Ecopreneur Kalua Green Releases Book on Tree Planting Accountability Titled "COME BACK AND CHECK"
Ecopreneur Dr. Isaac Kalua Green has launched a new book that speaks of accountability titled - COME BACK AND CHECK.
The book – addresses the issue of trees planted and neglected without closely following the journey of the tree to maturity.
In the new book, Dr. Kalua speaks of his 50-year journey of planting and nurturing trees with notable follow ups, especially from 2011 to date where from 1.2 billion trees planted, there is a survival of 981 million trees which can be traced.
Speaking when he officiated the ‘Plant Your Age Day’ which is marked every 14th of September, Dr. Kalua Green noted the rush by institutions, governments and individuals to plant trees but little effort to nurture the trees planted, thus, dedicating this year’s celebration to taking stock of the trees planted this far.
In Come Back and Check, Dr Isaac Kalua Green, who has grown trees for fifty years, built businesses from them, and served in Kenya's public institutions, brings a lifetime to one question that reaches from a family's garden to a nation's promises: what can we show for what we say we have done? He begins with himself.
For thirteen years he believed a certain tree in Kenya's Mau Forest was exactly his age. While writing this book he asked a forester, and the cherished story began to unravel. He keeps the story and prints the correction. The first unchecked number he confronts is his own. Then comes the larger reckoning.
The Plant Your Age movement reports a central estimate of some 981 million tree-growing contributions since 2011, assessed to 30 June 2026, a figure he places honestly within a range of roughly 700 million to 1.2 billion, and keeps distinct from an independently verified count of living trees.
He puts it through his own Seven Questions, finds the movement can answer only two, and those only in part, and publishes the limits, inviting independent institutions to examine the records and publish what they find.
No government has audited itself like this. No corporation has. He does it first, so the rest of the world is left without an excuse. The first number he audits is his own. The first person he holds to account is himself. His own success meets the same scrutiny.
A tree-nursery enterprise once helped him buy the Mercedes-Benz he had wanted since boyhood; yet the invoices could answer a question the landscape could not. He knew what the business had earned, but not what had become of the seedlings once they left his hands.
From that tension comes the book's argument: trees endure only where people have both a reason and the means to keep them alive.
Drawing on Kenyan experience, South Korea's forest recovery, farmer-managed regeneration in Niger, and a Philippine government audit, he shows how responsibility, livelihoods, ecological judgement and honest evidence decide what lasts. And he leaves the world instruments anyone can pick up and use: the Seven Questions for testing a tree claim, the Count What Survives Standard, an Evidence Ladder, and a Living Tree Account.
Together they ask what was done, where, by whom, what survived, and how confidently anyone cansay so. Losses stay in the record. Replacements are counted separately. Every piece of evidence carries a date.
His proposed Stake Gradient, offered openly as a hypothesis to test and not a finding to accept, invites scholars to study how a person's stake in a tree's future shapes the care it receives. It is a book about trees. It is really about everything a person or a nation begins and never returns to check.
In The Law of the Second Visit, Kalua carries the discipline of returning into work, learning, friendship, faith and family, with his mother's insistence on follow-through, his father's patient care for seedlings, and his own unfinished obligations giving it its human weight. Through Plant Your Age, a birthday becomes an appointment with a living legacy: grow trees for the years you have lived, provide for their care, record honestly what happens, and pass the responsibility forward.