Save the Trees

In. Out. In Out. That is how we breath. One breath in with oxygen, and one breath out with carbon dioxide. To some this sounds like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo right? Well it shouldn't! Every living thing on this planet needs oxygen to breath and live. Well, almost every living thing. The ones that don't need oxygen are the plants. What they need more than anything else is carbon dioxide.

In Israel, more than three million trees are planted a year. Do you know how amazing that is? It's incredible! Especially since is only 8,550 square miles. In other words, the whole country of Israel including water is just barely bigger than the state of New Jersey! Unreal right?

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has planted more than 240 million trees. A desert wasteland cares more about the sanctity of life and how important trees are to that life than most people. In fact many people donate money to plant those trees so that a part of them will live forever in Israel. At the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, there is a garden full of trees to honor and represent all those who helped to save Jews during that dark time.

But while Israel is planting trees, the Amazon is losing them. The Amazon Rain Forest is located in Brazil and covers about 2.124 million square miles. Most of the world's oxygen is dependent on those trees. Something about the Amazon is full of potent healing powers of the air. Yes we have plants all over the world, but the Amazon is a magical place. In 2019, over 80,000 fires broke out in the Amazon during its dry season which often lasts between July and October.

While fires aren't bad for the environment when the happen naturally, they are harmful to the forests when deforestation has helped to make the landscape a perfect breeding grown for the flames. We cut down those trees for paper and lumber, but mostly they are disappearing to create farmland for our ever growing population. While I'm not sure if the peoples of the Amazon have heard of crop rotation which would in fact help to keep them from cutting down tress and reusing their current farmland or just don't care, it is hurting our world.

In the United States alone, has currently 300 billion trees at least 1-inch in diameter, according to a census in 2019. That doesn't excuse the 3.5 to 7 billion trees that are cut down a year according to 2017. In 2011, paper consumption had increased to over 400 percent. It is far too much as it has surely increased since then in the last nine years. We as an American society attempt to do our best to recycle. In 2012 64.6% of all paper consumed in the U.S. was recycled. We need to do better. Recycled paper can be used to make cardboard and paperboard which is used to make cereal boxes and such. Unfortunately, we cannot recycle every ounce of paper. Sure all paper is biodegradable. But there are things we can do to make it so we don't waste so much paper. If we used recycled paper or FSC Certified paper, it would be better for the environment. We would be able to safe more trees and keep the world a more sustainable place.w

With the ever growing temperatures, rising water levels, and difficulty breathing, we need to be more considerate about what we need to survive. If an animal goes extinct, then it could be it's time. Extinction and evolution are all a part of life as proven by Charles Darwin's studies. But we cannot know for sure what else life will bring us if there is no life on earth left. A study shows that if we continue at the rate we are going, there will be no more trees in 300 years. It seems like such a long time away, but what will that mean for our descendants? Do we really want to leave them with a world that is so desolate and wasted that we can not longer live on it? Do we want the space-aged sci-fi shows and movies like Lost in Space to become reality? Plant more trees, save those we have. Do what you can to make our home, our planet sustainable and livable for generations to come.