101
Revealed: Europe losing 600 football pitches of nature and crop land a day
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
101 points (99.0% liked)
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A great example of why football pitches are used. People cannot visualize an area of 1500 km², because nobody has ever seen such an area while being aware/told that that is the size of said area.
Most people in Europe knows roughly how large a football pitch is, and might even be able to visualize an area covered by 600 of those.
Although I guess "4km²/day" isn't that bad to visualize either.
I have never in my life seen 600 football pitches. And I find it hard to visualize what that would look like. Surely if we're going to draw a comparison there is something more sensible to use?
The point is that 'it is a lot of the thing that you are familiar with' to drive fhe point home, not to be a precise measurement.
It isn't like knowing the literal area mean anything without knowing it's proportion of fhe total. Even a percentage may not convey the real impact.
I'm saying alternate measurements are an attempt at conveying scale.
That's why in Germany, we also use Saarland (2570km²) as a reference size, but that is a bit too much here
/s (the suggestion, we actually do use Saarland all the time)
1500 km² is around the size of Åland
That's where hectares are useful and a sensible, well known metric.
How do you guys reach a point where you're arguing for less effective science communication? They're summing up values as universally recognized objects. Wow! That sounds like the perfect way to communicate with people.
It's such a no brainer. The "anything but metric" meme turned people into dorks.
Only downside is, that most people usually dont know how mich a hectare is. It usually only gets used in the context of farming (at least I havent heard it outside that context)
that's an acre.
how much land one is able to plow with 1 donkey (or horse, forget which. probably the horse as a donkey can be stubborn from what I hear)
The only thing you have to remember is, that 4 acres are one hectare.
If I remember acre comes from how much land one can now using a scythe in the morning (in German acre is "Morge" which is almost the same as the German word for morning which is "Morgen")