them, I visit them, and I sub out. I don’t tell them what to do. I ask them what they’re doing or what they might like to do. They need to justify to me that what they’re doing makes sense. They have to explain their model. If I like it, then I will buy wholesale.

The business model for me is to sell low and buy slightly lower. These folks on the ground know what they’re doing. They just need more cash. The Western dollar usually goes very far where the need is. Why Tanzania? I didn’t pick Tanzania. I didn’t pick Africa. I picked a group that I found had its act together and knew what they were doing. They happened to be in Tanzania.

It’s the Friends of Usambara Society, and they’re up in the mountains, and we can talk about those projects. A lot of those are more agroforestry, soil remediation, and water retention up in the mountains. The Usambara Mountains are not far from Kilimanjaro in Northeastern Tanzania and not far from the cradle of our species, I truly believe. It’s an intense visit there to see the biodiversity. This is where we came from. It’s like a Petri dish, and it’s gorgeous. I highly recommend traveling there.

I had been working with this team for a while, a couple of years, 20,000 trees here, 100,000 trees there. Water resource trees, avocados, fruiting trees, etc. I was like, “I know that mangroves are super important. Have you guys ever done a mangrove project? Could we find one?” They said, “No, we haven’t, but we want to, and we know the perfect place to do it.” There’s this town called Pangani that’s on the Indian Ocean coast.

It’s about 100 miles from where they are. It’s the coastal regions. A different tribe, a different cultural mix on the coast than there is inland. Quick sidebar, Tanzania was a German colony before the Brits took it over, so there’s a lot of Lutherans there, but then on the coast, there’s a lot of Muslims because the Arabs have been trading up and down the coast of East Africa for centuries. Pangani is a little fishing village.

There’s a river there that has a pretty big watershed called the Pangani River. It runs upstream towards Kilimanjaro. When it rains on the southern part of Mount Kilimanjaro, that water flows into the Pangani River. It goes into the ocean at the town of Pangani, which is an ancient fishing village, where they have these old fishing boats with single sails that look pretty much like they did in the year 822 when they started using them. They’re pretty amazing.

They float out with the tide in the morning and come back in the night. They’re amazing. I started working with the Friends of Usambara Society on a mangrove project. We both wanted to do it. We both understand the power of the mangroves. On one hand, they sequester more carbon than any tree. When you’re looking at the tree out your window, you’re looking at about half of it because what’s above the ground is half, and what’s below is the other half in terms of roots. When you look at a mangrove tree, you’re looking at a third of it.

Even if it’s like 50 feet tall, it means it’s 100 feet down, and their root systems are super deep. These evolved right in coastal or tidal regions. They’re one of the few, if not only, trees that can survive in the salty or brackish waters. The root systems are very dense. They hang on to shorelines. They’re very tangled. They’re not pretty to look at in one sense, but they’re incredibly gorgeous because they’re life gone nuts in my hand.

Because the tides come in and out, the water levels rise and fall, the root systems look like they’re on stilts. That is the perfect breeding ground for all kinds of crabs, fish, shrimp, and everything at the bottom of the marine food chain. Each tree is its own little mini estuary. If you want fish in the ocean, then you put mangroves on the shore. They flower, so honey can be harvested from them. It’s a very rich, dark, no-messing-around African type of honey. It’s pretty intense. I got some back. I have to only eat just a little bit at a time because it’s not this light, clear, pretty, foofy clover honey that we’re used to. This is the real deal.

Maybe you can send me some as well. I would love to try it.

Some companies are a little bit nervous about looking too woke, which is getting harder to define these days.

You should. It checks a lot of boxes, especially if you’re in a fishing village like Pangani, where they’ve seen fish populations over the past twenty years drop by 80% in some ways. I honestly don’t know why. I need to find out what’s going on there. It might be temperature, it might be pollution from the Pangani River coming down, pesticides, herbicides, all kinds of shenanigans going on. Right there, they had had a problem with encroachments, where a lot of trees had been cut down because the good news, bad news about them is that because they have salt in them, you can build your houses and your huts out of them. The presence of the salt keeps the termites away.

It is also perfect wood for making fishing boats. Also, it burns pretty well, even if it’s green because of the salt in it. There are chunks of Pangani where there had been an encroachment, and it was laid bare. What used to be mud, some of those areas have clay in them. Once that gets exposed to the sun, it gets baked. It’s like you’re walking on asphalt. It’s horrible. It’s all cracked and it’s full of salt because the water evaporates. It doesn’t permeate. It doesn’t get down in.

