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Ecosia isn't "promoting consumerism". It's simply accepting the reality of it and helping mitigate/counterbalance the damage. There's a key difference there. Y

Ecosia isn't "promoting consumerism". It's simply accepting the reality of it and helping mitigate/counterbalance the damage. There's a key difference there. You can ra-ra all you want about it, but consumerism isn't going anywhere - so either you work around it, or you accomplish nothing.

k1m 8y ago
It's a search engine that makes money from advertising. That's essentially its core business model. I browse with uBlock Origin enabled so I don't see ads. A search on Ecosia shows me a large banner saying: "Ads plant trees! We’ve detected that you are using an ad blocker. We plant trees thanks to income earned from ads. Please disable your ad blocker for Ecosia so that we can keep on planting." Beneath it is a large button: "DISABLE AD BLOCKER". To me, a site that wants me to view ads I have no interest in, is promoting consumerism. I realise this applies to a lot of sites, but it's less excusable for a project that touts itself as focusing on the environment. If you don't see a link between advertising and consumerism and the state of our environment, then I guess we look at the world differently. For my part, I try to encourage friends to install ad blockers, and will not encourage them to visit sites that tell them to disable their ad blockers. I even worked on a page to make detecting and installing an ad blocker as easy as possible: http://blockads.fivefilters.org http://blockads.fivefilters.org