It's been a bit quiet around me the last few days. But today it will be all the longer. Because I've literally been working on this for months. Matter of the heart number one, if you will. More important to me than ALS, more important than myself. Because it is so important to me, I ask you to consciously read through these lines. Ten minutes will not be enough. But that doesn't matter. You have four weeks to do it. But we will get to that.
When you read the title, you probably thought to yourself, what nonsense is he talking today? Rainforest in Canada? That doesn't even exist.
Yes, there is.
The west coast of Canada does indeed have a beautiful rainforest to offer. A unique animal world finds its home here. Unlike what we have here in Germany, this is real forest. Primeval forest that stores tons of CO2 in its biomass. Our forests, which are all just afforested, can't compete with that. Tree planting projects in all honour, but until they have a significant positive effect on the climate, it will take decades, during which we will have destroyed many times that amount. Quite apart from the fact that, due to the consequences of man-made climate change, the forests in the entire Mediterranean region are already burning down faster than we will ever be able to reforest that much. People like to make things up. It's easier to live with lies than with reality. But the primeval whale, which could do so much for us, has long since disappeared.
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In the past, I have been blinded a lot by perfidious advertising texts. When booking a Lufthansa flight, you can offset your flight for a few euros extra. So says Lufthansa. Well, the figures differ widely, depending on whom you ask. But every time my girlfriend from the Hamburg area visits me, that should produce about half a tonne of CO2. That sucks. Wasn't that complicated somehow when she was still here. But with about 1,000 km from door to door and rarely more than one day off at a time, What can I do? I can't leave here. F*ck ALS. Not feasible for her by car. And the train in all honour. For a year I tried. Rail just doesn't work and is not an alternative. Full stop. .German rail at best nostalgically reminds me of British Leyland. The English carmaker known for being more "on strike" than on the assembly line.
On my last train journey from Munich to a client in the centre of Hamburg, I not only missed my business appointment. I didn't even arrive on the same day. Oh, what am I talking about, I didn't even arrive at all. We were so late that we were thrown out somewhere in the middle of nowhere with the nice advice that it was too late to go any further. Tomorrow morning the counters would be open again. The complaints would be taken up then. Thank you very much, dear DB. You would be the solution to our ecological passenger transport disaster. But you can't get it together.
Another example. The then new Munich-Nuremberg route to my parents. Supposedly in just over an hour at the destination station with ICE and green electricity. As I said, I tried it for over a year. It must have been much longer, because I didn't have a car for ages. How does the ICE journey feel? I don't know. We rarely arrived in under two hours. We never once managed the promised time, and it's always the others who are to blame. Oh yes, then there's the connecting train to Vach. And from there I had them pick me up by car. My parents live in Herzogenaurach, the world capital of sport. adidas and PUMA were both founded here and still have their headquarters there. INA Schaeffler, whose wheel and ball bearings can be found in practically every moving piece of technology in the world, employs 7,000 people at its headquarters alone. Sueddeutsche awards Herzo the title "World City of Corporations1https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/herzogenaurach-die-neue-hauptstadt-der-konzerne-1.592977.
Let's get to the point. Connection to the rail network? Not a chance. The existing tracks were already rotting away when I still lived there. I must have been one of the last passengers to actually wave goodbye to Herzogenaurach from a train. And today? No train, no S-Bahn, no U-Bahn and not even a tram to connect the mega-outlets with the completely deserted old town. It's a sight for sore eyes.
So we continue to blast vast quantities of CO2 into the air. And that doesn't just apply to the area of transport. I really try to make my life as environmentally neutral as possible. I live vegan, which as an ALS patient with an extreme energy barf is really a tough act to follow. Peas, oats and the like are not subsidised like cow's milk powder from factory farming. So practically every, and I mean every, tube feed consists of mother's milk for calves. It's cheaper than vegetables. Which opens up a whole new dimension. Not only have we produced tons and tons of climate-damaging gases until the first cup of Fresubin ends up in my PEG, but also so much animal suffering that I don't even want to think about it.
I don't expect everyone to suddenly go vegan. It's like smoking. Of course I knew there wasn't a single argument for it. Everything you tell yourself is bullshit and only comes from convenience, selfishness and ignorance. And especially out of ignorance, which in turn is a consequence of convenience, egoism and ignorance. Is that why I quit smoking? Nope. I haven't. Health risks aside. A single cigarette butt contains so many toxins that it can try a ton of groundwater and poison animals. I didn't realise that. According to the WHO, so many burnt cigarettes end up in nature every year that I had to count twice to see if there were really that many zeros. Yes, there are: 5,000,000,000,000.2https://www.br.de/radio/bayern1/kippen-wegwerfen-umwelt-100.html. From that point of view, I would never have dared to flick a fag out of the window.
We have so many ecological disasters going on, if you really want to do something, it's hard to say what the right thing is. Planting a tree doesn't really help. Just my opinion.