It’s not going to naturally recover. Human beings cause this problem. Human beings have to fix it. The first thing I said was, “Do the locals still cut down the trees? Have they gotten the memo that thou shalt not?” There’s a big neighborhood watch, if you will, where no one is allowed to cut down, at least clear-cut the trees. Every now and then, you can cut down an old one here and there, single, and get together and figure out how you want to divvy it up. That’s okay. Just don’t be clear-cut. When you cut one down, you make sure that you plant another hundred or so because they’re so cheap to do.

Not every tree will survive to become a large, beautiful mangrove either. That’s the reality of any tree-planting endeavor. When you see people cutting down pine trees and then going to replant new ones in a new site, they’re planting probably 3 to 4 times the number of trees that they plant for harvesting in the end, because some of them will simply not take root for one reason or another.

Mangroves are tricky because you do have issues with the tides, and that’s a function of river level. You want the tide to go far enough inland. In the dry season and during a neap tide, the tides don’t reach that far from the banks of the river. Hydrology is an issue, and you have to get creative about channeling, etc. Mangroves are tricky, but they’re worth the effort. They’re super beneficial. My friends at FOU, Friends of Usambara Society, said, “We’ll work with you on this.” That’s great.

I went out and I got a grant, and the folks at The Palmer Foundation took a risk on us, and we went through and we learned and we made big mistakes. I did a lot of things wrong. Now we’ve fixed those mistakes. In this one area around Pangani, Tanzania, I was there in June. We started this three years ago. I’ve been there on five trips, spent about $100,000 sourced from wonderful people like you. It’s been our tuition, but there are 400,000 trees there that are, for the most part, looking strong. Some didn’t make it in some areas, but we know what we did wrong there because it’s too hard and too much salt density, etc.

The Tricky And Challenging Process Of Growing Mangroves

One of the things I’ve heard about mangrove forests in particular is that when you get an area that gets dry and cracked like that, it’s often tricky because drainage becomes a problem. The rootstocks can go septic. One thing that may be true of mangroves is that they’re very resilient when it comes to brackish water and things along those lines, but they do need drainage in and out.

If water isn’t coming through like fresh water in one capacity or another, then they can get root rot, which you wouldn’t think would happen because “You’ve got deep roots.” It’s just not as simple as taking that hard-baked clay-ish earth and shoving a tree in there. You also need to work on the drainage and make sure the salt isn’t too prevalent, which can happen when you’ve had a lot of water sitting on an area and then it all evaporates. Now you have a lot of salt sitting in that top layer.

You have the Dead Sea. That’s correct.

A dry Dead Sea.

You get salt flats. Initially, we were doing it just to do it because that’s the mission of ForestPlanet. We’ve been learning a lot. The Friends of Usambara Society, we call them the hill people. They had to adjust to the different cultural/work ethics of the coastal people. Those tribes were sorting that all out. It’s hotter there. When you’re out there, and it’s in the rainy season. I was there in February, which is like their August, and it was the dry season.

They’re below the equator, and it was hot. It was miserable. Tides are not coming in that far. It’s like you’re walking in some of these areas, and it’s like crunch. I was very psyched to see that some of the trees that we planted with trenching that had the drainage, which you were talking about, were looking good, as they had been planted a year before. We had planted them in 2024, about 15,000 of them as a test in the trenches in a particular area. They got all planted. No one had visited there or gone out there because it was pretty far from town. It was tough to get through.

They ran out of money for people to go out and pay them to monitor the stuff. They were left to their own devices. We just handed over, “Here you go, nature.” It was in February, and I was almost in tears. I came back, and we were still talking like any 95% survival rates because we had set the ball rolling in the right way. We’re like, “Thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Corinna. We’ll take it from here.” That was awesome to see. Just a little bit of care and feeding because the tide comes in and out, in and out.

Sometimes it undermines the soil underneath the tree. The tree is alive, but it’s lying on its side. The roots are going in, and it’s flat on its side. It’s about 14 inches. The top of it is these bright green leaves. They’re like, “We’re good. We’re alive, but could you prop me up a little bit?” I’m like, “Yeah, sure.” We dig a little deep hole and prop it all up. They’re like, “Thanks. Bye. Cheers. See you next year.” I’m like, that was easy. Even with that, it was great to see.

