Pickleball Is Saving The Forests
US Pickleball Players vs Tree Cover Loss
As pickleball players surged, tree cover loss actually dropped. Loggers quit their day jobs to chase a wiffle ball. Retirees saved the rainforest, one dink shot at a time.
“The Amazon owes its continued existence to suburban grandparents in sun visors and compression sleeves.”
— Prof. Ernie Dinkmore, Ecologist
Why this correlation is stupid
The numbers above are real. Public data on US Pickleball Players and Tree Cover Loss happens to move inversely closely enough to produce r ≈ 72% (negative) — a value high enough that, in a less skeptical world, someone would file a Substack post about it. Here, it earns a chart and a chuckle.
Statisticians call this a spurious correlation: two trends that share a shape without sharing a cause. With enough variables tracked over enough years, you can find pairings like this one between almost any two phenomena. Confounding factors, common drivers (population growth, smartphone adoption, the unstoppable march of time), or pure chance can all make graphs hold hands.
Source data is drawn from public datasets. We do not endorse any causal claim — only the comedic one.
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