Interaction and endorsement

I got a great email from Alison this week, providing some feedback about our web site and the way we provide information about Christmas Trees. Here's our interaction:

Hi Alison. Interesting points, thanks for writing in… but missing key facts /considerations. Elaborations below in blue to specific points….

From: Alison
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 9:50 PM
To: info
Subject: Hi

Just was looking through all your arguments about real vs. fake trees. You might want to at least be a bit more honest,
-- there’s nothing on the site that isn’t factual or sourced / linked if it’s opinion …can’t be much more honest than that

and a little less obvious about which one you’re pushing.
-- really? You think we should be less obvious? I think being pretty up-front and obvious about what our association stands for and believes in is the right way to go…subterfuge or subtlety would not serve our purposes I feel.

Maybe at least throw in the facts that real trees take a lot of water,
-- so? …so do house plants and pets and people ….so what? What’s the point?

and a whole bunch of fuel to truck the trees to their final resting place.
-- not necessarily. Some people buy a tree at a local farm, and many people in the U.S. and Canada live near areas where Christmas trees are grown. Besides, if you chastised people every time they purchased an agricultural product that had to be hauled to them, well, you would be chastising pretty much every person that eats bananas north of Mexico, every person who eats broccoli south of roughly the 35th parallel, etc. Personally, I’m glad I live in a place where I can buy agricultural products from all over.

Also that it totally depends on how long people keep their fake trees. That in itself changes everything.
-- no it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter how long you keep a fake tree, it will eventually end up in a landfill where it will NEVER decompose. 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? The Earth will be here a lot longer than you or I and it will have to deal with all the non-biodegradable products we keep manufacturing, like artificial Christmas trees, instead of a the real thing, planted and grown on a farm, replaced by another seedling, then decomposed back into natural elements as all plants are.

Just thought you should know that you might be banking on human stupidity a bit too much,
-- I feel just the opposite Alison. I’m banking on people being smart enough to separate myths and misperceptions from facts.

but then again you might get lucky. Hope you guys make tons of money this year, enjoy mine, and spend it on coming up with more witty Christmas tree propaganda. Alison

Well, at least she thinks I'm witty.

So what do you think? Tell us if you feel as Alison does that we aren't honest on our website or that we should be less obvious in our attempt to convince people who display a Christmas tree to use a real one grown on a farm and to stop buying more plastic and metal fake trees.

Oh, one more quick thing this morning. I noticed the fake tree people again trying to tout an "environmental study" saying a fake tree was better for the environment ... when are they going to give this up? What do the real environmentalists say? Check for yourself, you can't get more "tree hugger-y" than the American Forests organization: http://bit.ly/vUJQTn