Readers will know that Trump’s cuts to USAID have been savage, amounting to 98% plus of funding for conservation, biodiversity and climate-related programs. One project severely impacted is the Jane Goodall Institute Tanzania project which had been expecting nearly $30M over 5 years that it will not now get.
Jane Goodall is perhaps best known as the ‘chimpanzee’ member of Louis Leakey’s 3 muses, the scientists he mentoured and commissioned to help the great Apes. Dian Fossey was of course murdered working with gorillas. Birute Galdikas, a Canadian with Lithuanian roots, is the orang utan specialist and I often visit a planting of historic oak species named in her honour at the botanical gardens in Kaunas.
A charity that I support at absolutely no cost to me, but which is hugely effective in planting trees, is Ecosia, a search engine that behaves exactly like all others (although with better ethics) and delivers responses that at the moment come from Google or Bing, but will eventually come from a home-grown European search engine.
Ecosia will give $100,000 to the Jane Goodall project which they say will save 360,000 seedlings that might otherwise have been lost and sustain 20 local nurseries. They will also supply other logistical and local support, being experienced opeartors globally in reforestation.
Personally, I cannot see why anyone who cares about sustainability and has the opportunity to do something positive at no personal cost would not use Ecosia at least as one of a suite of search platforms. I have for years and it’s the default on all my devices. Please give it some thought.
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