reforestation

sample screenshot of a tree-nation forest page, showing the team logo and stats on trees planted and CO2 offset

Titan Treecycle Initiative
Titan Treecycle Initiative 900 600 Simon O'Rourke

At the start of November, Simon announced he’d joined ‘Team Titan’, and become part of the Titan Treecycle initiative, but we have never explained what that means! We thought we’d use this week’s blog to explain a little more about the project, and why it’s such an important initiative…

a facebook screenshot from Simon O'Rourke's facebook page announcing he is part of the titan treecycle initiative. the post is accomanpied by a photo of a forest.

Simon’s initial Treecycle announcement

About Titan Chainsaw Carving

Before we talk about the Titan Treecycle initiative, let’s back up a few steps and start with Titan!

Titan Chainsaw carving is a recently opened specialist chainsaw carving tools supply store, started by chainsaw carver Matt Crabb. He’s been a professional chainsaw carver for 15 years, so he certainly knows what carvers of all skill levels need! And although it has begun as a chainsaw carving supplies store, Matt hopes it will be much more.

He wants to support, encourage, inspire, and help new carvers – people with an interest to try carving. He also wants Titan to be a place where beginners come alongside pros, somewhere knowledge and inspiration can be shared.
chainsaw carver (founder of titan treecycle initiative) stands to the left of a large tree trunk carved into a sculptures of four owls

Matt Crabb is the founder of Titan Treecycle initiative
Photo taken from his Facebook page.

Team Titan!

To help form that community, Matt has formed a team of world-class chainsaw carvers as ambassadors of the brand. As a team, they will also work collaboratively on large-scale carving projects. Simon is honoured to be one of the team, along with Matt, James Elliott, Mike Jones, Michael Tamoszus, Ryan Villiers, Res Hofmann, Simon Archer, and Hikaru Kodama.
Exciting as this is, Matt also has a bigger out-reaching vision, and that’s where the Titan Treecycle Initiative comes in…
Water Dragon by Keiji Kidokoro and Simon O'Rourke Huskycup 2019 one of the top chainsaw carving events

Water Dragon by Simon and Keiji Kidokoro at Huskycup 2019 – a taste of the quality and artistry expected from the Titan collaboration

The Vision Behind Titan Treecycle

Matt is highly aware of the situation with climate change and the desperate need for big change in the world (an awareness Simon shares). As a result, one of his goals is to ensure Titan runs as completely carbon negative. What a fantastic goal! This lead him to an organisation called Tree-Nation, and the Titan Treecyle initiative came from that contact.
Tree-Nation has a goal of reforesting the world. They want to use technology to make tree planting easy and provide support, advice and solutions to citizens and companies to help them transition towards a sustainable future.
five adults hold gardening equipment and tree saplings in pots. they are all wearing white t shirts bearing the tree-nation logo

Some of the Tree-Nation team
Photo taken from the Tree Nation website

The Initiative Unfolds…

Matt decided to use Titan and the team’s ever-growing online presence in the chainsaw carving community, to promote an initiative for every chainsaw carver to replant more trees each year than they use. So he started Titan Treecycle.
Titan Treecycle is a ‘Forest’ or project, within Tree-Nation. Chainsaw Carvers can donate money towards the forest, and Tree-Nation uses that money to plant trees in one of their reforestation projects. If every chainsaw carver in the world joined this action, it would make a monumental change to our carbon footprint.

In Matt’s words:

“It should become the norm. We [chainsaw carvers] use up trees to carve luxury items with carbon-emitting tools. Lots of carvers travel around and fly across the world to compete etc. It would be so so easy and at very little cost per individual to offset all of this. If we as a trade could set about this positive change, then perhaps our example can be used to show other trades and industries the way forward.“

Looking at the Titan Treecycle Forest page, so far (December 2021) the group have planted 321 trees and offset 142t of carbon dioxide. A great start in only a couple of months!
sample screenshot of a tree-nation forest page, showing the team logo and stats on trees planted and CO2 offset

The forest page provides updates and accountability for members and supporters

Simon and the Titan Treecycle Initiative

It’s fairly well known that Simon only uses trees that are dead, diseased or dangerous for his sculptures, and never cuts trees down specifically to carve. So why join Treecycle?
In his words:
“Even though all the wood I currently use has been cut for a valid reason, I feel this is an excellent way to encourage the carving world to go the extra mile in looking after the planet we’re so blessed to live on.”

And there’s more…

 

The Giant Hand of Vyrnwy stands in the Lake Vyrnwy estate. The sculpture is one of Simon’s most famous examples of transforming a storm-damaged tree

Team Titan Collaboration

Remember we mentioned collaborative projects? The Titan team are planning to meet up in England in April this year to collaborate on (matt’s words!) “the biggest and most spectacular chainsaw carving project on earth!”

At this stage we can’t say anything more, but it promises to be epic!

There haven’t been many occasions before this where a large collective of elite professional artists have collaborated together in such a big way. As Matt says, “It’s going to be a very special project and a huge step forward for the wonderful art of chainsaw carving“.

Simon is excited about the collaboration, and of course, we’ll be sharing about it here!
screen shot of the Titan Chainsaw Carving facebook page. Titan are the founders of the titan treecycle initiative discussed in this blog

More Information and Contacts

Titan Chainsaw Carving supplies are on Facebook and Instagram, and a webpage (www.titanchainsawcarving.com) is coming soon.

You can follow the progress of the Treecycle team on their Forest page, and find out more about the work of Tree-Nation at www.tree-nation.com

Finally, contact Simon using the form at www.treecarving.co.uk/contact/.

Enter your
text here