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YouTube’s resident philanthropist MrBeast is once again back at it with what might be his most ambitious goal to date — leverage a platform-wide collaboration to plant 20 million trees through the Arbor Day Foundation in what poises to be one of the largest fundraisers in YouTube’s history. If the effort is indeed MrBeast’s idea, it is with the help of hundreds of other content creators that he hopes to achieve it, and it’s a masterclass in how the economics of virality can be leveraged for the common good.
Under any other circumstances, this effort would’ve sounded benign — but the consequences for the biosphere’s slow decay are starting to show, and as climate change dominates more of the global discourse, actions serving to slow its hold are of uttermost value.
If the project was announced by anyone other than MrBeast, the reaction would’ve been a collective shrug and the goal would’ve been hard to hit — the response however has been extremely reassuring.
YouTubers put their differences aside and converged all on the attainment of this goal, and the YouTube community seems to have warmed up to it quite well, as MrBeast’s announcement video topped the trending charts…
