This Thanksgiving season I am grateful for people who have a special love for nature, including trees.
One of those people was the famous singer, songwriter John Denver. He wrote many well-loved songs such as “Rocky Mountain High” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He was such a good song writer that the state of Colorado named him Colorado’s poet laureate for 1974.
In 1992, John Denver founded the environmental group, Plant-It 2000, that plants trees worldwide. The group was later renamed Plant-It 2020. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, private foundation. It has both a forest tree-planting program and a city tree-planting program. Some of its projects have involved planting trees in several foreign countries that become wind breakers to help keep farmland from turning into desert.
It also has planted trees among crops in some African and Latin American countries to increase crop production and to reduce problems with starvation.
It even has a cooking stove program that provides fuel-efficient cooking stoves that use much less wood as fuel and that burn more cleanly. Some of the countries that have benefited from those stoves are in Central America and in Haiti.
Plant-It 2020 also has education programs in schools that provides training in leadership and in environmental and energy education. You can learn more about it at https://ideasforus.org/.
To learn more about Plant-It 2020, go to https://plantit2020.org. It is a pretty amazing organization.
I am thankful that many people, including John Denver, have helped to make Plant-It 2020 such a success. I also am thankful for other organizations that promote the planting and nurturing of trees. To learn more about them, use a phrase such as “organizations that promote trees” to search for them online.
