What If I Told You That You Can Plant Trees From Your Couch?

Yes, you read that right! You can even plant trees during your morning commute or while sitting on the crapper.

So "how on earth would that work" and "why should I care" you ask? Well, it's actually pretty easy and has a real potential to do some good.

Here is how it works: There is a search engine called Ecosia that re-invests 80% of their advertising profits in forestation projects a​​round the world. According to Ecosia it takes about 45 searches in order to generate enough funds to plant one tree. Imagine if only one million people worldwide were using this engine. Even if they only searched for one cat video a day it means that more than 8 million trees are planted every year. It is Ecosia's objective to fund the plantation of one billion trees by 2020.

There is even a small counter that displays the number of your searches at the top of the page to visualize how many trees you helped to fund:

Ecosia is supporting reforestation projects in the 25 most endangered forest ecosystems in countries like Indonesia, Peru or Madagascar. The way the projects are funded is fully transparent and the process is well explained on their website. The financial results are being publicized on a monthly basis in conjunction with an overview of the funds that were allocated to certain projects.

Of course I would not recommend using anything that I have not tested myself. I usually use Google Chrome and admittedly was very skeptical at first. After learning that there is a chrome extension (also available for Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera) though I gave it a whirl and was positively surprised. My browser now works almost as well as my old Chrome version and even kept my bookmarks and other information I had saved. Of course Google is still quicker at producing more results and does a better job at incorporating various pieces of supporting information like reviews or locations - basically saving you another click or search. Other than that, Ecosia does a great job in my opinion. You can still keep using Google Maps or Bing by the way - depending on your preference.

I decided to use Ecosia as my search engine and am very happy with it. I believe it is a cause worth supporting even if it means having to wait an extra second for the best search result or having to spend an extra click every now and then.

In case you decide to give Ecosia a try and for some reason get tired of it and want to go back to your old browser version or search engine you can easily remove the extension again (find out more here).