History

Verdant World was conceived in early 2017 out of a personal connection that arose for three of us on a walk in the early morning at Sundance Resort in Utah with the idea that the simple act of planting trees could solve climate change. We could tell that the ‘problem’ with our declining global forest cover wasn’t money, expertise or even will and saw an opportunity, even felt an imperative to facilitate a shift in the way humanity values and relates to forests. We felt that we could support a conversation that would reveal new systems to shift the scale and velocity of action required to recover global forest health with urgency and integrity.

We began regular virtual meetings with experts, advocates and supporters of reforestation and quickly found that in the simple act of sharing this vision, a strong energy of alignment and inspiration would invariably arise. For nearly everyone we met, the idea of people coming together and trusting in a conversation to harness wisdom, the nature of which none of us understand individually but all of us know collectively, was undeniably compelling.

The first Verdant World Council Gathering convened in October of 2019 where 30 global champions for forests came together for 4 days to explore the opportunity that the Verdant World Conversation makes possible and begin aligning around a total solution for global forest vitality.

The outcomes of this event reinforced the idea that planting trees is not the best or most successful activity to restore forests. The real challenges facing humanity involve a necessity to work together as equals and stewarding a thriving global forest system is no exception. We realized that when attention is brought to positively impacting local communities through reforestation and protection efforts, the regeneration piece is easy. Planting trees is hard, expensive, risky and temporary. Elevating social well-being and connecting human vitality with the local ecosystem through forests is rewarding, self sustaining, natural, and, while not always easy, definitely always worthwhile.

As our network grew, we developed strong relationships with some of the most prolific and successful reforestation organizations in the world. A staple of our work became making connecting people in ways that inspire them and drive knowledge sharing for the benefit of the whole.

Recognizing that, even with massive funding becoming available and remarkable practical innovations emerging quickly, incremental growth among organizations operating independently is no longer sufficient, we are now working to coordinate systems change across the ecosystem of organizations and donors contributing to global forest recovery to generate exponential expansion of initiatives that utilize sustainable and replicable methodologies for long term forest recovery.