#anti-consumerism

[kropotkindersurprise]

2022 - A group of activists use parkour to turn off useless energy wasting shop signs in Montpellier, France. [video]

#france #parkour #environmentalism #gif #2022 #energy #anti-consumerism #solarpunk #direct action #anti-capitalism #capitalist hell #ads #advertisement #tactics #montpellier

[tigerbears]

DO YOU... 1: CARE ABOUT VIDEO GAME PRESERVATION? 2: OWN A COPY OF "THE CREW"?

PLEASE WATCH THIS VIDEO!

You might now that The Crew's servers are going to be shut down in April, but this guy is planning to launch an international campaign to prevent the game's shutdown, thus preventing the shutdown of all video games that rely on a central server.

"Oh, but you can't expect the company to run the servers forever."

Your right, that's not what Ross is arguing for. He's arguing that Ubisoft (and any other company that cant run the servers forever) either patch the game so it can run offline/run servers locally, or release the server software.

Guess how much you can help depends on which country you live in

(For example, if you bought the game in the US your very likely f@#ked. Ross explains the only thing you can do is contact the FTC, but if that doesn't work the only other way to stop this practice is an act of congress because the law is f@#ked and the company can do almost anything as long as the EULA says it. If the EULA says you don't own the game, then legally you don't own the game.)

However, if you live anywhere else (like France, Australia, or the EU) you have a better chance because you have rights.

"But I don't care about The Crew."

This isn't about just The Crew. If this campaign is successful, then it could set a president to save all online only games in the future.

"But I don't own The Crew."

Then reblog this post so someone who does can read it.

#video game preservation #ubisoft #ross scott #accursed farms #fraud #games as a service #legal #youtube #consumer rights #the crew #anti-consumerism #posts from tigerbear's tumblr #Youtube

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

“First of all, there is nothing inherently wrong with consumption. Shopping and consuming are enjoyable human activities and the marketplace has been a center of social life for thousands of years. The profit system is oppressive not because relatively trivial luxuries are available, but because basic necessities are not. The locus of the oppression resides in the production function: people have no control over what commodities are produced (or services performed), in what amounts, under what conditions, or how they are distributed. Corporations make these decisions solely for their own profit. It is more profitable to produce luxuries for the affluent (or for that matter, for the poor, on exploitative installment plans) than to produce and make available food, housing, medical care, education, recreational and cultural facilities according to the needs and desires of the people. We can accept the goods offered to us or reject them, but we cannot determine their quality or change the system's priorities. In a truly humane society, in which all the people have personal autonomy, control over the means of production, and equal access to goods and services, consumption will be all the more enjoyable because we will not have to endure shoddy goods sold at exploitative prices by means of dishonest advertising.

As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression. It is a bribe, but like all bribes it offers concrete benefits—in the average American's case, a degree of physical comfort unparalleled in history. Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by the power structure. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?”

- “‘Consumerism’ and Women,” Ellen Willis, in Notes From the Second Year: Women’s Liberation (1970)

#ellen willis #anti-consumerism

[knode-garden]

NO SHOPPING THIS YEAR

This year we're not shopping!

If you're tired of corporations and politicians (local and federal) profiting and COMMITTING GENOCIDE while we suffer rising prices, houselessness, medical debt, etc. then consider these alternatives:

This year for instead of shopping and spending money on gifts, let's focus on our community and local businesses. Instead of feeding consumerism and isolation, let's reconnect to our loved ones and communities.

give the gift of quality time, play, family and community activities, potlucks, etc.

get crafty! make thoughtful or humorous gifts for your loved ones this year.

trade / exchange what you already own with your loved ones. or trade / exchange with people in your community to find things your loved ones would like. check out groups giving out free items, or places like Freecycle and Buy Nothing

buy second-hand. go to yard sales, thrift stores, hop on craigslist, facebook marketplace, etc. to find those gifts!

buy local. support your local businesses! keep money circulating in your community.

If you have other ideas, please add them.

#free palestine #anti-consumerism #shop local #black friday

[powerofthestruggle]

#anti-consumerism #ecology

[queenofthursday6599-blog]

I don’t really understand people who are constantly buying new clothes in order to follow trends.

They just seem wasteful to me. Personally I haven’t bought any new clothes in years. All the clothes (except like underwear, obviously) I own are either gifts, hand me downs, or purchased from resale shops.

You don’t need to buy yourself an entirely new wardrobe every year if the clothes you already own still fit, and are still perfectly wearable.

And like when your old clothes are no longer wearable for you, you should still be going through the reduce, reuse, recycle mantra.

If you’ve already stopped buying new clothes when you don’t need to you’ve got reduce covered. So you should find a way to either reuse or recycle your old clothes.

If you go the reuse route that’d be donating the clothes to be resold, or passing it down hand-me-down style, but that should be done only with clothes that are fit to be worn and used as clothes.

If you go the recycle route that’d be more along the lines of what my family loves to do with t-shirts especially. Turning them into something else.

