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Saturday, September 13, 2008

Sun Media, Canoe.ca, SunTV go tree-planting


We’re a small but mighty army.

It’s a weekday morning and about 75 employees from Sun Media, Canoe and SunTV have traded in our heels for galoshes, ties for hoodies and the office cubicle for the great outdoors.

In the media world, it’s a rare occasion that brings people from editorial, advertising, online and accounting together. Because of the largely solitary nature of reporting, print journalists, are generally known for being a bit brooding, sometimes cantankerous, and for the most part eccentric. Personally, I like to think of the latter as simply “quirky.”

But the morning’s event brought like-minded people together with the aim of doing the earth some planetary good.

In record time, the small army of volunteers planted 100 oak, poplar, black cherry and cedar trees in North America’s largest urban park. The Rouge Park, in east Toronto and Markham, Ontario, stretches 4,762-hectares, roughly 20 times the size of the Toronto Islands.

According to Tree Canada, in less than an hour's worth of treeplanting efforts,

we will achieve the following throughout the trees' lifetimes:


@ Provide a days’ worth of oxygen for 400 people

@ Lift 10,000 gallons of water out of the ground and discharge it in the air in one day

@ Reduce air borne dust particles by as much as 700,000 particles per litre of air, acting as a free standing air conditioner and air purifier

Researchers also estimate that an urban tree can save five to 10 times more carbon than a rural tree

Read on
The painting is by Laura Tasheiko

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