What we did end up doing to make it all work was dig up the mountains. It was nurseries. That’s a little bit tricky because you do it a certain way in the mountains, and then we were doing it in a certain way. Those rock. On our website or our social media, you can see that the nurseries are under the mature trees, close to the shoreline. They’re pretty much guaranteed that during dry season, rainy season, neap tides, and spring tides, they get their drink of water.

They’re protected by the mature trees in a couple of ways that are quite moving. What we had started last year, and what I visited when I saw them in February of this year, 400,000 beautiful little 12-inch, 13-inch trees all lined up like croquettes. They were like, “We’re good. We’re here. We’re ready to get put into the field.” It was quite moving, I have to say. I was very impressed. We had the funding then to get them into the field because then you had to time it with the rainy season. In that part of the world, the rainy season starts in late March.

To get things flushed out, exactly what you say. It’s raining, it’s getting down, it’s getting rain from the sky, it’s getting that fresh water. The river levels go up, which means the tide levels go up. It’s like a 1-2 punch. It’s getting water from all directions, which is exactly what they need. When you’re doing it, you’re taking it from a nursery. The nursery, you’ve got a little tube that’s about 8 inches long and a diameter of about 2.5 inches, maybe 3. That’s full of soil in there. You’ve got to fix your soil. You’ve got sand, soil, and a little bit of manure.

The tree is growing in that tube. That’s its ecosystem. When you plant the tree, you plant it with its soil tube. You’ve got to cut away the plastic, and that’s another discussion about what to do with all that. I’m going to take you away from home, where I’m going to take you with your friends. I’m going to put you in a new home, but with your friends. By that time, you’ve got all kinds of microbes and bugs and everything crawling around in the soil. Every day when the tide comes in, it brings brackish water, but it brings a lot of nutrients with it. Dead fish, fish poop, whatever. There are all kinds of organic.

They produce nitrates. They need that too, NPK.

You got it. It’s all right there. When you outplant this time, when we outplanted the tree, we outplanted it with the soil it was born in. That started in late March when it was not there. Let me tell you something. That’s hard work because the top level of that hard pen is full of a lot of clay. When it gets wet, you can feel the asphalt, if you will, about an inch or two down, but the top two inches is heavy African mud. Got a lot of clay in it. When you walk through it, it sticks to your feet, and you’re walking around with leg weights.

I can picture it. The shoes are engulfed in clay.

I look down and I’m like, “Do I have snowshoes on? Am I getting pizzas down there? What the heck?” You cannot bring your car that close because of the mud. You have to walk maybe a half mile through that just to get to the spots where we’re planting the trees. This is what people have to do all day long, God bless them. They did it. When I was there in June, it was still the end of the rainy season, and there was still a lot of mud, and half of it was on my feet. It’s incredible, but they looked amazing. Again, a couple of spots, too saline, too hard, frustrating to see 10,000 or 20,000 dead trees, but unbelievably amazing to see 360,000 very live ones.

That’s great.

I was very happy about that.

The nursery is hosting something like as many as 300,000 trees that they’re growing as seedlings or saplings at a time, right?

Correct. You can define your nursery. We had two nurseries that were for this one particular project, but they were right there. They can get pretty dense, and you put them in beds that could be 1 meter by 6 meters, so you can walk between the rows and double-check on them. A lot of times, the tide will roll in, and some sticks will come in, and the seedlings are so small when they’re only 1, 2, 3, or 4 inches. A stick will damage them. Human beings have to walk around and pick up the sticks, and keep them free so they can see all that.

All of this is happening underneath the mature trees. You clear out space. Here, it is gorgeous because the leaves of mangrove trees are very small. If you put your thumb and your forefinger together like an A-okay, that’s about how big they are, which means that light can filter down. This is how it evolved. You get enough light down for photosynthesis to kickstart, and the babies are growing fine, but not too much so you don’t get too many bare spots and too much intensity like you were talking about, and too much evaporation, leaving too much of a salt residue. They’ve been around for a while, and it’s a perfect machine. The mature trees are protecting the babies, and that’s a very moving sight as well.