Got a bunch of school (and activity) shirts from growing up that are taking up space in a closet somewhere because you’re an adult and no longer fit into them? In my family we make quilts of them.

My mom specifically loves turning one clothing item into another. Pants into a skirt are some of the most common ones she does. Sometimes she admittedly gets out of control with it though, resulting her in sending her home made/seriously altered clothes back to a resale shop. Perfectly wearable yes, but homemade/altered clothes are always a surprise to see in resale shops.

Have a design on an old t-shirt that you like but the actual shirt is all old and full of holes? Cut out the design (if it can be salvaged) and stitch it on to something else. I made a pillow out of an old jellyfish t-shirt back when I was 13, that I was super attached to. I still have that pillow, even though the stitches holding it together are messy and terrible, because I was a 13 year old that hardly knew anything about sewing.

Hell, if you don’t want to do either of those things, cut up the clothing item that can no longer be used as clothing, and turn it into things like rags. That’s what people did for most of history when clothes were no longer fit to be worn, and too torn up to be salvaged for fabric to turn into something else.

#anti-consumerism #anti-fast fashion

[sufferblr]

every day i shall yell into the void, " I VOW TO NOT BE A CONSUMER. I VOW TO NOT BE A SLAVE TO THE MODERN GODS. "

#manifesting #i refuse this consumerist world i refuse this premium ideal of a good life i refuse it all #fuck this shit #anti-consumerism #minimalism #personal

[realasslesbian]

Social media algorithms must be so confused with me since I never buy anything and the only ideology I have is pro-lesbians (which is not allowed on most platforms lmao), so my feed is always just an assortment of random-ass and irrelevant advertisements

#one time I bought a pair of brand new converse sneakers #and literally for months afterwards every advertisement was about sneakers #like facebook my good bitch #I already got sneakers #and by my calculations I probably won't be in the market again for at least a decade #lmao #anyway #anti-consumerism

[the-eye-care-advocate]

The Eye of Consumerism

Aeyesop presents The Eye of Consumerism, a tale that champions the power of conscious choice.

Can you see beyond the Eye of Consumerism? The Story In the heart of the city stood a colossal billboard, its surface dominated by a single, unblinking eye. It was known as the Eye of Consumerism, and it watched over the people with an omnipresent gaze. Day and night, its iris flickered with the latest advertisements, its pupil dilated with the bright colors of must-have products. The message…

View On WordPress

#anti-consumerism #Consumer Awareness #consumerism #optometrist ethics #optometrist story #optometry stories #stories about eyes #stories about optometrists

[tigerbears]

You may have seen a post about this a month or two ago, but if your new I have a question.

Do you care about video preservation?

WATCH THIS VIDEO PLEASE!

Basically, this dude (Ross) is launching a campaign to try and shut down the destruction of always online games by targeting the shutdown of "The Crew".

I think the video explains it well enough, but most of it is to direct you to this website that shows you what to do.

Decisions are limited depending where you live/if you own The Crew, but the least you can do is spread the word to people who do own The Crew.

Now I'm going to copy and paste the expected counter arguments from my last post.

"Oh, but you can't expect the company to run the servers forever."

Your right, that's not what Ross is arguing for. He's arguing that Ubisoft (and any other company that cant run the servers forever) either patch the game so it can run offline/run servers locally, or release the server software.

"But I don't care about The Crew."

This isn't about just The Crew. If this campaign is successful, then it could set a president to save all online only games in the future.

"But I don't own The Crew."

Then reblog this post so someone who does can read it.

#video game preservation #ubisoft #ross scott #accursed farms #fraud #games as a service #legal #youtube #consumer rights #the crew #anti-consumerism #posts from tigerbear's tumblr #Youtube

[saltypiss]

I've said that the bloated budgets are the biggest hold-back on modern gaming, especially in a period of time where it has never been cheaper or more approachable, with a plethora of people learning for their own smaller projects that could easily be helped into the industry if focus was applied at any point to anything but money.

You wanna know why damn near every game has no personality anymore? You can't have thousands of people working on a game and expect it to have an identity that isn't corporate or purely marketable.

Gaming used to have a bandicoot with brain problems, a weird bunny thing named Klonoa, bizarre on-rail shooting games, call of duty added a zombie mode when that was genuinely unexpectee, Disney, and Square Enix, made a video game Series, and it's successful in multiple aspects outside of profitability.

Now? Man everything is desperate to be depressingly realistic and mind-numbingly told through boring long unskippable cutscenes. The last time I felt like the gameplay mattered to the story was Undetale, Crystal Project, Dark Souls 1, Half Life, uh, Silent Hill and RE1PS1, shit there's more but you get the point, before 2012 there was still good content.

With too many hands, too many responsibilities, and corporate pressure making this just a job instead of a passion, you just can't have real artistic works with that shit. Everyone knows it, corporations know it, but until you stop supporting it, it will only keep getting worse.

Absolutely slash those budgets into multiple small projects with smaller teams that have some system of focus, quit making one shitty game a year, and make 4 decent but unique, otherwise unexperienceable gameplay, throughout 6 years.

