Our Green Strategy: 10 Years And Beyond

Most of us learned about photosynthesis in grade school. You water plants and they grow, forming carbon chains that amount to grass, wood, corn -- you name it. But as Jan Baptist van Helmont learned in his experiment in 1648, the mass that's grown extracts virtually nothing from soil. In his experiment, he grew 169 pounds of tree mass and found that only 2 ounces of soil had been used in the process. The only other thing he added was water, so where'd all the carbon come from? It came from the plant's extraction of carbon dioxide from the air.

The energy needed for the photosynthesis reaction comes from sunlight, and the resultant reaction produces the plant's solid material and some oxygen. We, and every other animal on the planet, use the oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. CO₂ is also released when carbon fuels are burned. We produce what plants need, plants make what we need -- everybody wins. So what happens when you start burning lots of fossil fuels while simultaneously deforesting significant parts of the earth? You get a system out of equilibrium and, in this case, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere rise. Scientists may argue about the exact effect of those rising CO₂ levels, but that the level is rising isn't up for debate. It's measurable.

InformationWeek is dedicated to managing our carbon footprint, but rather than buying carbon credits and hoping that someone actually builds windmills or finds other methods to produce energy without emitting carbon, we've decided to attack a different part of the problem -- deforestation. There are a few good reasons to go this route. First, if everyone wanted to buy clean-energy carbon offsets, there'd be no way in the short run to satisfy the demand. Second and more important, a consistent effort at reforestation pays back bigger dividends in terms of carbon removal as time goes by.

As part of our green strategy, InformationWeek produced four special PDF-only magazine issues last year and will do one a month this year. InformationWeek's 440,000 magazine subscribers -- as well as registered users of InformationWeek's portfolio of online products, including e-newsletters and InformationWeek Analytics -- can visit informationweek.com/gogreen to download the latest electronic issue in graphic, highly readable, non-plant-based PDF form, free of charge.

In tandem with that effort, InformationWeek, working with its partner American Forests, is planting a tree for each of the first 5,000 downloads of each PDF issue. By the end of June, we've donated more than 40,000 trees since the onset of our 10-year green strategy. Furthermore, under our 10-year strategy we'll partner and invest with nonprofit organizations that focus on the protection and restoration of damaged forests globally.

In determining just how many acres of trees we should plant, we looked at the Douglas fir as a benchmark. We picked the Douglas fir because there's a lot known about it, it's fairly fast growing, and it lives a long time. Its fastest growth rates occur from 10 years to about 50 years, with regular growth continuing on long after that. So if InformationWeek continually funds reforestation, it will offset its carbon footprint in the short run, and do far more than offset its footprint in the long run.

-- Art Wittmann, Managing Director, InformationWeek Analytics