Comment Articles

If you go down to the woods today...

Rupert Goodwins

Published: 11 Aug 2003 16:05 BST

Summertime, and a young man's fancies lightly turn to thoughts of global warming. What better time for NEC to announce Ecotonoha? It could be anything -- a washing powder, a robotic sea snail or the practice of designing Web sites in a spiritually harmonious way. But no -- this curiously unpronounceable word derives from 'eco' as in ecological and 'tonoha', the Japanese for 'words'. Ecotonoha is a word tree.

Fortunately, the thing itself is much more beautiful than its unlovely hybrid name. Follow this link, and you'll be presented with an elegant flash animation of a tree growing skywards to the sound of ultratasteful new age tinkling. Each branch is festooned with clusters of green words: click on these and you zoom into the tips, where people from around the world have left their names and a short message. Click further and you can add your own tiny missive -- just one a day, mind. For every hundred leaves added, NEC promises the company will plant a real tree to help absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- thus helping battle climate change.

It's got the lot -- internationalism, individual action, ecological awareness, and images of shady forests to calm the fevered brows of us sweltering citydwellers. Inspiration to counter perspiration. There's even some unintentional humour: browse the tree and among Yoshi saying "Green Love Is All!" and Natsuru expecting "Happy Cool Again For Hot World" is the occasional Gazza saying "What's the bloody point of all this?" Ah, cross-cultural pollination. The perfect ecoscheme.

Perhaps. If you're going to plant trees, you have to do some digging. Along with the tree itself comes a short corporate background blarneygram. The trees are going to be added to NEC's existing afforestation project on Kangaroo Island off Southern Australia, and they're going to be mostly Eucalyptus Globulus. The climate and land features are ideally suited to growing strong, healthy trees, the company says, and over the next ten years it'll plant a total of 3,000 hectares to absorb around a megaton of carbon dioxide over 20 years.

So far, so good. NEC isn't doing the planting itself, you understand: it's handing that task over to Green Triangle Plantation Company, Ltd -- well, they're the experts. And who owns Green Triangle? A typical Japanese consortium of companies, prominent among which is the Oji Paper Company, Ltd. Ah. A bit more digging reveals that the tree is also known as Blue Gum, which is in great demand commercially for paper, wood chip and timber, and there's a big scheme on -- yes -- Kangaroo Island for industrial Blue Gum production. The island itself is a rare haven of exceptional diversity and biological richness, and not everyone's happy with the idea.