ForestPlanet’s Fundraising Campaigns

I want to talk about some of the things that you’ve done to engage the community and technology for impact. You’ve hosted everything from stadium fundraisers to online film screenings. What are some of your favorite campaigns, the sorts of things that you’ve done to raise funds to produce more effort?

My favorite ones are the ones that work. I love them all. We have in-person film screenings, and those are fun because you get to engage people. Anytime anybody asks questions, I feel honored and excited to talk about it. The virtual ones, when they work, are great. We’re working with DC United here a few times. Those are fun too. You’re talking to people, and you get to see a soccer game. There’s nothing wrong with that. There is a thing called Professional Ultimate Frisbee. You might not be aware of it, but it is a league and it’s been around.

That started in Santa Cruz. I’m here.

There you go. Our DC team is the DC Breeze, and they’ve got a big playoff game this Saturday. Go Breeze. I know some of the owners from a former life, and I went out and saw it, got chatting, and said, “We can plant the tree with every ticket.” What they did was they sneaked up the price of their ticket by $0.15, and no one noticed, and no one cared. They’re up to well over 10,000. They’ve been doing that since 2018.

Those are fun games, and I get to talk to people. As I say, you can have your cake and eat it too if you’re willing to work hard, work smart, and don’t get too greedy about the size of the cake. You can do all these things at once, but you’ve got to plan ahead. Speaking engagements are starting to pick up. I spoke at one of the Unitarian churches. They had a lay-led service a couple of weeks ago here in the DC area. That was an honor to get up and do a 12-minute mini TED Talk. I cannot do too many of those.

Have you done a TED Talk?

Now that I’ve got the video for it, I’m going to be applying to some of the TED folks. I want to say, “Listen, you’re doing a big TED with 15,000 people somewhere. Why don’t you plant a tree for each one, just like DC United did, or the Ultimate Frisbee guy and sneak up your ticket by $0.15, and no one will notice.” I’m happy to do my 12 or 13.3 minutes, whatever your segment sizes are. That’s a product that I was starting to sell and starting to push. The pandemic wiped out all events for a while, but now I’m coming back and going back to event organizers and trying to get them to pick up on that. I can go to the event and enjoy the event, but also generate funds to do what we do.

What I can say, too, is that a lot of times, you have these ideas that come together and converge. What happened for me, I have hosted this podcast now for four and a half years. One of my earliest guests was this woman who started a charity called Buy One, Give One, Masami Sato. She came up with this concept that you could have any action within a business that did just a little bit of good. Maybe it was donating $0.5 per email that your team sends or something like that.

You pick something that you do. Maybe with every invoice you process, you tack something on. For every action of a particular type, you might make a small donation to a particular charity. It was through thinking about that earlier episode on Buy One, Give One, and what you’re doing, understanding that the cost can be managed to be something relatively low, that I came up with this idea of saying, “What if I were to plant a tree for every new follower this year?”

I feel like that has been a very inspiring thing for me. I’ve had members of the community who wanted to make sure that they had those four trees planted in their name. Perhaps I’ve spent $0.60 for that one follower, and I feel good about it. They feel good about it. Perhaps they spread the word, too, so that the impact can become greater and greater with time. I think if more businesses were to look at their charitable contributions in this way, they could inspire greater engagement on the part of their follower base and their consumers.

I’m just in the media here, trying to get the word out about the guests that I have on the show and the sorts of social and sustainable impact issues that we cover on this particular podcast. If more businesses would do this, and would take that impetus and say, “Beyond taking my annual contribution, giving it to the same charity every year, what if I were to inspire my employee base and build a plan like this that could be engaged with something that might be relatively low cost, but for each action, you have something come through?” Maybe that’s a ticket sale. Maybe that’s sending an email or an invoice, but it could be anything relevant to the type of work that you do every day.

With this podcast, I’m making a quarterly contribution that reflects those numbers, and I’m very transparent with you. I share those numbers. It’s a no-brainer to me. Why don’t more businesses engage this way? Why don’t they then also share that story with their audience, so their audience can be compelled with a little bit of that feel-good within their whole vitality and their personhood? Anyway, that’s my pulpit for the day, I think.

You’re a voice to all their ears. This is how I spend my day. It’s a challenge. I have to demonstrate that I know what I’m doing, that the trees get planted, and we’re not just taking their money. That’s fine. We’re still new. We’re picking up speed, and we’re picking up case studies, we’re picking up stories. We were picking up more corporate partners to the point where we have a spirit company, they have a gin, and they have a vodka, and they add botanicals to it, and they plant a tree with every bottle. That’s one. I signed up for a company based in Germany, and they sell condoms online.

