Planting Sea Trees in Indonesia with Pacha Light and Michael Stewart

Sustainable Surf is recognized most easily among surfers for its ECOBOARD program – a standard for Surfboard Builders seeking to lower the toxicity of their surfboard building operations.

Since 2014 Firewire has been the only global surfboard manufacturer to qualify all of our surfboard production for ECOBOARD Verification, and we encourage all surfboard brands to collaborate with Sustainable Surf to do the same – the presence of the ECOBOARD lamination on any surfboard means its carbon footprint is approximately 30 lbs less than a board made from traditional materials.

The ECOBOARD program however (more on it here) is just one of many programs managed by Sustainable Surf, each founded as a tactic to support the greater strategic vision of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals.

Are you surprised by that bit? 

The bit about the United Nations S.D.G.? And how Sustainable Surf aims to support them? We were ( but we won’t be surprised when Pacha Light addresses the U.N. formally someday).

Michael Stewart shared with us why the United Nations S.D.G. is important to us all in a new episode of The Wire Podcast (Apple, Spotify). 

It was supposed to be a quick catch up covering a trip he and Pacha took to the Papua region of Indonesia to plant Mangrove trees and surf, but it turned into more than that – a thorough education on the ways that Mangrove trees don’t just sequester carbon, but also do much more.

Mangrove tree root systems are foundational breeding grounds for fish who hatch eggs in their root systems, safe from predators. They also act as a barrier in times of Tsunamis or floods, protecting villages and more.

And while you may already know about Sustainable Surf’s Sea Trees Program and how we use it to wipe our yearly carbon footrprint through Mangrove planting and other things like kelp forrest conservation, the program does more than that, for example compensating locals in the Papua region for planting Mangrove trees so that they don’t have to seek income through tearing down Mangrove Forrest to create illegal shrimp farms or logging operations or charcoal production. 

Michael and his team have an ambitious goal for 2020, intending to enable 100,000 people to plant 10 mangrove trees each (at just one American Dollar per tree). 

If this happens, 1 million mangrove trees will be fostered before 2020’s end to help restore and protect the Papua region’s wave-washed, remote tropical islands, while sequestering an enormous amount of CO2.

You can plant Sea Trees yourself bypressing here, just like Pacha light in the image above.