It was probably inevitable, as the restoration economy increasingly became mainstream: Amazon customers can now use their voice to plant trees around the world.
During Earth Month, Amazon teamed up with One Tree Planted, the restorative environmental non-profit that we’ve featured before here in REVITALIZATION. They support reforestation around the world.
Customers in the United States with an Alexa-enabled device can now say “Alexa, grow a tree” to donate $1 to plant one tree through One Tree Planted.
Trees obviously play a vital role in creating clean air and water, maintaining a healthy climate, and providing habitats for wildlife.
Increasing tree cover is crucial to both restoring our global climate, and to reducing the deadly heat island effect in many cities.
That’s why Amazon is making it simple for Alexa customers to help support reforestation efforts by donating a tree just by using their voice.
Customers can also keep track and view how many trees they help to plant through their Amazon Pay account.
Amazon is also donating $1 million to One Tree Planted. This donation will help the nonprofit plant a total of 1 million trees, starting in April through December 2022, to make a restorative global impact around the world.
The initial reforestation projects include:
- Surface mine restoration in Appalachia: This project helps support the reforestation of approximately 34 acres of surface mined land in Centre County, Pennsylvania, which is unable to naturally regenerate on its own.
- Forest fire restoration in California: The Forest Health Project is a restoration program implemented on privately owned lands with the Mendocino National Forest impacted by the 2018 forest fires in Northern California’s Colusa County. With these funds, hard-working foresters will dedicate time to promote improved vegetation planning and resource management, helping to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires and floods in the region.
- Fruit trees to fight hunger in India: This project will plant and nurture fruit trees with smallholder farmers in marginalized communities across the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Odisha, and West Bengal in India. These fruit trees will help participating farmers create sustainable livelihoods and provide nutritious food to their families and communities.
- Orca whale protection in the Pacific Northwest: The endangered Southern Resident Orcas have lived for millennia in a stretch of Pacific Ocean from Northern California to British Columbia. Planting trees along rivers and streams of the Pacific Northwest restores critical habitat for salmon, the primary food source of the endangered whales.
One Tree Planted has planted over 40 million trees in more than 43 countries since 2014, with 23.5 million planted in 2021 alone.
The organization’s vision is to make planting trees available to everyone in an effort to collectively restore forests, regenerate biodiversity, and make a revitalizing social impact around the world.
One Tree Planted is also an AmazonSmile organization, meaning Amazon customers can automatically donate to One Tree Planted while shopping with Amazon through smile.amazon.com, which offers the same products, prices, and shopping experience as Amazon.com.
Image by eko pramono from Pixabay.