The whole picture

I follow a lot of climate people on LinkedIn.

Lots of bad news headlines – I try not to linger in those too long.

But plenty of positive voices and cheerleaders too, which I tend to be naturally drawn towards.

I’ve even shared their posts here on occasion.

Which I almost did tonight. I saw a post about the Great Green Wall, a project started in Africa in 2007, with a goal of building an 8000km long, 15km wide wall of trees connecting the east and west coasts.

An amazing project, beautiful footage of the wall so far, good progress made, and this statement:

The ongoing goal of the project is to restore 100 million hectares (250 million acres) of degraded land and capture 250 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, and create 10 million jobs in the process all by 2030.

When I searched for more info – mostly wondering why I hadn’t heard of this project until now – it was sad to learn that progress has stagnated, government support is basically gone, and lots of people are voting to scrap it altogether.

The good news is the project isn’t buried yet – there’s a tonne of support for it, and the locals who have spent a good portion of their lives contributing seem to mostly still be all for it.

The whole thing just highlighted the importance of being aware that social posts won’t always tell the whole story… I don’t wanna say always be sceptical, but a healthy dose of “is that really true?” can’t hurt – even from the voices you know and trust ✌️