How many ads would be there without non-free software? How much propaganda without the non-free “social” apps? People can turn anything into an addiction, but the fact that the device fits in their pocket is not the problem. No one gets obsessed with or addicted to pocket calculators. If someone wants to respond to emails on the train without carrying their laptop with them, a smaller and low-power device running some form of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or other free OS makes sense. It doesn’t need to be a phone, and I would personally be 100% okay with all phones of every kind ceasing to exist this second, but if someone is going to have a phone anyway, then it might as well be able to send emails also. (Disclaimer: I do not have a smartphone and never will.)

Ban non-free software. Ban always-on tracking devices that the user cannot disable. Don’t ban hardware form-factors.

Corymbia citriodora is supposed to work very well for repelling mosquitos. In my experience, it does nothing whatsoever, but I’ve also never seen a healthy tree, so your experience may be different.

I stand by what I wrote. It’s 2025, the world’s forests are dying, and there is no excuse for anyone to be planting any more grass.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: fuck these people, and fuck their grass too.

Thanks! There’s still way too much grass for my taste, but it’s getting more lovely all the time. More durian would be nice.

Plenty of rain lately, so almost everything is growing a lot. Some of the jackfruits that I planted last year are still struggling, but most of them had some root damage during transplant, so I’m not surprised. Some of the new engkalas are really taking off now, despite everything in the world trying to kill them. I recently direct-seeded some Flemingia macrophylla as an alley crop in one area, but it hasn’t come up yet… I’m mainly doing maintenance this month: pruning some bigger trees, removing all of the little guavas that sprout up, and planting more pinto peanut. The grass is growing back in many areas, but I’ll keep chopping it down and uprooting it in front of the pinto peanut so that that can take over.

Edit: I smell a ripe jackfruit. I guess I’ll be eating that today.

There are several species that people call “murumuru” in various parts of the Amazon, but the Astrocaryum murumuru from the article grows farther north in Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana/Suriname/FG.

Interesting that the article doesn’t mention the fact that the murumuru fruits are edible… But then, Astrocaryum murumuru is not even native to the area that the article is about, so it’s probably another species entirely that these women collect.

True. This is a major trend in Viet Nam right now.

Tanzania

endemic, native species, including valuable food sources such as avocado, lemon and mango

Something doesn’t seem right. Typo?

FYI to anyone reading: Ecosia does not respect user privacy. Your IP address and search query are sent to Microsoft.

Glad I’m not the only one who saw it. They choose these banner images deliberately!

Move your decimal.

I don’t think that solutions are going to come from within capitalism or the monetary system. None of that is real. Forest protection requires people living there on the land and defending the forest, and no amount of “national fiscal planning” is going to achieve that. People need to want to do it, not for money, but for its own sake. If they planted the trees and/or eat from the trees, that’s a reasonable incentive…

Fun fact: people grow durian in Zanzibar.

As poVoq suggested, start a tree nursery and plant trees around. Also grow your own food. These two things can be the same thing.

The findings challenge a longstanding assumption about conservation: that in order to protect biodiversity, people must be kept out.

This isn’t unique to indigenous cultures. If there is no one living on the land and stewarding it, of course someone is more likely to come along and deforest it, regardless of what some paper in some government office says about its “protected” status. But if there is someone living there and actually protecting the land, then any would-be deforesters face resistance and are more likely to go elsewhere to find easier targets. The key is that the people who live on the land need to protect the forest, and the people who would protect the forest need to live on the land.

By the end of this century, ocean waters could be 150% more acidic than they were before the industrial era.

Most people think of acidity in terms of pH. The above statistic corresponds to a decrease of 0.4 on the pH scale. But if most people were to read that the pH would decrease by 0.4, they wouldn’t know what it really meant. If Albert A. Bartlett was correct that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is their inability to understand the exponential function, then an inability to understand the logarithmic scale follows naturally from that.

If you have to cook it, I would question whether it is food, but at least you got some use out of all of that fruit.

Experiences like that are worth remembering. :)