It may be better to grow the trees close to the market than to ship them from Maine in terms of carbon emissions via truck. On the otherhand, my early tour of duty as a tree trimmer on one of those plantations convinced me that they are the closest thing to a biological desert you can find in the northern termperate zone. Birds don't even nest in them.

If there was ever a place where bamboo, recycled newspapers, recycled CDs/electronics or recycled (fill in the blank)s could step in - this has got to be it...my family always had white plastic or silver fake trees. And you know what? Once you dressed them up and lit them up, put a blanket underneath and snuggled up on the couch nearby, it always seemed just as lovely as any real tree.

(You'd need some pine essence in a scent diffuser hiding in the corner)

And fake trees aren't a fire hazard. How much carbon is additionally released every time someone sets their house on fire with a "real" tree? And then there's all the carbon released hunting down a "good" tree every year.

Or do as I (and others) do: don't have a tree at all. There's always the Festivus pole, too! :)

How about you plant a tree in a pot and keep it year round?

You could transplant it to bigger and bigger pots until it got too big.

At that point you could plant it outside and start again!

That way, you could always have a real, live tree and every few years, you'd be planting a new tree outside too!

If you don't mind my sharing poetry here, I'd like to share my poem about forest stewardship. It's surprisingly relevant.

____________________________
Sylvanthane

O Sylvanthane, thy forest wanes;
men slay thy trees with bladed chains.
They cut them down for profit’s sake
and rape the land as they do take
thy trees of old into their mills
to make their goods and warm their chills
while they think not of right or wrong
of silencing the ancient song
of birds and wolves and forest brooks,
this greedy band of selfish crooks.
A tree farm they make of thy land
to rob thy heritage right out of hand.
The virgin forest they clear-cut,
and render brooks a muddy rut.
With barb’ed wires girded ‘round
their tree farm stands all mute of sound
until the buzz of harvest time
by which they still excuse their crime—
“for every tree we cut, we plant
a dozen more,” they always rant.
But every dozen seedlings give
a mere sapling that might live,
and their trees grow not free as thine;
not wild habitats, but pine.
Not nests for birds but pulp for paper
they’re cut so young they give no shelter.
Thy wild forest, so they claim,
are by their roads now rendered tame.
And yet their pav’ed ribbons lay
a swath of death each tree they slay.
The creatures they kill as they go—
endangered species lists thus grow.

O Sylvanthane, don’t shed a tear
lest weep ‘til blind for loss so dear.
Earth’s stewardship they disregard
   as they lobby for their blunt demands;
we must truly fight them hard
   or they’ll consume our Father’s lands.

Plastic = Oil + Co2, CO, Ethylene, Chlorine, and a myriad of others... Cardboard to package it, oil to ship it, oil to make it.... geezus where does it end?

Fake trees at Christmas are better... You're kidding, right?

I hate to say this because I won't substitute plastic for the real thing, but honestly, religion is as much of a problem for the environment as anything else. At the end of the day, everything seems to come back to religion...

C3

I've recently read that every year around this time we create an extra 5 million tons of garbage!

Lots from wrapping paper and more from plastic packaging.

I've also read that a live tree is best. With all the carbon emitted from factory built trees buying a tree from a tree farm is better. Besides these trees are grown for that purpose so we're not robbing the earth of their natual grown. Find a local place that doesn't use pesticides on their tree.

Also keep in mind LED lights use less energy and last longer. And you don't need to keep them on 24/7.

We dont' have to give up christmas. We just need to be more concious of our choices.

So:

The claim is that because farm grown pines don't sequester
*as much* CO2 as natural forest / hard wood trees then they
are... what? Just not as efficient?

If we were raping the natural stands of pines and forests,
the same people would complain of deforestation and destroying
Alaska.

C'mon. Get it straight folks. You've gotta be consistent in your
narrative.

Christmas tree farms are family operations planted on small, unused fields. Who cuts down hardwood forests to plant Christmas trees? Nobody.

On the other hand, the Southeast has many paper companies who are logging native longleaf pine and hardwoods to plant fast-growing short-leaf pines.

In contrast to the imagined strawman problem invented above, the loss of trees to drought, disease and fire are real factors.