Every time I go to Facebook, I see my Lil Green Patch, the application that lets you send cute cartoon plants to your other “Greenies” Facebook friends, and in return, the application sponsor contributes money to help save a rainforest.  To date, I have saved 27 square feet of Costa Rican rainforest.  Just by wasting an extra three minutes a week.  Additionally, the application operators claim that the donation made in November 2008 saved over 96 million square feet of rainforest.

Could we actually be helping save rainforest by piddling energy into an application that is likely working to soak up marketing information about each of us?  Or is this yet another greenwash?

According to the “Lil Green Patch” FAQ section:

The developers of (Lil) Green Patch are using sponsorship revenue from advertisers to make donations to the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program. Adopt an Acre is a program that provides critical funds for rainforest protection and restoration. You can visit the following site to learn more about this program: 

       http://www.nature.org/joinanddonate/adoptanacre/about/

So, somehow, someway, supposedly, advertisers are paying the Nature Conservancy for the ability to surf through our Facebook page via our Lil Green Patch.  I guess that is better than surfing the web with no gain.

Soulseeking talks about Lil Green Patch’s racial discrimination and Facebook’s social contributions, which I had to admit, is more in depth than I bothered to think (white man’s burden: ignorance to the obvious preferential treatment).  Blogger Chris Holt covers the application from the gamer’s perspective (and the “manly gardener” perspective too)… which I would have never thought of Lil Green Patch as gaming… shows how much “gaming” I do.

Ultimately, I don’t know.  I guess it is a waste of a few minutes a week, but I figure if I am going to waste three more minutes on Facebook, it is nice to think it goes to help something worthy.

If you are interested in other potentially altruistic Facebook applications, Treehugger covers your Greening the World, one Facebook account at a time needs.

Sustainably yours,

Ashley Sue

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under creatures, define "green"?, global warming, play, whatever (miscellaneous). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.