Wouldn’t it be awesome to help plant trees by simply using a search engine?  Since 2009, the German-based company Ecosia has been doing just that.  With the power of Microsoft’s Bing, Ecosia is an extension compatible with many web-browsers which makes Ecosia the default search engine.

Whenever a search engine is used, a small profit is generated for the company owning the engine through advertisements when a link is clicked.  For Microsoft and Google, these profits go to the growth of their respective companies.  However with Ecosia, 80% of their profits go towards planting trees!  In fact, Ecosia has planted over 6 million trees since 2009 all because everyday people simply searched for everyday things using their search engine.  My favorite feature on the website is their “Tree Counter” which displays the estimated amount of trees you have helped plant by using Ecosia (I’m over 50 trees just over the course of a couple of months).
With all of the searches which happen on campus everyday, we can help plant thousands of trees incredibly quickly if we could make this the default browser on campus.  The quality of the searches would be exactly the same as Bing, and we would be helping a cause which puts the planet before profits.  Perhaps more importantly, it will encourage students to download Ecosia on their personal computers so the idea of Ecosia will spread off campus to the community as well.
The link to their website is www.Ecosia.org.  I hope everybody takes a minute to check it out!