Protect the Rainforest Wrestle Loggers! Forestle
Yesterday, we took a long, hard, carbon-neutral look at Click4Carbon, an alt that donates part of its proceeds to forestation projects. Today, we’ll take another carbon-neutral look at Forestle, which actually buys up forest with your click. (We ask our readers not to confuse carbon-neutral with Switzerland, which is only neutral when countries decide to blow each other up. Call their hotline to find out if they are also carbon-neutral.)
Now that we’re all clear on the Switzerland issue, Forestle, instead of funding forestation projects, protects existing rainforests by purchasing them. How does this work, you ask? You ask a good question.
It costs around $200(US) to buy one acre (4,047 m² or 4,840 yd²) of rain forest. On average Forestle earns around 0.5 US cents per search. Thus you can save about 0.1 square meter (0.11 yd²) of rainforest with every search at Forestle. This area roughly equals the surface of your computer screen. Since an average Internet user does about 1,000 searches annually. This means you can save more than 100 square meters (109 yd²) of rainforest every year by using Forestle. Here’s a table to demonstrate statistical goodness.
Worried about having to go to Forestle.org to type in a search every time? Worry not. Forestle has search plugin that you can use along with indicators to access numerous search functions. For example, you can type “wikipedia::Donald Duck” to do a Wikipedia search instead of a web search. To download the plugin (which goes right on your toolbar) and see the other cool stuff you can do with it besides searching for Donald Duck on Wikipedia which can only get you so far in life (maybe 5 feet), go to their website and click on the search plugin link.
Forestle is an independent nonprofit website that donates all of its income (minus administrative costs) to their partner organization, The Nature Conservancy, which uses this money in their “adopt an acre” program for sustainable protection of the rainforests.
Financial reports are transparent and are posted on their site.
October 3rd, 2008 at 6:18 am
Unfortunately, Forestle have now had the rug pulled from under thier feet by Google. Try http://www.click4carbon.com in the mean time. They donate money to fun forestation projects globally.