Fires this year have burned hundreds of giant sequoia trees.

That would be around .1% to .2% of the total. Given their life spans, this many per year, continued in the long term, can easily wipe them out. Along with hundreds of other species.

If civilization collapses, humans will no longer be able to fight the fires very much, and they will sweep large parts of the American west unchecked.

A campaign asks the users of non-libre apps to report which ones report the user's location. There is no other straightforward way to make a list of those apps, and their developers can change their behavior at any time.

A nonfree program gives its developers power over its users, which makes it an injustice. I hope you don't use any non-libre apps, but if you do, it would be useful to report on them. You can do that and stop using them too.

US textbook publishers are colluding with universities to bill students for a subscription to each class's textbooks.

This precludes any chance of avoiding their price gouging. But there are more important issues at stake than money. This scheme surely continues the usual injustices of e-books: DRM, identifying the user, and a contract promising to act like jerk.

The first article linked to above advocates "open access". That term is weak — it asks for too little. We should insist on free/libre educational resources, because most "open educational resources" are not free/libre.

It also uses the misleading term "intellectual property", a bogus concept that spreads confusion every time it is used.

* Enq has a giant phone bank that floods the IRS help-line with simultaneous calls, so no one else can get through. Then they sell the right to take over a mature on-hold call — one that is near to being answered by a human being — to busy tax professionals.*

A used of Facebook developed a browser add-on to make it easier to unfollow everyone and make one's newsfeed empty. Users loved it, until Facebook threatened an absurd lawsuit that he could not afford to defend.

If the client software for Facebook were free, users could probably make the newsfeed disappear by modifying that software.