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I'm certainly not going to make you a vegan or a non-smoker. You have to work that out for yourself. This whole "militant veganism" is also bullshit in my eyes. It was never the idea of veganism to demonise everything animal. It's about avoiding animal suffering. I would go so far as to say that it is about avoiding unnecessary animal suffering. No kidding now, I still get really nauseous today when I think about how I used to insanely love eating octopus. As I now know, one of the most intelligent creatures on this planet. Including us. Too sick, that's all.
There are many things you can tackle. If you overcome yourself and muster the energy.
Or you can donate. A simple way to ease your conscience. But even that is not so easy. If you want to do just a little bit more than soothe your conscience, a little bit more than pure egoistic self-gratification, you quickly come up against a question. Who can I trust? Don't misunderstand, I'm not spreading conspiracy theories. As I said at the beginning, I let myself be blinded.
In the case of a geothermal power plant, I think my money arrived and maybe even did a little bit in terms of sustainability. I have my doubts about the solar cookers for Africa. In the end, every non-profit organisation has to be financed, and the big ones have immense costs for marketing and self-administration that have to be financed somehow. I'm not naming names, because it's good that they exist. But have you ever noticed how many plastic packages that are guaranteed not to be environmentally friendly have the logo of an environmental protection NGO on them? That's about as ridiculous as an MSC seal or any other on your can of tuna. There are no animal-friendly fishing methods. The seal itself states that it is purely a self-commitment by the fishing companies. It is not audited. This is not even possible for the small amounts of cents that are collected per printed MSC seal. If we are honest, we know that. And yet when we buy something, we look for the emblem with the happy dolphins. Well, I do. At the time.
However, the crowning touch to the delusion I fell victim to came directly from an oil giant. I thought it would be a good idea for my company to become a member of the "BL Target Zero" programme with the ARAL Fleet Management framework agreement. Sounds great. Although English is my mother tongue, I didn't realise what target neutral actually means in German. "Target neutral", that is. No one said that the extra money for each tank of fuel would compensate for anything. While I am lulled into the belief that we are offsetting CO2 - and we are not even doing that - the parent company BP is fighting Sea Shepherd. Because they are the only ones who will stand in BP's way, no matter what the cost. Sea Shepherd, for example, stopped BP from ruining forever one of our planet's most important ecosystems, the Great Australian Bight. So yes, Sea Shepherd deserved our support. But for what I have in mind today, somehow not the most appropriate. I have something else in mind. I'm planning an experiment. Something big.
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I have spent a lot of time researching over the past few weeks. Besides Sea Shepherd and the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, I kept getting stuck on two projects. For my birthday in four weeks, I want something that is proven to improve the climate. And I want it today. Not maybe in 30 years, and not tomorrow. But today, tomorrow and forever. Something that doesn't fizzle out and something that I can control myself. That seems to be a pretty tough sell for everyone. Again, without naming names, my one-time favourite has kicked himself out of the game after not even receiving a reply to my three requests for months. That's just really sad. It's really not easy to do good for our planet.
All the more reason to give you the opportunity on my birthday to do something really good that I am convinced of without a single minute of research work. And I'm really working extraordinarily hard on the subject.
Exactly. We buy rainforest. And really old ones at that. The trees are about a thousand years old and can easily live that long again if we don't destroy them. But that's not all. I have a plan. Those who know me know that I don't do things by halves.
There is an NGO called Wilderness International, they have quite a sophisticated concept, I think. How come you've never heard of it? That's exactly the point. Because there is no budget for advertising. Only 5 % of the donations go to administration and 38 % is spent on the actual land purchase, notarisation, land registration and official stuff. The vast majority, however, is used for real sustainability work, the cooperation with the "locals" who take care of the long-term protection of nature there. Investments are made in research and education, which I personally consider to be the key to success. There is no sustainable point in buying rainforest somewhere if it then becomes the victim of palm oil plantations for our KitKat (from Nestlé, by the way). People need to understand why these forests are so important to us. I'm not quite sure how you would calculate that, probably more of an educated guess. I consider these very forests next to the oceans to be the most important ecosystem on our planet. While it's hard to put a figure on the ocean, it's easy with the rainforest. I can even see it on Google Maps.
Wilderness International refinances the advance land purchases through donations. And here's the cool part. For every share, you get geo-coordinate-referenced aerial photos and a certificate that is also certified with exact coordinates. So I can actually go and show my godchild where he can look up on Google Maps in twenty years' time which rainforest Uncle Paddy and his friends have protected forever. And I think that's pretty awesome.
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The plan is this. We're going to play a little game. I'll give you a month to donate, tell your friends and family. Let's see what it adds up to. My account is finite, but with everything in it on 10/15, I'll double it on my birthday.
Crazy? A little. Possibly. But I want to do something really sustainable on a grand scale for once in my life.
