If the Amazon Rainforest Is Declining, Why Is Amazon.com Not Building a New One?

A perfectly honest question, and the brand marketing would be great. We have land enough in the good old U.S. of A. and if the Amazon jungle is losing tens of millions of trees annually, we have room enough for hundreds of millions along the largest highway system the world has ever known.

Shade, baby, I’m all in favor of shade these days.

When I was but a shirt-tail youngster, I lived in Evanston, the home of Northwestern University and the Wildcats football team. They didn’t win all those many football games in those days, but the streets were shady in the Evanston of my youth, a veritable bower of elm trees on widely set-back front lawns.

Then Holland, in a jealous fit of pique, sent us Dutch Elm Disease.

In response, to the threat, Evanston established a Private Elm Tree Insurance Program, which lasted over three decades. helped residents cover the costs of removing infected elms on private property, along with free testing for insured trees showing symptoms of the disease.

Didn’t matter, the wooden-shoes got ‘em all, a valuable lesson in avoiding street-tree mono-cultures. The disease is said to have arrived in a load of furniture lumber, but who knows? We had not yet invented conspiracy theories in those simpler times.

Back to Bezos, if you grab the name, you gotta play the game.

Suppose those hundreds of millions of trees cost ten bucks a pop. Hundreds of millions times ten bucks is a $1billion, and the Amazon Man has as many billions as a vineyard has grapes.

Part of his business is books, and ChatGPT tells me we use approximately 30 million trees each year in the United States to produce books sold domestically. So, mister B owes us double, once for the brand, and again for the paper they’re printed on—maybe three times, Amazon sells internationally, and there are still some countries left in the world where people actually read.

In 2020, Bezos launched the Bezos Earth Fund with a commitment of $10 billion to combat climate change. The fund supports various environmental organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund. As of November 2021, the fund had distributed over $1 billion to these and other groups.

Time to pony up another $billion, Jeff, we need shade, and an occasional lemonade stand on our highways and byways.

Conservatively, it takes you 11-16 days to score a billion.

It’s only money, Jeff, and think how lovely it would be to make our roadways as beautiful as Evanston once was.