Video | Rooted by Our Purpose: A New Direction at Leaf & Limb

My name is Basil. I helped start this company back in 2010, so today actually marks my 10-year anniversary here at Leaf & Limb and I've actually had an amazing time this journey.

I think what I appreciate most about my experiences that I am essentially paid to learn when I started here. I didn't know the first thing all trees. Back then we cut trees down and we prune trees and we didn't even really know how to prune them. We just cut limbs off. I don't think I knew what a branch collar was, but. To build this company and to be successful and do all the things that I needed to do. I had to learn a lot about trees and you know I started first with the tree biology. What is a branch collar what are root collars these sorts of things, but from there, it really branched out so to speak, I had to learn about soil. I had to learn about insects. I had to learn about migratory birds just a whole bunch of other things that I had to learn in order to say diagnose why a tree is sick.

And it was around this time that I really developed an acute appreciation for the complexity of nature. It hit me one day. I remember I remember thinking to myself, I could look in this soil as infinitely as I can look in the skies above, you can look in basically any direction when it comes to trees and it's an infinite channel of knowledge. It was around that time that I really also began to realize how little we actually know about trees. They're really quite complex.

I do think that we are only the very beginning of learning what there is to know about trees. It was also around this time. I became more in tune with some of the environmental issues that are happening. I learned about. the loss of biodiversity, I learned that we're we’re losing clean drinking water or record speed. I learned about the loss of top soil. I learned about oxidized carbon all these things that are happening here on Planet Earth and they're all very bad news for for we humans.

So there I was in my depression about the state of things and it hit me trees are the answer trees are natures most powerful tool for creating a healthy planet trees have been here for ages creating the planet that we know today and it was such an exciting realization to finally see a little glimmer of hope here I do think trees can fix our water issue our soil issue, biodiversity, climate you name it is so many pressing environmental issues for which trees can solve it's really, really amazing stuff.

But there was a really difficult realization that came after that, and it's: wait a second. Nearly half of our revenue here at Leaf & Limb comes from cutting down trees. So if trees are nature's most powerful tool for creating a healthy planet. Can we justify cutting down trees? And that was a really difficult thing. I mean we are talking about the livelihood of our company, millions of dollars in revenue. We justified and we reason that we analyze and we went through a whole bunch of thought processes looking for ways to get around this, You know replanting and none of it. None of it was the right thing.

In the end, we did have to choose to do the right thing as part of our values as a company and so we decided to stop cutting down trees in 2019 and it was a difficult decision. It really was, but now we care for trees and we plant trees and we teach anybody who will listen about why trees matter we want to do all of the things that we do in a way that is responsible to all members of our ecosystem. Our long-term hope is that one day we can help facilitate trees, healing our planet and restoring life on Earth and this is a big big thing.

It's gonna take a lot a lot of people. There’s no way we could do this on our own. It's gonna take a whole cohort, even an army of people, who have a fundamental belief in the importance of trees and I think that brings us to the perfect beauty about all of this. It took us a decade, but now we have purpose We care for trees because there are essential to the health of our planet and we invite you to join us on this journey. It's a very important one and there's so much to do If you would like to learn more, we offer a course. That will teach you why trees are essential to the health of our planet. It will teach you some basics on caring for trees and all this information is linked in our description. So remember: trees are essential to the health of our planet.