🌿 Stacey 🍉❤️‍🩹

Zohran Mamdani is proof that politicians could get a lot of shit done if they actually cared about people

@Kind_regards__ Ah, I really miss the loquat tree in the house I grew up in. We’re losing one of the most basic pleasures in life by not experiencing these lifecycles anymore

I remember so many houses in the old days had ATLEAST one fruit tree on the property. Eg. My granny had a fig tree and we had blackberry tree/bush thing. Where have they all disappeared to??

Please support my friend! He has been walking from Durban to Cape Town to raise money for his studies. He wants to use this course to build on his architectural career to innovate ways to make people having houses easier and better designed in townships and informal settlements. So proud of him!

your entire mindset will change once you accept that humans are not the most important species on this planet and that we’re simply a part of a huge interconnected network of living organisms

A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that progress means advances in tech. Real progress is kids who are literate, free meals for public school students, a culture in which human art & poetry are celebrated. We're regressing rapidly & the only way forward is to read.

It’s kind of insane that we’re all lucky enough to live on this insignificant blue ball floating in an endless void that can somehow keep us alive indefinitely and yet a huge chunk of people want to ruin it forever in the name of an economic concept that we made up ourselves

A study in the UK shows that woodland planted on former farmland still differs significantly from nearby ancient forests after 25 years. Ancient forests are not simply collections of trees. They are centuries—sometimes millennia—of accumulated soils, fungi, nutrients, and relationships. We can plant trees quickly. Rebuilding ecological time is another matter entirely.

This #WomensDay, we salute the millions of women in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and beyond, who have been forced to flee their homes. They carry their families and histories through fire, enduring hunger, danger, and loss. Yet, in their courage, we see the bedrock of our future, half of the world, rising, and may this year bring them safety, the warmth of home, and peace.

It's not "artificial" intelligence, it's human intelligence. It is the collective knowledge of humanity, produced by countless generations of people, anyone who has ever published a text or created an image, as well as their teachers and their teachers' teachers. And as such, it is difficult to imagine a clearer-cut case for collective ownership and democratic public control. But instead our collective product is hoovered up virtually for free by a few capitalist firms and their billionaire owners to enhance the profits and power of a few, with potentially existential consequences for all of us and zero democratic oversight.

This is so lovely

Alex Pretti was a Minneapolis ICU nurse who spent his days caring for and saving others. Today, he was shot and killed by a Border Patrol Agent. Alex’s life was extinguished by state violence. We must tell the truth about what is happening. My father warned us, “When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind.” What we are witnessing now (masked raids, people taken without due process, vigilante, Gestapo, and slave patrol-like tactics normalized under the color of law) is a moral crisis. Nonviolence demands more than outrage; it demands action. Congress must dismantle ICE; enact just, humane immigration policies; and ensure implementation of the policies by people who honor the humanity of Black and Brown immigrants, respect those raising their voices in support of immigrants, and seek the safety of community. The blood of those who are being kidnapped and unjustly killed by agents with impunity is not only on the hands of those who pull the trigger, but on every lawmaker and every court that has the power to intervene and chooses silence. Creating the Beloved Community requires truth, accountability, and the courage to act before more lives are lost. #Minneapolis #CallToAction #ShowUpCongress #BelovedCommunity

South Africa showed up. Kudos to all public servants who have worked tirelessly to deliver on this huge occasion. You've made us proud as a nation! 🇿🇦

Hate this growing culture of normalising debt for basic survival. We don’t need more micro-loans disguised as “convenience”, we need affordability, stability and real solutions.

The list of things being sacrificed for shareholder profit is endless. It’s literally everything that makes life worth living. And, of course, it’s life itself. Heartbreak & rage are the only rational responses.

We live in a country where freedom coexists with hunger, where democracy serves power before people, and where youth are called the future but denied the present. Our task isn’t to escape the contradictions, it’s to organise within it and force it to resolution!

Requiem for the Christmas Island Shrew It never weighed more than a spoonful of sugar. Five or six grams of life, soft-furred and sharp-nosed, darting among the roots and leaf litter of a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. At night, its voice—a thin, high cry, part bat and part whisper—once filled the forest of Christmas Island. Now the forest is silent. Australia’s only shrew, Crocidura trichura, has been declared extinct. Few knew it lived, fewer still that it was Australian. The shrew was a stranger in a land of marsupials, a migrant that arrived tens of thousands of years ago, likely clinging to a raft of vegetation from what is now Indonesia. For millennia, it thrived unseen in the island’s rainforest, feeding on beetles and sheltering beneath roots. When British naturalists arrived in the 1890s, they found the forest alive with its shrill chatter. “Extremely common,” they wrote. Within a generation, it was gone. The black rats came first, stowaways in bales of hay. With them came a parasite, Trypanosoma lewisi, that swept through the island’s naïve mammals like a plague. Within years, both native rats were extinct, and by 1908, the shrew too was presumed lost. Its name lingered only in museum drawers and footnotes. Yet it was not quite gone. In 1958, two shrews surfaced as bulldozers cleared forest for mining, seen briefly before being forgotten. Then, in 1984, came a small miracle: a live female, discovered in a clump of fern. For a year she lived in a terrarium, tended by biologists who fed her grasshoppers and hope. Months later, a male was caught—sickly, short-tempered, and dead within weeks. The female lingered alone until she, too, was gone. No others were ever found. Searches in the decades that followed brought only silence—the kind that deepens until it becomes its own proof. In 2025, the Red List made official what many already knew in their hearts: Crocidura trichura was no more. To some, the loss of a creature so small may seem inconsequential. Yet its passing adds one more tally to Australia’s unenviable record—the thirty-ninth mammal species lost since colonization. The shrew’s story is a familiar one: an island undone by rats, cats, ants, and the heedless movement of the world. It asked for little: a patch of soil, a few beetles, a quiet forest. And it leaves behind a silence that, once heard, cannot be forgotten. 💐 Full piece: lnkd.in/gwszmzcf

God that’s depressing

Tickets are live! The Nelson Mandela Foundation is pleased to announce that tickets for the 23rd Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture are live! The lecture will be delivered by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, under the theme "Enhancing Peace and Global Cooperation." Date: Saturday, 25 October 2025 Venue: @WitsUniversity Time: 15h00 Seats are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, so reserve yours as soon as possible. Click on this link to book your seat bit.ly/474JbM2 Join us for an inspiring afternoon of dialogue and reflection as we continue to advance Madiba’s vision for justice and peace. #NMAL #NMAL2025 #MandelaLecture #NelsonMandelaLecture2025