And Strengthen Your Family’s Wealth and Legacy at the Same Time
By Stephen Dean
As I write this, I sit exactly 2 miles from the birthplace of Earth Day. Sort of.
What resides exactly 2 miles away from your writer’s office chair is a paper mill, still puffing away 140 years after it was built.
As a child, I called it a “cloud maker” due to the endless puffs of “clouds” emanating from its smoke stacks day and night.
And yet 2 miles in the other direction, you’ll find “The Gateway to the Gorge.”
It’s where a freeway turns into a winding road that curves through the Columbia River Gorge, a national scenic area described by the Forest Service as “a spectacular river canyon, 80 miles long and up to 4,000 feet deep, that meanders past cliffs, spires, and ridges set against nearby peaks of the Pacific North West’s Cascade Mountain Range.”
Maybe it was this contrast between smoky skies and stunning nature views that turned Earth Day founder Dennis Hayes into one of America’s earliest environmentalists.
Hayes also grew up in my hometown of Camas, Washington. We both had to endure the smell of sulfur emanating from the mill while attending Camas High School, despite graduating nearly 40 years apart.
Thankfully as I work remotely in Camas (Wealth Factory headquarters are in Utah), the smell is gone, thanks to new technology and stricter regulations.
But it was more than just the smell that bothered Hayes; it was what the mill’s pollution was doing to our environment. This stuck with Hayes even as he went on to attend Stanford and Harvard, where he was selected at age 24 by Senator Gaylord Nelson to organize the first Earth Day.
And it was a big success. On April 22nd, 1970, it’s said that more than 2000 colleges and universities, 10,000+ schools, and 20 million demonstrators took part in the environmental protest.
Today Earth Day is celebrated in more than 180 countries, making it the world’s most widely observed secular holiday.
It’s a day when cities (including Camas) organize clean-ups, people reflect on making more eco-friendly choices, and many people choose to plant a tree.
In fact, that’s one way we do our part at Wealth Factory. We plant trees.
This last Earth Day, we helped plant 97 trees.
And we don’t just do it on Earth Day. Every time someone purchases our book, What Would Billionaires Do?, we donate $1 to the National Forest Foundation (NFF).
And for every $1 donation, the NFF plants 1 native tree in a National Forest in need of reforestation… and the U.S. Forest Service matches the donation with $2 of value via project support and implementation.
This has allowed us to plant more than 30,000 trees since 2020.
And if you want to plant one more tree with us, with the added benefit of discovering how to build lasting wealth and legacy for your family, you can purchase the book at the link below:
Get your copy of What Would Billionaires Do? right here
What Would Billionaires Do? details how to set up a powerful (and proven) financial engine to drive your family’s wealth creation for generations. It’s one of the most tax-advantaged ways to build wealth,
And it gives your kids (and their kids) access to opportunity without just handing over money and creating trust fund babies.
When you purchase the book, we’ll donate $1 to the NFF, during Earth Month, as they call it, and a tree will be planted in your honor.
It’s one of the easiest ways to help the planet while also learning to be a wise steward of your family finances and legacy.
And as a nod to Dennis Hayes, we promise to plant it far away from Camas so that it won’t be cut down to feed the paper mill.
That was a joke, but it will be planted in a National Forest where logging is limited and requires plans for reforestation.
So know that you can feel good when you plant a tree with today’s book purchase.
Just tap the link above to find out more about building wealth in a way that will benefit your family for generations.
