Trees happen to be our closest relatives. What they exhale, we inhale. What we exhale, they inhale. This transaction is on all the time. Whether you are aware of it or not, one half of our pulmonary system is hanging up there right now on a tree. Trees provide so many benefits to our everyday lives. They filter clean air, provide fresh drinking water, help curb climate change, and create homes for thousands of species of plants and animals. Planting a Billion Trees can help save the Earth from deforestation.
Recently, YouTube’s Mr. Beast made his way to create awareness among people on his ambitious project to raise $20 million to plant over 20 million trees across the globe. Each dollar raised will get a tree planted. And now, they’ve managed to generate over $21 million (approximately Rs 149 crores).
YouTube is a free to use service. It is an amazing platform to watch music videos, comedy shows, how to guides, recipes, hacks and more. It is true that raising good quality saplings will be a challenge but the response is phenomenal when the team went on the campaign and people welcomed this because they know it’s an economic solution for their life.
Now, Mr Beast (aka Jimmy Donaldson) is planning to use these funds to plant 21 million trees not just in the United States, but also in countries like Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Mozambique, as well as India.
As per The Arbor Day Foundation,(first reported by The Verge) 100,000 trees will be planted in California, 350,00 in Kenyas Kijabe Forest and 400,000 in South India’s Cauvery River basin by the end of this year.
In May, last year, some people asked Jimmy Donaldson to plant 20 million trees to celebrate his channel reaching 20 million subscribers. Initially, he collaborated with content creators like Mark Rober, Rhett & Link, electronic music artist Marshmello, ASAP Science, among others — and managed to plant only 1700 trees
After seeing the success of this channel, many other YouTubers showed their interest to participate in this channel and came together, with people like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Zack Dorsey, etc. Elon Musk also went on to change his twitter handle name from Elon to Treelon.
During one of the videos promoting the initiative, Jimmy stated, “We only have one Earth and it’s important we take care of it. Recently lots of not so great things have been happening to forests and people just keep making fun of our generation for retweet activism and not actually doing something, which is why we created TeamTrees.org with the help of the Arbor Day Foundation.”
