By: Anna Liu

If you’ve been on the Internet recently, you’ve probably seen, or at least heard of, a very extreme, daring project: #TeamTrees, which is a campaign launched by YouTuber MrBeast and a former NASA engineer Mark Rober. To celebrate reaching 20 million subscribers, MrBeast teamed up with Mark Rober to plant 20 million trees, an idea highly requested by his fans. Although this may sound daunting, they have each come up with several ideas  and methods on how they can achieve this. For example, Mark Rober is using drones to plant seeds, and MrBeast has been attempting to enlist the help of his bountiful subscribers and followers in order to make this seemingly impossible goal, possible. 

Now, onto the aftereffects of this plan. Will actually planting 20 million trees change anything? Is it worth it? We know that trees are beneficial and help the environment, but wouldn’t planting such an excessive amount of trees in a short time period take away much-needed land space for our overgrowing population? It’s 20 million trees, after all. Trees can take up a lot of space, and chances are most of them will get cut down anyway, due to an increasing demand for wood products, especially large-scale manufacturing companies that need wood. In this case, planting such an excessive amount of trees will only feed these large companies, unintentionally encouraging and supporting these tree-cutting businesses. 

Now, I know what you may be thinking: Trees are good, and they help the environment! Yes, I agree, however, large-scale planting of trees, especially if they’re concentrated in certain areas, will only lead to more lumberjacks. This situation would be very different if each person were to plant their own tree, however, since they would be spread out, and have a larger effect on our world overall. It is also interesting to note that, unless otherwise stated, most of these trees will be planted in the USA, in a similar geographic location. Although planting trees may be better than not planting any at all, this should be noted since it shows how this campaign isn’t global, it’s only in the USA. Thus, a better idea would be to have each person(or subscriber) plant a tree, so the locations of the trees would be spread out and so the benefits of planting trees could occur all over the world, instead of being focused only in the USA. 

The verdict? You should take part in this challenge if you can, and you should also plant some trees on your own. Not only would it help the environment, but you could help reverse the detrimental effects of climate change.

Let’s plant 20 million trees!