Branch Out
2021-09-14
Living on the U.S west coast, I spent September 2020 confined at home due to a respiratory pandemic and the smoke-filled air from raging fires. This experience made me appreciative of the synergy between plants, water, and sunlight. The synergy that makes the Earth’s lungs and allows us to have an abundance of fresh air.
Did you ever wonder where most of Earth’s oxygen comes from? More than half is produced by plankton in the Earth's oceans. Land plants generate the rest. But, marine life also uses about 50% of the oxygen on our planet. For illustration only, let’s say that marine life gets its oxygen from the ocean, and we get our oxygen from land plants. Since trees are the largest plants, they produce a significant amount of oxygen, especially healthy, mature, and leafy trees. Trees also absorb harmful pollutants and carbon dioxide, which helps reduce the effects created by climate change. Research led by the scientist Thomas Crowther supports the notion that forest restoration is a top priority for climate change mitigation.
In addition to the oxygen we breathe, trees provide us with countless additional benefits: they help clean our water, provide building materials and beyond, and help create millions of jobs worldwide.
The exciting news is we can always plant more trees. Planting trees is one of the best strategies for climate change mitigation, but since most of us don’t plant trees in our daily lives, we can instead promote those who do, and while at it, contribute to climate change mitigation methods:
Plant A Tree Without Actually Planting A Tree
Ecosia has been my default search engine for the last few months. I freed myself from some of my Google dependency. I find all I need, and the more I use it, the more trees are planted. About 80% of Ecosia’s profit goes to organizations that plant trees. Not only that, their servers run entirely on renewable energy, and they even built their own solar plants.
One growing dependency of ours while staying home during the fall of 2020, is online shopping. We can continue our regular online shopping habits while increasing the world’s number of trees by using TreeClicks.
Shopping your favorite online shops such as Amazon, eBay, and Ikea through TreeClicks will plant a tree for every purchase you make and track how many trees you are responsible for planting. If you choose Amazon, make sure you purchase their recent climate pledge friendly ideas and products.
Numerous online fashion stores promote tree plantings. Tree Tribe, for example, is responsible for more than 460,000 trees already, and tentree plants ten trees per item sold.
You can also plant trees by paying for all of your online shopping using a TreeCard. Powered by Ecosia, TreeCard will plant one tree for every $60 payment you make, and 80% of its profit will go toward Ecosia’s reforestation projects.
You can also do this yourself. If you own a business and want to pay back to earth, you can join treeapp to offset your business’ carbon footprints by planting trees, or you can partner with an organization that will do the actual planting for you. Here are popular organizations:
Most of these organizations also take donations. Some nonprofits accept minimum contributions of $1 and plant trees in return. Here is a couple:
Yet another option is buying your own tree from EcoTree and enjoying 100% of the profit made by your tree after being sustainably harvested. While your tree is growing, you can track its value, visit it, and show it to others.
There is no doubt a global reforestation trend has formed in recent years. We commend the commitment to planting 1 trillion trees by the year 2030.
keep cool. build resilience. eampact.
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