plant trees, both literal and figurative

I went to a lecture by Cameron Sinclair, cofounder of Architecture for Humanity.
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/

The group provides architectural design services where they are needed (post-tsunami, post-earthquake, post-hurricane, post-genocide, and the like).

Here is his talk on YouTube that he gave after the group won the TED Prize a few months back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcqEjmuxjA

This guy is another inspirational speaker, and I’m going to do what I can to help them out.

(2004 Nobel Prize winner, and founder of the Green Belt Movement – they plant trees, a very modest effort by itself (except they have planted 30 million of them) but the extra trees are helping undo the deforestation of Africa, postponing and possibly reversing desertification, preventing soil loss, returning water to the soil, and raising farmers out of bare bones poverty. Not too shabby.

(As an aside – the conference I am attending is the ESRI User Conference (ESRI makes a suite of powerful software tools that I used heavily for many years, and still use when I get the chance) and after Ms. Maathai’s speech the founder of ESRI (Jack Dangermond) announced that this year they are going to offset the carbon-emmision debt all 20,000 or 30,000 of us attendees incurred by travelling to this conference. Way to go ESRI and Jack!)