'We Recycle Your Air.'

Dan Morrell, 38
Founder and CEO
Future Forests
Somerset, England

It's April 26, and Dan Morrell flies economy class from Heathrow to JFK, then takes a cab to First Avenue and 46th Street. He straightens his tie, brushes down his suit, and strides into the United Nations building. He flashes his passport at security and scans the lobby for his welcoming party. No one.

He checks his watch. He's right on time, but there's no sign of Kofi Annan -- or the tree that he and Annan are supposed to plant in Washington Square Park. Damn it, there isn't even a shovel. Not good. Maybe this wasn't such a smart idea after all. Photo ops with UN secretaries-general were the last thing that Morrell had expected when he wrote a hit-and-hope letter to the UN suggesting that its forthcoming commission on sustainable development and global warming ought to set an example by going "carbon-neutral." Flopping himself into one of the chairs in the lobby, Morrell begins to ponder how his fledgling ecocommerce business, Future Forests Ltd., might have made better use of his airfare.

Derrick Osborne, cochairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, enters the lobby on his way to convene the conference. He allows Morrell 30 seconds to brief him about Future Forests. He likes what he hears and says, "Dan, this is great. I want you to address the forum." Morrell prepares himself for a room with maybe 50 or 60 people, tops. But the room that Osborne leads Morrell into is not one of the smaller chambers at the UN; it is General Assembly Hall. And few of its 1,969 seats are empty.

Morrell has no carefully crafted script, no PowerPoint slides. So in three minutes flat, he tells his powerful audience the simple truth about his work: We plant trees at $5 a pop to offset the carbon dioxide that you create. Morrell thanks his listeners for their time and then sweats in silence as the translators conclude their interpretations. A delegate stands and begins to clap. Then another stands and claps, and then another. Morrell leaves the room to a standing ovation, and Future Forests has won some very influential friends.

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Ten trees will offset the carbon dioxide (CO2) that one U.S. citizen generates in four months, says Future Forests. Nine trees will negate the effect of your family vacation in the Caribbean. Plant eight trees, and you'll cancel out four years' worth of garbage. Seven trees will offset five flights between New York and London. Six will neutralize all of the CO2 released by your refrigerator over its lifetime. Five will reabsorb your automobile emissions for a year. Four trees will let you carbon-neutralize your washing machine for six years. Plant three trees, and you can enjoy carbon-neutral train commutes for 10 hours a week for three years. Two trees will offset the CO2 generated in the production, delivery, and brewing of four pots of coffee a day for six years. And just one tree? That's enough to make an average citizen of Uganda carbon-neutral for a whole year.

It can't be that simple, can it? Of course it can't, and Morrell, 38, Future Forests founder and CEO, is the first to admit it. Photosynthesis is complex to a stultifying degree, and CO2 absorption depends on a multitude of biological factors. Such details are important to Morrell, who lives in Somerset, England, but if he has learned anything from his recyclable career as a nightclub operator, a video-game importer, a fashion retailer, and an advertising middleman, it is this: The simpler the idea, the better it sells.

The major players of the Green Movement have proved adept at hand-wringing and alarm raising, but they have proved lousy at solution delivery and implementation. The momentum and optimism of the late 1980s and early 1990s appear to have been lost: The burden is too heavy, the scale of the task too great. But carve the global problem into chunks of individual responsibility -- and give people the power to repair the damage that they've caused -- and you stand a chance of turning the tide.

"People feel powerless about the environment," Morrell says. "But from what little they remember from their school biology lessons, they can make a connection between planting a tree and CO2 absorption. Slowly, people start to change their minds about driving their cars, using their dishwashers, recycling their waste -- just because they have a tree planted somewhere."

The average U.S. or UK citizen has a lifestyle that annually produces 11 tons of CO2 -- the main contributor to the greenhouse effect and to global warming. But trees naturally absorb CO2 and produce in its place useful by-products: oxygen and wood.