Adjusting to the 2020 climate can be challenging. In the first three days, news about Australia’s bush fires was trending everywhere. For myself and many others, climate change and the fate of the planet was very much in mind.
Every day it feels like the world is getting closer to ending.
I remember back to third grade when we were reading about rainforests being destroyed and orangutans having no place to live. What will happen to our planet in the near future?
Everything happening and being reported in the news can feel so polarizing and harrowing.
While trying to learn about how I could contribute to the planet, I stumbled on the internet browser Ecosia.
Ecosia is a search engine like Google and Bing that makes money from ad revenue and uses it to plant trees around the world. All it takes is switching out a current search engine with Ecosia.
For every web search made, it contributes to planting trees. It takes roughly 45 searches to plant a tree and as a busy college student I search that many times in a day.
Currently, 81 million trees have been planted in over 9,000 planting sites around the world.
Planting trees by switching search engines seemed too good to be true.
When I started using Ecosia I had so many questions about the company. Is this a scam, was revenue really going toward planting trees, how can a company exist without corrupt intentions?
Ecosia is legitimate and is planting trees every second. Because earning trust on the internet can be hard, they publish monthly financial reports and tree planting receipts. Ecosia has also been featured in articles for The Guardian, Forbes and Scientific American for all the good it has done.
As well as planting trees, Ecosia also works on improving communities.
Ecosia has provided income to local farmers by giving them coffee and tree nuts plants to later sell. They have also created havens for chimpanzees much more.
They also respect privacy and don’t sell data to third parties or advertisers.
While using Ecosia I have helped plant roughly five trees. Although it doesn’t seem like a lot, I do plan on using Ecosia permanently and I know there’s more planting to come. It feels really great knowing I can have my data protected while also helping out the environment by doing work for school and performing endless searches run into while using Ecosia, is it requires more searching than Google and other search engines.
Ecosia is a really great company to support, and it is super convenient being able to help the environment with just a web search. Being something we do every day, it is truly genius and a great way to make the world a little greener.
Emily Pearce can be reached at [email protected]