It’s what it is. Everything has a footprint. It doesn’t matter what it is. There’s a company that I signed up for that’s based in Cleveland, of all places, and they make yard signs. How many yard signs are out there all over this country, especially during election year, especially here in the DC area, that’s for sure. The vast majority of them end up in a landfill. They work their backroom economics such that they bake it in. One of the things, and certainly nowadays with the current political environment, I do think some of these companies are a little bit nervous about looking too woke, which is the dumbest term I’ve ever heard because no one can define it.

Carbon markets, not governments, could be a real catalyst in reforestation.

It’s either good or it’s bad, and it depends on who you’re talking to.

You even ask people who don’t like it, “What does it mean?” They just stand there, and they look at you blankly. One of the things that we’re starting to see is what they call green hushing, where companies are supporting being green, and they’re letting people know about it internally. It’s almost like HR. The people who work there enjoy it. They feel good about their job. They feel good about what they do every day, and they might go in and they say, ”I have a boring, repetitive, not hugely inspiring job, but at least my company is planting a million trees a year. I’m part of that.”

It’s an HR thing as much as anything else. The company turns around and does not let its market space know. They do not use it as a market differentiation. That’s their choice. The trees get planted and/or maybe they let it slip here and there, but they keep it as their voice, so to speak. They don’t make a big noise out of it. They just do it.

Tell me you like Oprah without telling me like Oprah.

It’s all the different businesses. Some businesses like the sign hero guy. He was right there, front and center, when we planted trees. We are targeting that particular website to more sustainability candidates, people who give a fig about the environment. We know what color those are. I’m going to target it out and say, “You’re to buy yard signs if the price is the same and the deliverability is the same. Why don’t you plant trees? Why not? Why wouldn’t you do this?” Those are the conversations that you have to have.

Even then, people have their vendors that they want to work with and are familiar with. It’s tried and true. This is one of those things. If it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it. Other people are a little more progressive and will take a risk. We don’t need a lot. In terms of brand differentiation and making a statement, nowadays, you’re only appealing to a small fraction of the audience. In businesses, at least B2C, they want to go for the great metal. They don’t want to have their markets segmented by politics. Everybody needs a condom. I don’t care how you vote. Everybody needs a yard sign. I don’t care how you vote. That’s their business, and that’s fine. They focus on all that.

What I try to do is find some of the brands that do want to do, just a little bit of good, and want to have a good story, but do so in the right way. To your point, it’s easy to slip it. You do want to plant a tree with that, and you want fries with that. You can slip it in. That’s where my advertising and marketing experience comes in. Those are the conversations that I love having with each different brand, and they have their own bespoke little approach to it, just like you did. That’s fun.

Environmentalism Should Never Be Political

I didn’t intend to talk about politics, but you’ve introduced the topic, and I feel the need to put a framework around this because environmentalism should not be a political issue. Caring about planting more trees to preserve coastlines with rising seas and warming temperatures, trees help to monitor temperatures to bring them down. They are preserving those coastlines so that homes and communities aren’t thwarted by constant erosion.

There are a lot of great things that come from this that truly are not partisan. This is not partisan politics. I think that this whole idea that something environmental is somehow woke and therefore bad from either side of the aisle is ridiculous. We need to dismiss those arguments right out of the gate, because people tend to agree that planting trees is a good thing. People tend to agree that having cleaner air to breathe is a good thing.

I agree with you, but living here in DC, I hate to say that somehow I get invited to some conferences and they’re just rabid. I don’t know what it is. What I do try to say to the brands that I work with is that “Innate in human psychology is a positive psychological, emotional, and physiological response to just looking at a tree. It’s unavoidable.”

It’s baked in.

It’s baked into our DNA. We like trees. I say, “Just talk about trees.” You can talk about the benefits of the trees and the roots and the soil and the water, and whatever. What I do recommend if you want to stay away from all this stuff is don’t talk about carbon. Don’t talk about climate change. Just don’t talk about it. It’s a juxtaposition. People will support us because of climate change. We’re going to give you money to get a bunch of these trees planted, these mangrove trees. That’s not why the trees are being planted.

