You may have noticed the advertising for 37Signals products, Basecamp, Highrise and Backpack on the right hand side of the site, also at the bottom of this post.

We use these products here at CTF, because we are all volunteers and we don’t often get together in one place, the 37Signals tools help us be productive by listing out what needs to be done by who and by when. Buy their products through our website and donate at the same time!

So, as we love these products so much, we thought we would join their affiliate program to promote and resell their products. If you buy their product by clicking one of our ads, CTF will receive a bounty for getting you to sign up! So you can donate to saving the rainforest at the same time as signing up to use these great products.

We wouldn’t promote anything we dont use ourselves, we are serious fans here.

So if you want productivity products for school projects, or if you need them to run your projects across uni, college or your small business, buy them through us and donate at the same time!

If you could repost or re-tweet this offer, it would really help us out.

Thanks for your support guys

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I am writing to ask our key supporters for urgent assistance to help preserve a critical area of rainforest in Costa Rica.

Without intervention, the rapid decline in local species such as the Bellbird will continue.

The Bellbird Biological Corridor

We would like to assist our partner organisation, the Monteverde Conservation League (MCL), with an immediate opportunity to acquire an ecologically critical area of land in the Monteverde region.

MCL already owns and manages the First International Children’s Rainforest, or Bosque Eterno de los Ninos (BEN). This is Costa Rica’s largest private reserve of 22,500 hectares, mostly purchased with funds from the International Children’s Rainforest Charity network over 20 years.

This new addition would be a key part of a larger project to preserve a forested area, to be known as the Bellbird Biological Corridor, which will link the Children’s Eternal Forest? across the Continental Divide to the Gulf of Nicoya on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

Why your support is important

This area is vital for the survival of many spectacular tropical birds, animals and insects that need to migrate annually from the rainforest on top of the Continental Divide to the food sources available at lower elevations.

Without these forests further down they simply starve. Yet Monteverde’s Pacific slope, with little of its unique forest type represented elsewhere in Costa Rica, is under significant pressure from development for tourism and commercial purposes. Already, some of the Corridor will need significant regeneration.

Many species are under threat, but the most spectacular of these are the Three-Wattled Bellbird, the Resplendent Quetzal and the Tapir.

Populations of the two bird species are declining rapidly. The forest corridor would provide them with an area rich in wild avocado trees, the fruit of which is their principal food source. In return, they spread the avocado seeds, essential for forest regeneration.

An investment for the future

The Bellbird Biological Corridor is a significant project that will require the purchase of many small areas of land to complete the 10,000 hectare territory to be protected.

A number have already been acquired and MCL now has the opportunity to add another 1,300 hectares in 18 sections.

To do so, MCL needs funds immediately. Any donations you make will go directly towards the purchase fund.

Please consider helping us in this endeavour, which will substantially progress the creation and protection of the Bellbird Corridor and the fragile life within – it needs and deserves our support.

Yours sincerely,

Robin Jolliffe (Chairperson)

Find out more about The Monteverde Conservation League in this short movie.

So you may wonder how you can possibly do a project that can raise money to help save the rainforests of the world. You might be sat at school thinking, there must be something I could do? Some way we could help?

Well you are right, there are loads of ways to help the rainforest and THIS is one of them.

There is a lady called Sue Memhard (you can find out about her from her website). Sue has written a book about the rainforest, it’s called Dream The Forest Wild. The idea is, we can all download the book for nothing! And then once we have it in our grasp, we can then illustrate the book ourselves, in any way we wish.

Once you have done the illustrations, you can display your book in your school or community, and send your illustrations to the site, where they will post them for all to see! Here is an example.

To raise money for the Children’s Eternal Rainforest you can then have a book sale, a Dream The Forest Wild performance, a bake sale, etc.

