I saw a post the other day about something McDonald’s did in the 1990s: kids received tree seedlings with Happy Meals, planted them, and they’re now huge. I looked it up and discovered that one April weekend in 1991, McDonald’s teamed up with nonprofit American Forests and launched the national environmental education program “Let’s Get Growing America” where nearly 7500 restaurants across the country gave away more than nine million free pine and spruce tree seedlings to customers upon request, no purchase necessary. The program was a response to President George Bush’s 1990 State of the Union Address, where he called for the planting of one billion trees each year for the next decade in an effort to “keep America beautiful for generations to come.” The New York Times dramatically called it a ”war against polluted air.”
Thirty-four years later, with a very different Republican president, the government’s own Environmental Protection Agency website brags about its “Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History” referred to by the head of the EPA as a “dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Who knew environmentalists would ever be missing George Bush and his old-timey billion tree-planting goals?
Yesterday I attended the Sustainability Symposium at Johns Hopkins University, where my daughter graduates next month with an Environmental Science degree. She spoke at the event on her senior research thesis, Organic Carbon Storage Potential of Submerged Aquatic Vegetation in the Chesapeake Bay. It was fascinating to learn about different areas across the fields of her colleagues and professors who are working on vital environmental issues. I met a government worker who handed me her business card with her personal email address written on it, saying, “We do that now because we never know how long the government email address will be working.” The EPA director announced he wanted to cut 65% of the department’s staff, which the White House walked back, saying it meant 65 percent of the department’s “wasteful spending.” I worry about my daughter finding a job in the current environmental “climate.”
In college, though I was a Psych major, I took an Environmental Science class to meet a requirement. The class had a lot of impact on me. The hippie Boomer professor was passionate, with her “If it’s mellow let it yellow if it’s brown flush it down” and “turn off the water when you brush your teeth” slides, along with 1000 other words of wisdom and key lessons on climate change, fossil fuels and much more. When I later became a chief elected official, Girl Scout leader and journalist, what she taught me remained. Now with three daughters who are successful in the sciences—Sarah has a master’s in ecoforestry, Molly’s a veterinarian and now next month Faith with her environmental science degree, I couldn’t be prouder. I wrote to my college professor to let her know the impact her class had.
As I looked over the stories and photos from the McDonald’s seedling kids from 1991, there were an astonishing nine million given away. I wonder about the significance and how many of the trees grew up with those kids. I wish there were more companies doing good things, especially to offset all the damage.
Bianca Yarto from Texas wrote to McDonald’s to show them her family’s “McDonald’s Tree,” which her brother planted at their grandparents’ house. As Bianca and her brother grew up, so did the seedling, now a tree over 50 feet tall.
“Every time we go to my grandparents’ house, we say, ‘Look at the McDonald’s tree!’ That’s what we call it,” Bianca says. “It’s cool to see something grow over that many years. It makes us happy, and it’s something we all go back to. These days, everything is changing constantly, so for me, it’s nice to see something constant.”