The joke that grew into a school forest

MOST Sydney schools have vegetable patches, rainwater tanks or solar panels, but the students of Ascham School are sure they are the only ones with their own eco-forest.

The brainchild of a year 11 student, Sarah Cohn, the forest, hopefully, will eventually be big enough to completely offset the Edgecliff school's carbon use.

It is ambitious and innovative, but it started out as just another paper recycling campaign.

"After I saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth, I started looking at Ascham and how un-environmentally-friendly it was," Sarah says. "As a student, the thing we notice most is how much paper the school uses, so I thought that was going to be one of the main problems."

But closer investigation, and a meeting with the school bursar, Bill Apter, proved otherwise. "Mr Apter showed me a pie chart of where our usage actually was and the two biggest areas were electricity and gas."

To reduce expenditure in these areas, the pair successfully campaigned to have the temperature of the school swimming pool reduced by a few degrees, dramatically reducing gas consumption. It was a good result, but they wanted more.

"I had calculated the school's carbon footprint and I jokingly said that if we turned the whole school into a forest, then we could offset all our carbon emissions," Apter says.

But Sarah took the suggestion seriously. A few weeks later she had another meeting with Apter.

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The painting is by Laura Tasheiko

Plant a tree

If only we had a machine that could turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. What a marvellous leap forward that would be in the fight against climate change. Ideally this machine would not only produce oxygen. It would also act as a kind of scrubber -a filter of the atmosphere, which nowadays contains all kinds of nasty stuff, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. And this machine would need to be easy on the eye, too.

See where we're going with this? The miraculous machine already exists -no patents pending. It is known as a "tree." Planting one, or two, or six trees, is among the most important steps you can take to help purify the air we breathe. Trees Ontario, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1994, is dedicated to helping you do just that. And now Sun Media, Canada's largest newspaper chain and the publisher of this newspaper, is putting its shoulder to the wheel. In addition to helping through its newspaper and websites to raise awareness of Trees Ontario's vitally important work, Sun Media will also match, twice over, every dollar that the agency applies towards marketing its planting programs.

"Trees are vitally important to our environment," said Sun Media chief executive Michael Sifton. "This partnership will help us make a difference in all the locations in Ontario where Sun Media newspapers are helping to connect and build better communities."

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The painting is by Laura Tasheiko