Here is some info from the guys at Sues website…

A NEW CHILDREN’S STORY and a BOOK PROJECT to help the Children’s Eternal Rainforest
DREAM THE FOREST WILD – How Children Saved a Rainforest
by Sue Memhard with Jim Crisp (the forest’s founding Director)

This joyful, inspiring story for all ages of how the Children’s Eternal Rainforest was created is co-authored by the MCL Director who gave the forest its name.
The children’s Dream of 20 years ago to save a rainforest is still alive. Now, you can help keep the forest wild and safe for the next 20 years, and at the same time help your school.
READ THE STORY AND BE PART OF THE KIDS’ BOOK PROJECT to keep the dream alive

The Greenbird project, a project initiated to attempt to break the land speed record for a wind powered vehicle, has come to an end. Uncharacteristic rainfall in the Australian desert has thwarted the attempt. This uncharacteristic rainfall could well be as a result of the damage being caused by the continual removal of our rainforests and the increasing levels of carbon we pump into the atmosphere.

…July saw twice its monthly average fall in 2 days at the end of the month, then August saw its monthly average quota fall over the last 12 hours – Richard Jenkins

All of this rain in stark contrast to a month or so back when Australia were reporting the biggest drought in living memory!

Check out more at Dales site Zero Carbonista on the attempt or directly at te Greenbird website (PS its a lovely looking website!)

The ‘blog’ plan (insofar as I have a plan) is not to talk exclusively about CTF UK and its fund-raising projects and conservation partners in the tropics – although there will be plenty of that. I shall try and bring news of other rainforest conservation initiatives from around the World, making links where I can with my own rainforest experiences to provide a flavour of what it’s like to be there – in the forest.

Sometimes, the focus will be on particular rainforest species, wherever possible with first hand accounts of actually seeing them.  And Rob Llewellyn is going to put life and colour into the whole thing from the huge picture library at his disposal ( I’m going to try and find one of me looking youthful in a rainforest setting many years ago). ‘Every picture tells a story’ my old Granny used to say, mostly when she was trying to get up from her chair. Better than words can ever do, I might add.

And throughout all this, the blog wants reactions and input from you.

What you think of particular conservation plans – or indeed of rainforest conservation in general – worthwhile or waste of time.

Whether you’re actually involved – as a professional or a volunteer – in any rainforest protection schemes.

Or just your own rainforest experiences on your travels to the tropics.

So lets start as we mean to go on. Off at a tangent! By welcoming HRH The Prince of Wales to the rainforest protection community!

As well as talking to little plants in his conservatory (only affectionate banter, you understand, Sir) HRH is now embracing the salvation of big plants in the rainforest. And that makes him the most well-known World figure to wholeheartedly back the critical need to preserve our rainforests.

On 15th July 2008, HRH launched the website for his Rainforest Project

The Project has a very clear objective, somewhat different from the traditional rainforest charities like CTF UK. And that is ‘to find innovative ways of paying the countries that are the custodians of the tropical rainforests an appropriate price for the eco-system services they provide and so out-compete the drivers of deforestation’. Rog interjects – these include the logging companies, developers, politicians and bureaucrats and the desperately poor squatters who follow the logging and development roads, clearing the forest and planting their meagre subsistence crops.

‘Put simply, our aim is to make the rainforests worth more alive than dead’ says the Prince’s Project. They’ve got it right, of course. As my old Granny used to say, ‘it all boils down to money, Roger!’). Finding more of it for the owners of the rainforest, private or public, than they get from the first logging crop and the subsequent sale or rent of the land for cash crops like palm oil, beef and soya to feed the ‘developed’ world.

‘It is worth remembering’ says the Project ‘that it has become accepted throughout the developed world that people pay for utilities such as gas, water and electricity. The rainforests are probably our greatest natural utility, providing huge and irreplaceable benefits. It is time we started to pay for them too.’

