Saving the Forest with the Trees

Like many people, I try to do my bit for wildlife and the environment and support several recognised charities - I’m a member of the National Trust, the RSPB, World Wildlife Fund and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust. I am however, becoming increasingly concerned that now it seems a week does not go by without yet another plea for a ‘worthy cause’ desperate for my help. Last week it was giant pandas, the week before it was the albatross, prior to that african elephants and before that, the poor old tiger.
Today, it was the Sumatran rain forest.

No matter how worthy these individual causes may be, it simply isn’t possible to support them all but what causes me most concern is that with every plea, comes an unsolicited free pen, a book of raffle tickets or a pack of sticky labels, in addition to the full colour-printed, multi-page leaflet or brochure, with matching envelope and of course, the postage and a reply paid envelope for my donation - and that’s without the use of high quality images from major image libraries.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of these things produced and mailed out every week. Don’t these organisations realise that if that they stopped doing it, not only could they save as much, if not more, than they receive in donations but more importantly, they could probably save an entire forest of trees!