Monday, March 15, 2010

Low impact blogging

coupons and shopping carbon neutral with kaufDA.de As a form of communication, blogging (and all that other stuff on the internet) is fairly environmentally friendly. Trees are not cut down to produce paper to print our posts, fuel-hungry trucks are not used to deliver these articles and stories to our many(!) readers and there is no trash to add to landfills. However, there is still the unappreciated cost associated with energy consumption for all the hours of researching, writing, and being read. The energy for all this electronic activity mainly comes from fossil fuels, meaning that my blogging has a carbon footprint.

Not anymore. No, we did not go nuclear. Rather, the ingenious people behind Mach's grun have started a great program. For writing this post about them, their 'make it green' campaign and the Arbor Day Foundation will plant a tree in Plumas National Forest in northern California. In 2007, a devastating forest fire destoyed 65,000 ha. By choosing to blog green, at least one more tree is planted. I will feel better knowing that there will be tree exhaling oxygen for our blog.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

What about natural succession?

In all seriousness... what about succession? I get that people want to make an impact, but when we think about conservation priorities (especially species diversity) do we want a forest replanted with late successional trees of few species?

I don't know much about this topic, but might it be better to just cordon off the area, give it 10+ years and let nature take its course?

Hope to see you at http://www.eeb.utoronto.ca/undergraduate/workshop