Jeff Schnurr

A maritime native helps to restore the ecological world, one tree at a time

Jeff Schnurr doesn’t believe in fate (as an activist he finds the concept of inevitability lame, literally), but he does believe in coincidence. Specifically, the right-place-at-the-right-time phenomenon.

It was quite by accident that the career tree planter found himself on Pemba, a tiny, tropical island off the coast of Tanzania, about the time a group of local fishermen expressed interest in tree planting as a means of stabilizing the local marine environment. It was 2007, and Schnurr seeded a tree-planting project on Pemba that has since spread its roots across the water to Tanzania. A year after returning to Canada from Africa, in 2008, Schnurr founded Community Forests International, an organization that aims to restore ecologically degraded areas all over the world.

To date, Community Forests International has launched 14 community-owned projects in Tanzania, operated by 1,800 locals, 70 percent of them women. More than 200,000 trees have been raised and planted locally, providing both environmental healing and sustainable trade.
Tree planting has become Schnurr’s mission. The 25-year-old Sackville, N.B.-native acts as Community Forests International’s executive director, spending hours every week raising funds and rallying friends in support of his cause. Says his friend and colleague Daimen Hardie: “Jeff has been living in relative poverty for the last four years, devoting all his time and energy to volunteering for Community Forests International. He has often relied on odd jobs, making only enough money to scrape by so that he can continue pursuing his vision.”

And vision is an apt word to describe what has, essentially, become Jeff Schnurr’s lifework. “I was in India and a monk told me that planting trees was the highest form of virtue,” says the self-effacing volunteer. “I think that’s because tree planting is an act that transcends the individual. By planting a tree we contribute to a forest, and to the health and integrity of the entire planet, which sustains all life. The lifespan of a tree, and the perpetuity of a forest, allows the human individual to contribute to a better tomorrow.”

Schnurr is now working hard to train other volunteers to add their efforts to his own—both in Tanzania and in Uganda, where a fledgling nursery effort is underway.
“We must rewrite the history of natural resource manipulation and focus on practices that provide for humanity while improving the natural world,” says Schnurr. “The future will be written with saw or spade. In both farm or forest, we can work together to make conservation the consequence of production.”

— Liza Finlay