I will pass on this idea!
I looked at the overview of the book. There are better ways to be sustainable, and frankly, no one is going to eat the wood, unless the baker who was putting sawdust in cookies (see Aaron's earlier post) is looking for more ingredients.
The book strikes me as a convoluted way of approaching a possible problem with a much simpler solution.
We bought our tree from a Christmas tree farm in our area, thereby supporting a local producer. Such farms protect land that might be gobbled up for development, and the trees have a positive effect on the environment as they grow.
As for after the holidays, when I lived in Lubbock, the Boy Scouts would pick up trees for a small donation after the holidays, and the trees would then be mulched. People could also drop off trees at a site where they would be mulched. Here, once we take the tree down, my husband ties it to our light post, and it looks like another tree until about May or June, depending on the weather. He then takes it over to the shed and it eventually becomes firewood. My husband's cousins remember their mother sending them out to bring home discarded neighborhood trees, which she would put in the back yard as a refuge for the birds in the winter.
We actually have two trees this year. The second one came from our woodlands, after we had bought the first, where my husband discovered that in the autumn a male deer had girdled one of his 18-foot tall trees, effectively killing it. So, he took the tree down, and the top 7 feet are now a second Christmas tree.
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