The local people in Pangani need a livelihood. They need fish. They need their shorelines not to erode. They cannot think about global stuff. Frankly, 300,000, 400,000 here and there. It’s good, it’s great, it helps. It’s not going to cure climate change. It is going to help the local economy in lots of ways that we discussed. That’s fine. The donor has one intention, and the recipient has another. Guess what? Who cares? The tree got planted.

You can have your cake and eat it too. If you are willing to work hard and smart, do not get too greedy about the size of the cake.

Getting Into Carbon Markets

The tree got planted. If we have thousands of projects like this happening around the globe, then even if they are thinking and acting locally, the impacts are global. That’s just a reality. I love what you’re doing. I want to understand what’s next for you because you’ve crossed a major hurdle and have already planted over two million trees. What’s next? Are there any new regions or project types that you’re exploring in 2025?

I’m glad you asked because I got some big news here. The next level is leveraging the mangroves that we’ve been planting, which were paid for. Again, 400,000. A lot of people were asking me a year or so ago, “What about carbon markets?” I was like, “These are dodgy things. I’m not so sure about them.” They said, “If you’re already planting the trees, you could be leaving money on the table.” I’m like, “I got to do some due diligence here and check my gut reaction and look into it.”

Long story short, I think carbon markets can help if they’re done right. I’m optimistic that they can help. What we found out right away was that the 400,000 we planted is too small to justify all the overhead and the paperwork, and this and that, and turn that effort into some fungible credit, if you will. People were saying, “What else you got that’s bigger?” I was like, “Hold that thought.”

When I was in Pangani in June 2024, tinkering with the ones that we already were planting, we identified enough spots, additional degraded areas that amounted to 2,000 hectares, or roughly where 5 million trees could go. That is called the Kukua Project. That’s Swahili. It means a plant. I picked the word because it has two Ks in it, like Kodak. It’s easy to remember. There are developers now who want to work with us.

We’re starting to have some pretty big meetings where investors will upfront fund the planting of millions and millions of trees, with the vast majority of the dollars going to the local people doing all the hard work that I was talking about, slogging around the mud and building the nursery. Waiting three years and then registering those projects with the various verification organizations. That can be paid out, that they would say, “This is legit activity, and this is a legit carbon credit.” It’s over the course of the lifetime of the tree, which could be 25 or 30 years, depending on how you negotiate it.

Everybody wins in that regard. The investor gets their money back. What’s happening is, with the carbon markets, you can get carbon credits for doing lots of different types of activities. Again, I am no expert on this, so check me in on all this stuff, but I’m not stupid. I’ve been paying attention. The ones that are called blue carbon or the mangrove credits are holding their value in the fair market environments where companies that do want to offset their business activities, that want to go net zero, fine, will pay the money, and a credit is a ton of CO2, etc. It’s almost like a share in the New York stock exchange, if you will.

The bottom line is that all the work we’ve done to date has turned out to be our audition tape, if you will. We can go to these carbon market developer folks and say, “We cut our teeth on somebody else’s money. We made mistakes on somebody else’s money. We learned how to do this. Here’s our audition tape.” People take us seriously because it’s a mixed bag. Mangroves are tricky. They’re tricky to work with. You have to time things with the seasons and the tides, and the moons.

You now know what you’re doing. You’ve cut your teeth on it, as you’ve said.

That’s why they’re talking to us. They’re like, “Do you have a team that knows what you’re doing?” “Yes. Here’s our tape. Check it out.” “Do you have spots where you can plant them?” “Yes.” “Do you have permission to plant them?” “Yes.” “Are they registered with the government because every country is going to be different?” In Tanzania, you have to get these registered with the government, to which I say, “Yes, they will be registered in another week or so.” I’m like, “This is what I’ve got. I am looking for a partner who will help find the funding to get 5 million trees planted, and crank things up.” They’re like, “We could find money to get 50 million trees planted.” I’m like, “Hold that thought because 5 million is 10x growth over what we’ve already done.”

Let’s start there.

Yes, ma’am. We’ll come back, and there’s a lot more to do. I went into it with a lot of healthy skepticism, and I still have a lot of healthy skepticism. Sitting here and now, I’m starting to be a little bit more optimistic that carbon markets, not governments, could be a real catalyst. I’ll take that back. Some of the people demanding carbon credits are governments, like the governments of Sweden or Finland. They balance things out.

