Ecosia is a search engine that aggregates search results from multiple other search engines. The ad revenue from our searches funds the planting of trees worldwide. With over 200 million trees planted so far, Ecosia have learned to be fully transparent about their projects, and financials which are available right on that website. Set it as your default search engine, and start planting trees. They also recently released a Chromium based browser if that’s your thing - TechCrunch article for reference.
There are many legitimate reasons to not use ecosia, and yes, from the ecological perspective.
Planting trees has shown to be not as effective at curbing the effects of climate change as previously thought. Contrary to popular belief, the oceans have a much larger effect on our climate than our forests, and we aren’t doing nearly enough to clean those up because the task would require us to fundamentally change the way we farm, fish, and obtain oil (i.e. pretty much stop everything we’re currently doing).
This isn’t to say planting trees doesn’t have some benefit, but there are much better ways to curb your CO² emissions which you can see at the end of this rant/post.
Sneak peak though, if you eat meat, and actually give a fuck about the forests, perhaps you should stop consuming animals. Eating meat in particular is directly related to deforestation, as often deforestation is done to make room for massive CAFOs, which even if the deforestation didn’t occur, would still significantly contribute to climate change.
Ecosia’s funding comes from advertisements, which incentivizes consumption, which itself contributes to climate change innately. Every purchase you make, every meal you eat, every time you travel by automobile, airplane, or petroleum powered boat, contributes to the ever growing mass of CO2.
Advertisements and marketing exacerbate climate change by cultivating a never ending consumerist desire for products that are almost entirely produced using a petroleum derived process and/or packaged in petroleum derived plastic, resulting in the consumerist behavior being inherently responsible for climate change.
Ecosia is a moldy old band aid on a gushing neck wound that honestly is causing more harm than good by distracting people from the real source of the climate crisis, which is modern capitalism and the resulting consumerism.
Actually fighting climate change requires more of you than some passive empty gesture. Here’s a bullet point list of things you can do today to make a real difference:
There is a reason climate scientists are increasingly becoming climate activists. This is not something you can buy, recycle, or search engine your way out of.
As I’ve pointed out, there simply are far more impactful ways you can make a difference today than using a search engine that gets in bed with marketers and advertisers all in order to make relatively empty gestures while playing nice with corporations that, I guarantee you, are far more interested in pursuing business as usual than preserving the planet for their own children, let alone you and me.
I think you completely missed the point. The relevant question is not if there are better ways to reduce one’s negative impact (because obviously there are) and also not if Ecosia is perfect (because obviously it is not). The relevant question is how much environmental damage using Ecosia does compared to using other search engines and how good the search results are.
It is very effective if done right.
For example, here they are doing a few things right: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)
I don’t know about ecosia though. Just throwing in $0.02
A+ my friend. Solve this one, and you solve most of the others.
However, eating animals isn’t inherently bad on its own. It’s the SCALE at which we do it. Animals have been eating animals since there were animals, and as long as there is a natural balance, this can be a good thing. Factory-farming for billions of humans is where it all falls apart (much earlier than that, actually)
I couldn’t give less of a fuck of humans make it or not, but the Earth and its other inhabitants don’t need to go down with the shitty ship humans built.
I agree with your overall point, though, but I think the main solution to the problem is simply to use a condom. Most of the rest will sort itself out or be much easier to solve after there are less of us.