The problem is that most of these ‘great natural utilities’ are intangible (to most of us at the moment) or theoretical. Huge supplies of water is an obvious rainforest ‘product’ but while we are used to paying for our water and electricity from the utilities who harvest it – they themselves, mostly, don’t actually pay for it. And we take for granted the air we breath with its delicate balance of gases – one of which we need about every 5 seconds (or thirty if you really try and hold you breath, which I’ve just done!) and the beneficent climates  which make like comfortable for us, both of which owe much to the stabilising influence of the rainforest. At some time in the future, more forest plants may provide many more cures for man’s many ailments – and so on and so on.

So how is the Prince’s Project going to achieve its objectives. There is no real flesh on the bones at the moment but HRH says ‘I have set up my Rainforests Project with the support of some of the World’s biggest businesses and leading experts to work with countries around the World including the Coalition for Rainforest Nations.’  There is, interestingly, no mention of the involvement in the Project of National Governments in the developed world as yet.

When you start a rainforest blog by the way, you start to dig around and broaden the horizons of your knowledge. So, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations was completely new to me – and I shall come back to them in future blogs. If anybody knows anything about them now, blog in babies!

Anyway, having gone off at a tangent, I shall, in the next blog, come right back to CTF UK and its sister charities around the World – and more particularly to the First Children’s Rainforest in Monteverde, Costa Rica – which between us we have helped to conserve.

Because the Monteverde Conservation League, which owns and manages the First Children’s rainforest, already has a project, up and running, which pretty closely matches the Prince’s objectives. Whilst our approach to rainforest preservation – to purchase virgin forest for indigenous conservation organisations to own and manage – is quite different to the Prince’s Project, in the Monteverde Cloud Forest you have a clear example of both approaches.

So in the next blog, I will explain how the Esperanza Watershed Project works – and try and dig out some other working models from around the World as well..

In the meantime, we welcome your comments and ideas and hard information – particularly if you are involved in HRH’s project.

Roge

There is an interesting article in the environmental section of the FT regarding paying countries to keep the rainforest they have, rather than selling out to logging firms. It does seem like a very viable option. The president of Guyana has been asking the UK government to pay for his rainforests as a way to off set the carbon that our country pollutes the rest of the world with.

Preserving the rainforests is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to cut emissions.. Stanley Fink, former CEO of the hedge fund Man Group

I think we would all tend to agree. It largely doesn’t matter where the money comes from, so long as it isn’t procured or generated through the direct degradation of the rainforest itself. I think varying people have varying views on this. Some would view this as ‘tainted money’ others would say ‘the only problem with tainted money is their taint enough of it!’

‘Send lawyers, guns and money’ or so the 1978 Warren Zevon lyrics go. I don’t think we need lawyers or guns, it’s just the money we need. Dan Janzen talked on this blog about exactly this point. There is no silver bullet to rainforest conservation. The fact is, if conservationists don’t purchase the land then the land owners will sell to the loggers to make their investment pay.

Prince Charles seems to agree as well.

Can big business buy the rainforests? And indeed, why should they?

Here at Children’s Tropical Forest we’ve taken a step to making our website operation carbon neutral by teaming up with NS Design for the supply of our web hosting.

NS Design use data centres owned by Coreix the first UK data centre to become carbon neutral.

On March 26th, 2007 Coreix became the first UK based managed hosting services company to take the crucial step to make their operations more environmentally friendly. On behalf of all their clients Coreix is voluntarily offsetting all the CO2 emissions caused by its data centre and are the first UK data centre to do so. Coreix contributions have been used to help purchase the Rodas property, a 45 hectare extension to the Buenaventura Reserve managed by Fundación Jocotoco in the foothills of the Andes in south-western Ecuador.

But it isn’t just through the use of Coreix data centres that NSDesign are making their products greener, they also do work in the UK with Tree Appeal, a tree planting scheme. As NS Design explain…

As an ethical business we care about the environment, and recently became one of the few web service companies to become carbon neutral, by completely offsetting our carbon footprint.