Norway is making trillions of dollars off petrochemicals, hardly any of which they’re using. They recognize that they’re contributing to climate change. How can we balance that out a little bit, and they’re making an honest effort to tidy up after their party, so to speak? That’s how I look at it. That could truly crank things up a quarter of a magnitude or two almost overnight. I’m very excited about that potential, but I’m trying to stay calm.

Big multinational companies are investing in these projects. I saw examples from Nestle as one key example, where they’re trying to offset the emissions of cows that they use in all their dairy products. They’ve invested $7 million in an Algae Tech company and continue to do other work in that arena. If the big multinational companies are already looking to get to net zero, then this is absolutely going to remain mainstream, whether or not the US requires this of its constituent companies.

It’s voluntary to date, but I believe that if you are publicly traded and you have made claims saying we are trying to get to net zero, the SEC is like, “Thou shalt get to net zero.” You’ve got to do it.

It’s on your balance sheet, essentially. It’s in your annual reports. It’s there.

It affected your share price. Now, you have to step up and deliver it. I’m to stay optimistic until this all blows up in my face, which could happen any minute, but so far, so good. As I say, three years, $100,000, five trips to Tanzania. One trip to the ER once I got back, and then three face plants in the mud, where it’s like so sticky, and that’s what you just face plant and they got to dig you out, and you’re covered with mud. That’s the real deal. That’s what it takes to get the credit, to sit at the table with these people.

You needed to share those pictures.

I should have, but the thing is that the camera was covered in mud, too. I don’t mind it. It’s fun. It was a great trip.

Get In Touch With Hank

As we prep to close here, I want to ask you a couple of questions. One, if you could leave our audience with one simple call to action, what would it be? Two, where can people go to get involved, whether that’s donating, sponsoring a project, or partnering like we have?

ForestPlanet.org and join our mailing list. That’s the second question. Your first question, the one thing to do, is to open my emails. Get the emails, opt in, and open them up because in every email, there are things that you can do. There are brands that we work with. There are lovely podcasts that we work with. There are sign companies. There are vodka companies. There are events that we’re doing both virtually and in real life. Number one is to open my email, and number two is to join the email in the first place. Nice and simple.

That’s great. Go to ForestPlanet.org, join your newsletter and open it, and give it a read. I could say the same about our Care More Be Better emails. If there’s a question that I didn’t ask that you wish perhaps that I had, you can go ahead and ask and answer it. If not, a closing thought?

Thank you very much. It was a great conversation, per usual. I enjoyed being on your show. I enjoyed listening to your guests. We’re very grateful for your support. We hope that other people will follow your example. I appreciate that. Thank you for having us once again.

Thank you so much for joining me.

—

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

To support ForestPlanet and help reforest coastal ecosystems, you can do two things. First, follow this podcast on the platforms I mentioned, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, also on Spotify, and our newsletter at CareMoreBeBetter.com. I’ll plant four trees for you if you do all those things. Secondly, go to ForestPlanet.org, sign up for that newsletter, and consider donating $10. $10 would be the equivalent of planting something like 66 trees.

This helps to restore that biodiversity. If you did all of that, you would have planted 70 trees. Let’s push this effort forward, give Hank a little extra juice to keep this project flowing. Don’t forget, every new subscriber, we’re doing this. We’ve planted almost 25,000 trees so far this year, and I’m keeping this going as much as I can for 2025. With your help, we’ll grow that number even more. Thank you, all of you, for being a part of this. Together, we are truly building a greener and more resilient future. Make it a great day.

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Author

Corinna Bellizzi

Corinna is a natural products industry executive who has earned a reputation for leading the development and growth of responsible brands (e.g. Nordic Naturals, iwi, NutriGold). In her professional life, she champions social benefit programs to enhance company impact while preserving and protecting our home planet. She’s presently working tirelessly on the development of a new pre-market that seeks to achieve a carbon-negative impact. In January 2021 she launched her show, Care More, Be Better: A Social Impact + Sustainability Podcast to amplify the efforts of inspired individuals and conscious companies. Through Care More Be Better, she shares their stories in an effort to show us all that one person with one idea can have a big impact. As part of her lifelong education journey, she earned her MBA from Santa Clara University, graduating at the top of her class with a triple focus in Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Marketing in June 2021.

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