Using Drones to Plant 20,000,000 Trees

these massive drones are attempting to plant 20 million trees from the sky but find out how I ended up here in the middle of this forest we need to go back six months because that's when mr. bees hit 20 million subs and someone suggested to celebrate he should plant 20 million trees it went super viral on Reddit and Twitter at which point someone else suggested he should team up with me and a bunch of other youtubers to make it happen which got me thinking and so with that these guys are talking a big game like they know what they're doing but go do it impromptu pull tests first of all I don't love the angle can I just say that Wow [Music] we've been planning all day solid eight hours we're up to like 250 trees so I mean it's a start definitely a start can you say look who's the dirtiest I saw you rubbing my bat kills there's a field of trees 300 you know after a full day of planning 300 less than 20 million so after talking it over we decided we would play to our strengths Jimmy was gonna try and solve our problem with a tweet recruiting thousands of people and I was gonna pursue a more robotic station and so with that I made my way further up the coast of Washington using a shortcut I knew to see if I can uncover a way to plant trees from the sky but before I get into that have you ever thought about where trees actually get their mass from the knee-jerk reaction is to think it comes from the soil but that can't be true because if you have a tree in a big pot as the tree gets bigger the soil level doesn't go down at all the answer as it turns out is that the mass comes from thin air the clues if you look at what the bulk of the tree is actually made of it's almost entirely carbon pretend I'm a tree basically a tree sees a carbon dioxide molecule floating by then it powers up your energy from the Sun using photosynthesis then it uses that energy to rip the carbon from the oxygen and it takes that carbon and slaps it on itself to get more swoll and the trees like hey humans here's some beautiful fresh oxygen you can have that I don't need it so it takes the sea and leaves us with the o2 that's a sweet deal and so trees start really small but in order to get bigger and bigger they're just sucking more and carbon out of the air so now you can see a tree and appreciate the beauty in the shade but also that they're just these really massive vacuum bags completely stuffed full of carbon and so I was in Washington to meet with some people who had a crazy idea that just might be the key to helping mr. beast and I plant those twenty million carbon vacuums well the company's called drones EDA and they're only about four years old and their idea is to use these massive drones to plant trees from the sky they do this in two steps first they send out a smaller recon drone that uses lasers to create a 3d map of the terrain and then from that that you software to find all the best spots to drop the trees to maximize their survivability and then they create a flight path for each of the drones to fly autonomously then you load up the drone with a bunch of these seed pucks that you'll drop from the sky and their design is super clever too because in each puck represented by a hockey puck in this case there's a special cocktail of around six seeds specifically chosen for the area where they're planning and then you have nutrients sort of like a fertilizer that will help the seed grow and keep it from drying out and because you don't want to put two squirrels or my is just making a buffet out of all the CG drop you need some way to condition them to give the whole experience just a one star review the ghost peppers they're an Olaf actor and gustatory deterrent which means if you eat it you know the obvious reaction and on the way out is the same thing I talked about last night at some gustatory and then once you secure the puck dropper to the drone it's time to fly light the fires kick the tires [Music] [Music] like mechanized poop in some ways this sort of like mimics mother nature right because like a bird eats a seed it flies it poops it and there's like nourishment around that seed yes that's exactly what it is biomimicry and this is brutal terrain you wouldn't be wanting to walk down in here so real the access is from the sky is a really big deal after wildfires we used to rely on Mother Nature to do reforestation for us but due to some factors related to climate change 40% of the time now we're seeing tall shrubs grow back instead of big old trees that can literally suck up tons of carbon and that's an example where drones are perfect because they can get in right away and start planting trees in the smoldering remains where it's too dangerous for humans to be on the ground even with only three drones you can reef or San areas six times faster than a normal planting crew if you can nail a fleet like this with just three you can just scale this up you can imagine the potential where you know you have a swarm of a hundred drones the worked Road seat is doing is awesome it gives me so much hope when I see people use really cool technology to solve really big problems but they're still fine-tuning their system before they massively scale up so they just aren't going to be able to help us plant the 20 million trees in time which is why we've been talking with all our YouTube creator friends for the past five months and we decided if we were actually going to plant 20 million trees by 2020 you need to bring the entire YouTube community together I'm stoked let's plant some trees it could be one of the craziest things that YouTube is embassy there's so many people we could end up with too many trees we're calling it team trees and we went through a bunch of different options on how to pull this off and eventually settled on working with the Arbor Day Foundation they're the longest running most well-respected tree planting nonprofit and we made a deal with them that for every dollar we give them they would plant one tree it's basically magic and I had to prove that to my buddy Thomas it's a dollar I'm gonna call my buddy Zach King here Zach king oh hi mark hey Zach we've got a dollar for you oh okay so you take the dollar put in some dirt and then pull oh you get a tree oh wow it's like and so despite mine and mr. beets best effort we need your help because to play of 20 million trees we're really looking to raise twenty million dollars that's just an insane goal especially when you only have two short ones to pull it off but starting today you're going to see the entire YouTube community come together on this like you've never seen before I would plant at least a couple of trees the reason I'm most excited about this is it feels like the end of Power Rangers when they would all assemble into the big thing and fight stuff together and do good this will absolutely be historic and we need you on Team trees this is our chance to end this decade on a super strong note it's a constructive way to tell the policymakers that this generation and our community on YouTube truly cares about the environment is basically all of us joining together to give a massive fist bump to freaking mother Kirk I personally will be planting 50,000 trees by donating $50,000 but that's still way less than 20 million so join me and mr. beast and all your favorite YouTube creators by clicking that blue button right over there and planting as many trees as you can afford right now we honestly need you if you're working adults consider how many trees you willing to plants to send a message your kid talk to your parents about this get creative and do some chores to earn some money ask for some freaking trees for Christmas you can pick up twenty-minute soda cans and then recycle them and that's one more tree that will exist in the world that if you wouldn't have done that this is all hands on deck so either click that blue button or go to team trees org and turn your dollars into trees and then for like the next two months make sure you like and DoubleTap and retweet anything having to do with team trees and harass your favorite creators to join if they somehow haven't already and so now in exchange for joining team trees if you've ever wondered how we really know climate change is occurring stick with me for two minutes because I'm gonna break it down real simple using this column of ice a while back scientists went down to Antarctica and drilled out a bunch of ice cores like this and what's cool is that because ice layers up over time the really old ice is at the bottom and the newer ice is on top as you know ice traps air bubbles so as you move your way down the column you get these little pristine pockets of air going back and talk what they found is that co2 levels in the atmosphere naturally fluctuate from about 200 to 300 but then starting with the Industrial Revolution we started burning way more coal which is made from dead trees and we started burning down forests for resources to keep pace with a growing population the problem with both of these is we're taking all this carbon that was in the ground in these massive carbon vacuum bags and we're putting it back into the air at a super unnatural rate so much so that around 1950 we busted into the 300s for the first time in at least a million years and we weren't done yet because just four years ago in 2015 we broke into the 400s when I started writing the script for this video we were at 411 today we're at 412 and this is the actual curd data from NASA's excellent website which does a great job laying out all the data they've gathered on climate change a lot of my old friends at NASA played a role in collecting this data now here's the punchline and why all of this matters if you independently look at average temperature over the past million years and then overlay it with average co2 in the atmosphere they match up pretty much exactly so this relatively sudden spike of all the co2 in the air is not a good thing and sure enough right now we are consistently breaking the hottest month on Earth Records which has a lot of knock-on effects which will start snowballing unless we can band together and reverse the trend and it's important to note with regards to team trees that 20 million trees by 2020 isn't going to cure climate change but step in the right direction and a constructive positive way to send the message that we see the science and we care so thanks for watching and thanks for doing your part to make a difference I am so stoked we totally got this I want to give a massive shout out to Wick's who supported the making of this video I warned them that this was going to be the worst converting ad read in history because I was going to send everyone a way to donate before I got to this part so to the five of you that made it this far please make a mental Dona brain right here under the week's category that says they're one of the good guys and I love them and I've been using them for several years now not just because they're good humans that care about the earth but because they have the best platform for making beautiful websites quickly and efficiently to demonstrate how efficient it is to use all the drag and drop tools I recreated the team trees website from scratch as you can see I can delete or select and resize or drag any element on the page and then you could always preview to see how things would look to a visitor on your site I'm using the Wix payment feature here which is also super user friendly to set up there are plenty of other built-in options as well like putting a social feed on your site and if you want to get real fancy corvid by Wix lets you create super customized elements think of all the trees you could save if you just tell people to visit your website instead of printing out paper brochures so to create your own personal Wix website go to wix.com slash go slash mark rover or use the link of the video description thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 14,178,629

