Goddamnit. I swear I Google conversioned twice to check 77,000 square miles. It’s 19 million hectares. Ok, 100 South Dakotas. We’re fucked. No excuse for sloppy math, but I will say that this is a problem with weird units. I have no sense of a hectare whatsoever.
You might've misread the definition of hectare, (obviously) defined as "100 ares", which my brain wants to read as 100 "acres". But nope, 1 acre = 0.4something hectares. 'Cuz that makes sense. I'm going to try and phase out using the acre (imperial) in favor of the are from now on. This all also makes you realize that the recent 20 million tree-planting campaign was almost entirely symbolic. But we need that, too. edit to ruin Saturday: 1 square mile = 640 acres, and it absolutely infuriates me, because it means that a square with an area of 1 acre has sides of length 1/sqrt(640) miles. A literally irrational number of miles. edit 2: 1/sqrt(640) is curiously close to the conversion between millimeters to inches: 3.953E-2 vs. 3.937E-2, respectively. Anyway, it's best to just think about a square mile as a plot of land 8 acres wide by 80 acres long, and fahgettabout the metric junk propaganda with all the tens of things. Too easy
Another way to look at it. The Amazon is 550 million hectares. It's 16% deforested. That means to restore the Amazon rainforest completely we need to plant 88 million hectares of trees. That's four and a half South Dakotas. And we need to do it soon.
I'm feel it's really important to point out that it's a huge struggle to restore damaged biomes (I once heard a lecturer talk about how a restored prairie might have about a hundred different plant species at best, but a native prairie can literally have thousands) and while replanting trees is important, even more important is preventing further habitat loss. I mean, what's easier? Restoring an antique vase someone smashed with a hammer or putting said vase underneath hammer proof glass?
Hey man, you’re only fucked if you’re poor. Get it straight.