Our partnership with Tree Appeal allows us to do even more – by pledging to plant a native broad leaf tree for every customer who purchases our new “Green Web Hosting Plan”. They’ll also get an official certificate (digital of course!) thanking them for their contribution, as well as links to specific environmental websites and carbon calculators.

Data centres have a huge environmental impact due to the massive amount of electricity they consume to power the servers and the climate control needed to keep everything cool.

As this article from Tech Republic illustrates..

Here’s one of the interesting things about all of these new data centers that are going up in rural areas — their energy consumption. For example, Microsoft’s new data center will consume 48 megawatts of power, or enough to power about 40,000 homes. According the US Census Bureau, for 2005 all of Grant County, Washington (which includes Quincy) contained only 30,605 housing units. That means that Microsoft’s new data center will consume about 30% more energy than all of the people in the entire county combined.

We can all do our bit and choosing our suppliers based on their environmental credentials is a good place to start.

For more information on carbon reduction, check out Zero Carbonista as well.

If you’re the person responsible for writing Roge’s Rainforest Blog, perhaps the first thing you ought to do is establish your rainforest conservation credentials. So, if you’ll bear with me for a couple of paragraphs or so, I’ll try and do just that.

Full name: Roger Littlewood. Principal activities for Children’s Tropical Forests UK – Trustee since 1995-ish and Editor and Author of CTF News since its first appearance in the Spring of 1996.

Charity begins at home, so my old Granny told me, and I cut my nature conservation teeth in Warwickshire in the late 1970’s. First, as Voluntary Warden for a little succession of Ancient Woodland Reserves purchased by Warwickshire Wildlife Trust; and then, together with the Trust and Warwick District Council, helping to establish a network of Local Nature Reserves in the County.

But at some time in the 1980’s, I decided I wanted to add a global dimension (very grand!) to my voluntary conservation work. So I started raising money at little charity do’s and sponsored thingies, first for another British rainforest charity, the World Land Trust – and then for Tina Jolliffe, who founded Children’s Tropical Forests UK in the late 1980’s after falling in love with rainforests following a trip with her husband Robin (now the Chairman of CTF UK) to Costa Rica.

After Tina’s sad and untimely death in the mid-1990’s, I contacted Robin, offering more help to CTF. I became a Trustee and at my first Trustees meeting in 1995-ish, offered to write and produce a fund-raising Newsletter, which I have done ever since.

Oh! And since 1987, I’ve spent about two years of my life, tramping round the World’s rainforests trying to see birds and animals which mostly didn’t want to be seen.

Now, a new young generation of rainforest enthusiasts is giving a fresh impetus to CTF UK led by Rob Jolliffe (Tina and Robin’s son) and Rob Llewellyn, my new blog boss. About six weeks ago, Rob (the Jolliffe one) rang me up and asked me if I would write a regular ‘blog’ for CTF’s brand new website. After a ten minute chat, I finally plucked up the courage to ask him what a ‘blog’ really was, and still in a slight fog of incomprehension, agreed to do it. So, at the age of sixty-six (clickety-click – appropriate, I suppose, for a born for the first time geek) here I go.

At CTF everyone involved works on a pro bono basis, not a single penny of donations is spent on administration overhead, everything goes to land purchase or other projects. It’s the same with many of the projects we raise money for, such as the GDFCF.

But is it for everyone? What makes someone or an organisation want to do pro bono work? Is it out of a sense of duty, or just a marketing gimick? Is it a sense of pride or a sense of shame that drives a person to leverage their professional skills for the common good?

We understand the success of our company requires the support of the communities and organisations in which we are members. As a successful marketing communications agency, Frameworks believes a great way to thank these communities is by sharing our wealth of experience and knowledge in the form of charitable Pro Bono work. {Frameworks Web Design Agency}

Well that’s how Frameworks, a web design agency, see it as an organisation and they have done some lovely work for the Rights and Humanity website.

