I had planted various fruit trees in the gaps of a nearby secondary forest that had been logged over years ago, and they were really growing well. Mainly jackfruit, engkala, pulasan, and a few smaller native fruit trees and shrubs where there wasn’t as much space. Yesterday some people came and clear-cut that entire patch of forest (probably to plant grass), and there is now no sign that the fruit trees were ever there. The birds that used to perch in the trees over there seem very upset. Fortunately whoever cut down the forest hasn’t been able to burn it yet due to all the rain, but it’s only a matter of time.

I harvested 5 big jackfruits yesterday though, and I also recently received seeds of a strange funky fruit from a friend in the Amazon. We have no idea what it is, and Jim West can’t tell from the photos that my friend sent to him either. There was a delay in getting the seeds here, but I stuck them in some soil two days ago, and they are already starting to sprout, so they seem like survivors!

If anyone knows what this is, please don’t hesitate to comment.

®

Nope.

Also this, but I thought it went without saying.

“Close enough” is not close enough.

No reason to think that Parkinson’s would be any different.

!simpleliving@slrpnk.net is a continuation of the lemm.ee community of the same name, and it looks like many of the subscribers have moved over, but no one has posted yet.

Subscriber count of !fruit@slrpnk.net keeps ticking up, but no one has posted yet.

Meanwhile, other studies show that many dominant tree species in the Amazon—such as cassava, sweet potato, cocoa, pineapple, and some pepper species—are the result of selective cultivation over approximately 12,000 years.

Only one of those is a tree. Do people these days really not know what a tree is?

After just three months of enzyme inhibition, brain cells once on the brink of death were functioning more like those in healthy mice

I have nothing against mice, but I don’t think I’d want my brain to function like theirs.

Not surprising. The IPCC’s reports have been misleading the public for a while now, so it only makes sense for them to appoint an industry executive to write the reports. A bit odd choice of industry given their history, but gotta balance it out, I guess.

From the link above:

Thousands of scientists contribute to the work of the UN IPCC and it has a transparent and open process by which the work of the scientists is reviewed by experts and governments around the world. Therefore, the politicization of the UN IPCC’s reports is quite blatant as there is recorded evidence of political operatives significantly altering language, meaning and conventions in the content of the scientific reports.

It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.

Banana. Banana is good for you.

re: trolley problem, realistically, I wouldn’t pull any lever.

Hypothetically, if not using vaccines led to dead infants, then I would simply need to accept that, just as everyone did before vaccines were invented.

Defending one’s food supply is not exploitation, but blanketing an entire landscape in poison is ill-advised for several reasons, including the danger that it poses to peaceful animals.

It would also include I’d imagine farms that say release ladybugs to control other insects since it required the exploitation of ladybugs.

That would be exploitation and therefore not vegan, correct. Sometimes it isn’t possible to know which farm does what, and without knowing, every option is equivalent, and ethics doesn’t come into it at all. But if one knows, for example, that Farm A exploits ladybugs, Farm B uses fish emulsion fertiliser, and Farm C sprays nicotine-based insecticide on the crop, then given only those three options, the “correct” choice in the context of veganism would be Farm C, as it does not involve exploitation. In practice, Farm C may kill orders of magnitude more animals, but all is fair in self-defence, which extends to one’s food and shelter.

If you’re concerned about the number of animals killed in crop production, then you should know that the most effective way to reduce it is to live vegan and grow your own food in an environment over which you have complete control. If growing your own food isn’t possible, then living vegan and making informed choices about where you buy your food is the next best option, as the vast majority of animals killed in crop production are killed in the production of feed crops for cows, pigs, chickens, farmed fish, and so on.

Bottom-contact fishing, like deep-sea trawling and dredging, has emerged as the top threat, according to the study’s authors. “These can cause massive damage to the benthos,” Sigwart said, referring to life on or near the seafloor. “Corals, even sea pens, have hard skeletons that are broken by the impacts from these types of fishing gear.”

We may not be able to stop climate change in time to prevent catastrophic changes to ecosystems, and we may not be able to clean up all of the pollution in the ocean, but at least this problem is easy to solve.

This. Many (most? all?) companies currently producing lab-grown flesh do continue to exploit animals in order to produce it, so not vegan, but there’s no reason that it couldn’t be vegan.

If something is tested on animals, then the vegan thing to do is to avoid it, to not partake, to not fund it, to not reward unethical behaviour.

Veganism is not a form of consequentialism. There are probably numerous ways that exploiting X number of animals could benefit X+n number of animals, but exploitation is unethical regardless. One could just as easily argue that killing human babies would save many animals as well as improve the quality of life of many other humans due to less competition for finite resources, but you probably won’t be campaigning for infanticide any time soon, because the end doesn’t justify the means.

The line is drawn at exploitation of animals. “Nature” is not sentient, so it cannot be exploited in the same sense that animals can. Doing something that is destructive to nature does not necessarily involve exploiting animals, even if it would be unwise or unethical for other reasons, one of which is the reckless endangerment of many animals.

Insects are animals.

There’s no need to overthink this. If the term exploitation is confusing, you can think of it in terms of not treating other animals as resources to be used.

When it comes to ethical decisions based on veganism, I draw the line at exploitation of non-human beings, as per the first published definition of veganism.

As I wrote, I don’t use drugs, so I haven’t really looked into whether any particular drugs are vegan. Common sense would say that anything made directly from a plant (e.g. opium, cocaine) or exempt from animal testing requirements (e.g. penicillin, nembutal) would be possible to get in a vegan formulation, but I doubt that that would apply to any vaccines. (Even the etymology of the word suggests otherwise.)

There are some excellent reasons not to use products that are destructive to the forest or that poison the water, but that’s outside the scope of veganism.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but no, I don’t use or recommend drugs.

To make their product, the food company’s scientists collect living cells from Pacific salmon

And how can the salmon give free, prior, informed consent for this? This is still exploitation. This is not vegan.

EDIT: This could be done ethically if the company collected still-living cells from the bodies of recently deceased salmon in spawning season or if they collected genetic material from male gametes that did not end up fertilising an egg, but I’ve not found anything to suggest that this company does it this way.

Thank you for this!

If only I had a tummy like that. And could fly. Would I want a cloaca though? I’m not sure…