In the last 20 some years that I have been aware of my existence on this planet, I've witnessed quite a few startling changes taking shape around me. The areas where, as a teenager I would ride my horses for hours & hours without ever seeing a house or fence, are now subdivided and cross fenced and littered with cars & trailers and houses.
I spent some of my formative years growing up along the banks of the Columbia river, several miles south of the Canadian border, where one of the worlds largest lead smelters dumped its waste materials straight into the Columbia river. With no environmental restrictions in place in Canada to prevent this, all the heavy metals and toxic waste flowed straight across the border into the United States, dangerously polluting the water.
I remember when the signs went up along the river banks warning against eating the fish and swimming in the water.

My Dad was a logger when we were kids. He enjoyed working out in the woods, spending his days surrounded by the smell of pine trees & fresh sawdust. He loved the woods as much as anyone and appreciated them for everything that they were.
In the spring he would bring us home buckets full of wild mushrooms and stories of the wild animal encounters he had had while working.
Sometimes he would take us up to the logging sites and let us see what it was all about. I remember him showing us entire mountainsides of old growth forest that had been clear cut, and explaining to us the damaging effects that clear cutting had on the environment.
Even with his awareness of this however, the simple fact of the matter was that we lived in a rural area where work was hard to get and logging was what was available.

Last summer I flew over Oregon and was appalled to see the vast amounts of huge clear cuts all over the once heavily timbered mountains. Oregon has always been one of the largest timber producing states in the country. The impact this has had on those once beautiful, timber dense mountains is devastating.
In the eastern states the old hardwood forests are being cut down for lumber at an alarming rate and replanted with pine trees, which grow much quicker, but don't have the value of the hardwood lumber.

Our consumption of natural resources in this country alone is shocking. With all the pressure we are putting on our planet to produce enough to sustain us and to heal all the damage we are doing to it, the time is long past due for people to start thinking about what they can do to ease some of the load we are requiring it to bear for us.
It all seems overwhelming to most of us, but it doesn't have to be. If even some of us start to do small things and make small changes in our lives, it begins to add up. Most people seem to want to do what they can, but don't know where to start.
That's where the Paulownia tree comes in. It takes very little effort to plant a tree, and each one planted can do more to balance out our negative impact on the environment and make a step towards healing some of the damage that has already been done.
With it's astounding ability to suck up carbon and produce much larger amounts of oxygen than just about any other tree, besides growing approximately four times faster than even the fast growing pine tree, making it a key element in the battle to save our forests. Paulownia trees produce a high quality lumber that is strong and light.

View more about Paulownias and the environment here: Paulownias & the environment

By taking the simple step of planting a Paulownia tree, you are making an important decision to do something good for the environment, and small as it may seem, you are taking action to change the world and make it a better place.

Purchase Paulownia trees here

Here's a great article about Paulownia trees:
Paulownia: An Agroforestry Gem