But as an individual I am personally driven by many things. I enjoy web design, but I am neither trained nor have a talent for it, but I enjoy it. Hence my involvement in the redesign of this website. My inner geek also drives me to want to be involved with the site. My professional skills allow me to develop website strategy and execute on it, but it gives me a great sense of achievement.

The rainforest cause for me is something I feel very strongly in. To do nothing is simply not an option. It is so far removed from our daily lives in the UK and Europe that raising the profile here is vital to get people donating in any way they can. We are reliant on a resource thousands of miles away, a resource that we consume in a variety of ways either directly or indirectly. I feel compelled to do something to save it both at a local level here at home with recycling, energy efficiency and the rest of the good stuff we can all do, but to also act directly to help IN the rainforest in some way. This allows that.

I’ll be asking the other guys at CTF and some of our project owners to see what motivates them and of course, we’d love to hear your views.

If you can help with some time and energy then we’d love to hear from you.

We asked Dan Janzen, President of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, how they identify the people who currently own the rainforest that they purchase for conservation. See what he has to say.

The land purchases (more than 300 in the history of the formation of ACG, and see the GDFCF site for the specific example of Rincon Rainforest) are extremely varied in their nature and ownerships. The owners range from original frontier colonists to middle-class absentee landlords to wealthy corporations to foreign investors, and about every imaginable combination and in-between. They all have one trait – they are happy to sell their land for something approximating market value in order to buy something ‘better’ – land, store, delivery truck, investment bonds, vacation in Europe, relative support, and about everything else you can think of. This move “up” is their personal evaluation of their situation.

Another variable that has been important has been the occasional case, usually with long-time resident families, of “I am happy to sell it for inclusion in a national park” (with the silent implication of I would not sell it to a developer or THAT neighbor).

The actual process of land purchase is sociologically complex, but boils down to what any neighbor does if he wants to buy the neighbors farm. You talk, think, discuss, offer, counteroffer, etc. for weeks to months to years, and in the end, it is commonplace for the fund transfer to be in portions (because ACG and GDFCF does not have enough donor funds to buy the entire property outright) and to allow 6 months to a year for removal of livestock resident on parts of the property.

Almost always we purchase an entire property, because the person has long since moved off the land and simply wishes to cash in and use the funds elsewhere. All properties purchased are surveyed (for area and location), titled, and registered in the national land register, and owned by the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (a US and Costa Rican registered charity) until passed as a “finished” ACG Sector to the government (in the meantime they are managed jointly by GDFCF and ACG).

As for what appear to be high land prices, one has to remember that Costa Rica, for all its low financial resources, very much approximates a developed country in terms of goods, services, health, education, government stability, and land ownership. Ask yourself what a hectare of old growth forest on private land a two hour drive from an international airport in UK or California would cost, and then the Sector A land prices are bargain basement (and climbing yet more rapidly as agro-industry becomes the major competitor and yet another road is paved).

But with this greater cost also comes enormously greater social stability for the purchase and its permanent incorporation into national park status. In those countries where tropical forest can still be purchased for a quarter to half the cost of Sector A lands, the management and stress costs, both in dollars and sweat equity, will have to yet be paid over the years to come. In Costa Rica they have already been paid.

So how do people come to own large tracts of rainforest?

If the owner is international, they bought it from a Costa Rican, almost invariably. The Costa Rican who owns it today bought it from someone else, and all the land around here (Rincon Forest) is owned by a historical chain containing 5-10 owners back to colonial times. ACG contains the second oldest European ranch in Costa Rica, established about 1580. Think on that date. There have been 40+ owners for Santa Rosa since then. The specific Sector A area was initially a few huge land holdings obtained by colonists in the 1800’s and early 1900’s as part of government programs for rural development, and these have gradually been fractured and sold off in parcels as they were also (often) logged or otherwise converted to agroscape, where they are now. The indigenous holdings here vaporized with the first several hundred years of European occupation.