Happy Earth Day to our beloved readers! We hope you celebrated our favorite holiday in a way that was both inspiring and fruitful. Paper Culture has set a goal to plant 1,000,000 trees, one for each new Facebook like. Click here to get going, and dedicate your tree to someone special. We’ve planted 200,000 since Earth Day last year and are looking forward to the many, many more trees we’ll be putting into the ground through 2012 and beyond.

Over one billion people are dependent on our earth’s forest for their livelihood. And the benefits of trees are innumerable: producing oxygen, absorbing carbon dioxide, fighting soil erosion, and cleaning the air, just to name a few. Planting a tree is one of the simplest things we can do to show our planet that we care about tomorrow. In the spirit of the holiday, we’ve listed below some of our favorite quotes about trees, courtesy of the United Nations Environment Programme. How will you commemorate Earth Day 2012?

“The symbolism – and the substantive significance – of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.”

Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed.
If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.”

Chinese poet, 500 BC

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Greek proverb

“If what I say resonates with you, it is merely because we are both branches on the same tree.”      

W. B. Yeats

“He who plants a tree loves others beside himself.“

English proverb

“The best friend on Earth of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically,
we have one of the greatest resources of the Earth.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

“The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!’”

John F. Kennedy

Me and Baby B

So Baby B was really part of the Paper Culture inspiration. I say “part” because our other 3 co-founders (Creative Director, Huiling Chen; CTO, Armando Singer; and President, Anurag Mendhekar) have their own parts of the story which I’ll let them tell. But the other reason I’m writing this blog series is that Paper Culture is so much more to me than just creating great eco stationery, it’s about an opportunity on a daily basis to speak to you, the community of Paper Culture. As you can imagine, our community is full of parents, and as a first time parent, it’s a privilege for me to listen, learn and talk to the community on a regular basis. You’ve not only helped us hatch Paper Culture, but you’ve helped me learn to be a parent.

I hope “Me and Baby B” is just an extension of that daily conversation.