Team Trees

The idea started on May 24, 2019, when a fan suggested on Reddit that MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) should plant 20 million trees to celebrate reaching 20 million subscribers on YouTube.[10][3] The idea spread across YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, mostly in the form of memes.[2][3] The idea may have been related to the 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires. American YouTuber, engineer, and inventor Mark Rober partnered directly with Donaldson to launch the fundraiser. On October 25, 2019, Donaldson uploaded a YouTube video explaining his plan,[11][12] which claimed the top spot on YouTube's trending page, and caused numerous YouTubers to join the movement.[3][13]

Notable YouTubers who have donated including PewDiePie,[14][15] Rhett & Link,[2] Marshmello,[2] iJustine,[2] Marques Brownlee,[2] The Slow Mo Guys,[2] Ninja,[2][14] Simone Giertz,[2] Jacksepticeye,[2][16] Smarter Every Day, Mark Rober,[2] Simply Nailogical, The King of Random, Dude Perfect,[17] The Try Guys, Alan Becker,[14][18] Alan Walker,[19][20] TheOdd1sOut [21] Linus Tech Tips,[22] Jeffree Star[14][23][24] and Jaiden Animations. Entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk,[25][26] Tobias Lütke,[27][28] Marc Benioff,[14][29] Susan Wojcicki,[14][30] Jack Dorsey,[14][31] and Jean-Michel Lemieux[14][32] have also donated and promoted the campaign.

The trees will be planted "in a variety of forests on public and private lands in areas of great need" starting in January 2020. The goal is to have them planted "no later than December 2022".[2][3]

Many YouTubers created content to capitalize on the growing trend of Team Trees;[3] despite the Arbor Day Foundation reaching out to only a few hundred creators, Team Trees is now featured in over 8,000 videos from over 420 global creators.[33] Across Instagram and Twitter over 556,001 posts have garnered more than 4.6 billion views.[34] Creators were able to uniquely inspire their audience to become donors and supporters of Team Trees through their relationships with their fans.[33]

In addition to social media influencers, large corporations made large donations including Verizon,[14][35] EA,[36][37] Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Shopify (CEO Tobias Lutke[14][27][28] and CTO Jean-Michel Lemieux[14][29]) and Tesla (Elon Musk).[14][23][25][26][12]

Discovery Channel made a documentary called #TeamTrees about the campaign which aired on December 3, 2019, coupled with a donation of USD $100,203 the next day.[38]

Team Trees has also received substantial criticism from some, primarily regarding its effectiveness and whether or not the science behind the recapture of atmospheric carbon with trees is adequate. YouTuber Thunderf00t put the effect of planting 20 million trees into perspective, by showing that 40 million trees needed to be planted per day just to offset the carbon footprint of the USA.[39] That would come down to close to 15 billion trees per year for the United States alone. In the video, Thunderf00t also addressed global warming and climate change denial.

Climate scientist Dr. Simon Clark criticized it based on his fear of the self-licensing effect, which states that one's positive moral action makes them tend to worry less about future negative moral actions. As applied to Team Trees, Clark mentioned that someone who donates to the fundraiser may feel justified to perform other actions that might completely offset the carbon reduction obtained by planting the trees. As an example, he mentions how the carbon reductions from an entire lifetime of 20 trees could also be achieved by going vegan for six years, or could be completely negated by taking only four round-trip flights from western Europe to the western coast of the United States. Clark also attempted to put into perspective just how little of an effect Team Trees would have relative to the amount of carbon emitted annually. With the estimation of 20 million trees removing one million tons of carbon from the atmosphere over a century, Clark indicated, this is only a thousandth of the billion tons of carbon that we release every single year.[40]

Eike Lüdeling, the department head of horticultural sciences at the University of Bonn, stated, "It turns out that many of these seedlings, if you don't do this well or if people do it who don’t really care about those trees, then they all just die quickly. Sometimes it’s probably a better idea to plant fewer trees and really take care of them." Danny Cohn, the director of public relations for the Arbor Day Foundation, addressed these concerns in saying that "the partners who work with the organization are all required to have plans to help their trees thrive."[41]

Adam Rogers, writing in Wired, described more issues with attempting to combat climate change by planting trees. Much of the article is a response to an article published in Science regarding the potential for drawing carbon out of the atmosphere via a colossal restoration of forested land. Rogers indicated that technical comments left on the article after its publication heavily criticized its logic, which included substantially underestimating the amount of carbon absorbed by the ocean and overestimating the amount of carbon absorbed by trees. Rogers quotes Carla Staver, an ecologist at Yale University who wrote, "We're not talking about small errors here. We're talking about a huge difference in the total amount of carbon you could sequester." Staver emphasizes that while planting trees may be a popular and partially helpful solution, it's far from a truly sufficient solution and it's more important to focus on addressing the ways in which we emit carbon.[42]

On December 19, 2019, Team Trees raised 20 million dollars, reaching their funding goal.[51] As of October 2020, while they had to cancel 10% of their projects due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they have managed to plant 4.6 million trees of their 7 million tree goal for 2020.[9]

• Official website