I read a reddit exchange from a while back that captured this feeling (thread is on an article about a large reforestation project;) After getting my environmental studies degree I arrived at the same conclusion (more or less.) Which doesn’t mean I don’t contribute financially, but a day doesn’t go by that I don’t read some horror story.
Post 1:
It’s a positive contribution but in the scheme of things people are going to need to get a lot more involved. To help put it into some perspective: According to wikipedia “Between May 2000 and August 2006, Brazil lost nearly 150,000 square kilometers of forest”, or 23,696.68 sq kilometres a year over the period. A soccer pitch must measure a minimum of 45 x 90 metres, and therefore would have a minimum area of 4,050 m2. 30,000 football pitches would therefore cover a minimum area of 121,500,000 m2 or 121.5 square kilometres. 121.5 sq km is approximately 1.83 days of rainforest replaced.
Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research suggested 2,000,000 acres were lost between July and August 2015/2016 or 8,094 sq km. At that rate, the 30,000 football fields would replace 5.47 days. And, around the world we are losing 80,000 acres and degrading a further 80,000 acres a day. That’s 647 sq kilometres a day destroyed or degraded. This measure will replace 4.5 hours. I’ll let someone else come along and correct my stab or make it more accurate.
Reply 1:
I was excited but after reading this I’m now hopeless.
Reply 2:
You should be. The sad truth is that there is actually no hope of arresting, let alone reversing, environmental damage. Knowing this rapidly leads to fatalism. The environmental movement are aware of this, and wisely avoid the kind of contextual information that the guy doing the back of an envelope calculation at the top of this thread provided - they know it makes people feel despair.
This is not to say we should do nothing. But we should continue to expect everything to get worse - a lot worse - for the rest of our lives. We have made not one iota of progress in reducing emissions, ending habitat destruction, deforestation or altering the course of climate change. Nothing has been achieved in thirty five years of effort. Only, perhaps at most, a marginal reduction in the rate at which this damage is accelerating.:
