Making hay

What a crazy few weeks! I would love to get back to a regular writing and blogging schedule again, but I'm too busy making hay while the sun shines for the time being.

I've been thinking a lot about trees lately. More than usual, I mean. I have found a couple of organizations that I think would be interesting to work with that have volunteer events where you go out and actually plant trees. There are many fine and respectable organizations that are very happy to send you a water bottle or an umbrella with a logo on it, but all the work is done by professionals. And the work they do is valuable! But all I ever see from them are magazines with depressing articles. And their beautiful but often not very strong tote bags.

I already belong to Save Our Shores, but haven't been able to get to a beach clean-up in some time. With all the spare time that I don't have, I'm not sure why it is so important to me to join another group that has volunteer opportunities for people without PhDs, but I would like to know that there is at least the possibility of being involved with large projects requiring lots of hands rather than being limited to just writing a check.

Here are a couple of groups that I am looking at:

American Forests: www.americanforests.org 

American Forest Foundation: www.forestfoundation.org

Has anybody ever heard of either of these groups? I sure haven't. The American Forest Foundation gets a much higher rating than American Forests at http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=5418#.VQ5w5eGO4gR.