Rating: 4.9493637 out of 5

Keywords: #teamtrees, trees, plant trees, mr. beast, arbor day, tree, 20M trees, 20M trees by 2020, mark rober

Id: U7nJBFjKqAY

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Drap303]

2018: plant trees with shovels

2019: plant trees with drones

[u/NegentigMinutenLang]

Interested to see how this goes. $20m is a huge target but would be really incredible to see YouTube come together to hit that goal.

[u/SealCub-ClubbingClub]

My phone just lit up with notifications as half of educational YouTube uploaded. So hype.

[u/[deleted]]

www.teamtrees.org

[u/Azurae1]

I love that he also included a short educational part about climate change and especially CO2 levels in the atmosphere. TeamTrees a great idea, hope it takes off and we reach 20 million or more.

[u/hardnofap]

I spent 7 years planting trees in British Columbia, Canada. The area he’s planting with the drones is a clear cut. On average 5 months over 7 years I planted about 100,000 trees each planting season, as a job. We made about 12-14 cents a tree. That was a job that we thought could never be automated.

The entire camp during one season would plant about 2 million trees. I think that’s an average for most trees planting camps in B.C. multiply that by 3 camps in the company and you have 6 million trees planted on average. A camp consisted of about 50 - 60 people. From when I was working I would say there were about a dozen tree planting companies in the central interior BC. Some bigger than others.

I think this is all really cool. I have my reservations in terms of tree planting as it’s not a perfect system, but I think it’s better than nothing. I also would hate to see the job become automated. I think it’s a great character building job. When you meet someone who’s eaten dirt for a few years there’s a connection there that I don’t get anywhere else with strangers.

[u/i_just_blue-myself]

At work, didnt watch vid yet, was Cody's Lab mentioned at all?

edit: I didnt know it was a collab thing. But I do remember CL using drones.

[u/Bagelstein]

Im usually one of those grumpy ass naysayers, but fuck, I like this. The video was great and the simple, science explanations were solid, and theres no bigger cause for our time. $20 donated, if my negative ass can get behind this, so can yours.

[u/icyflakes]

I feel like a lot of people are confusing the 20 million initiative and the drones. The drone planting isn't being used for the goal - it was just an interesting topic to introduce the initiative.

20 million trees will be planted manually by the Arbor foundation.