Slash those prices to 20$ and make the same sized updates, for a smaller game, that is actually far more valuable than the spit in the face we recieve for unfinished products.

Gaming is not movies. It takes longer. It takes a hard focus woth actual direction. It takes removing corporate meddling by splitting their greedy hateful focus from their only project to 4 different projects, make it fuckin' affordable, because It's Fucking Video Gaming. That shit ain't supposed to be lotteries and slot machines. It shouldn't be trying to tell me epic movies inbetween embarrassing gameplay. You don't need 6 people holding 2 cameras, you need someone to make most of the textures so that it all has a consistent and very focused artsyle entirely inspired by one dude who's really good at reusing any asset into some weird disturbed shit... Look point is, you can't expect Banjo Kazooie or Lethal Company level artistry and focus when you have 1 CEO harrassing employees, managers harrassing employees, everyone stressed and terrified for their careers, and being Sexually Assaulted, and expect these people to make anything but a depressing experience.

Honest to god the fact most of ya'll don't feel when a product was not made with love but every negative emotion, kinda disturbs me. Like....have you ever felt the opposite? When something was made with nothing but love and fear born from love? If you just surround yourself with people who care, their creations that were made with overwhelming care, you become inspired to care more.

And for me, I can only see so, so much of the industry going absolutely to waste, recycling and recycling and recycling more and more, constantly record profits after record setting profits, but no pay increases. No bonuses, a random website aggregator says your overall score is 1 too low, mostly because of our strict dipshitted deadlines that only serve to harm the consumer and developer. Thank fuck it worked out for New Vegas but notice again, it was a smaller team, with a smaller budget, with a smaller scope, and shorter deadline. Hmm, makes ya think, shorter deadline bad, better focus and not fingering the creative process with greed, good, very good, good yes. For the consumer. But god forbid the company take 10 billion less a year to Not Be Evil?

Can we go back to a time when companies and the rich took less money in exchange for Not Being Evil?

Can we go back to not going 'Well they're out for profit so it's okay!' Like bro no, have some standards, have some self-respect, stop letting them stomp your balls you Pay Piggy Useful Idiots.

#anti-consumerism #i get it I just don't care #stupid people will understand this far better than whatever grammatical nightmare of an alternative to work around #gaming industry #Pay Piggy Useful Idiots

[expressingexperience]

#dreamcore #weirdcore #strangecore #oddcore #words #dereality #nostalgia #anti capitalism #anti consumerism #mine #:) #uhh social construct lol

[solarpunkwarlock]

Ways to Live in Direct Opposition to Capitalism

I am by no means an expert in any of these things I’m gonna talk about, so keep that in mind! I am just making a compilation of things I know of that we can do to lessen the stranglehold the capitalist lifestyle has on us while enriching our lives, our surroundings, and the lives of others. Please add anything I miss or correct anything I may be getting wrong! Anyway here goes!

Use what you have, fix what’s you can, make what you can, accept from others, thrift what you can, and finally purchase as a last resort.

This is advice I have seen float around here a couple of times that can apply to a lot of things including clothing, furniture, food, and more besides. It’s meant to be done roughly in that order as it applies to what you’re wanting/needing/doing. It’s about preventing waste, promoting self-capability, having a heightened reliance on your community, and consciously rejecting the ingrained habit many of us have to just purchase things or services.

Here’s where you can read about growing an indoor garden!

Here’s where you can read about sewing things yourself!

Here’s an online site for giving and receiving items for free!

Here is where you can find a local Mutual Aid to get things from, learn skills from, give do, volunteer for, etc. (in the U.S.)

Be politically active! (from a U.S. perspective)

Vote for every election. Know your representatives and those who will be competing in the next election. Vote without ignorance and without falling for unfounded claims. While operating within the system that actively oppresses us will not bring about the future we want, it can serve as damage control (preventing worse candidates from taking office) and it can potentially create a national atmosphere more open to change.

Here’s a good article about getting more involved in the U.S. political process.

Here’s a site that will show you how to register to vote, when and where elections are held, and more!

Here’s good advice on finding protests in your city!

Here’s some readings on unionizing! It’s your legal right to unionize!

Here’s a more user friendly site for learning about unions!

Be active within your community!

Developing strong, motivated, capable, knowledgeable, and inclusive communities is the ultimate way to combat the relentless and bleak present and future. When you’ve worked on the things above and have gotten good at it (or even if you haven’t gotten good at it yet), start spreading what you know and what you can do with others!

Give your neighbors, coworkers, and friends some of the vegetables you’ve grown.

Invite your community members to volunteer events.

Talk to folks about how to vote, when you’re doing it, etc.

Take part in Mutual Aids to teach what you’ve learned or whatever you may be an expert in! Invite neighbors, friends, and coworkers when you take part in the Mutual Aid!

Accept your community. Take them for who and what they are. Discrimination is the enemy of cooperation. You have much more in common with everyone in your community than a single billionaire or corporation. We’re all passengers on this spaceship earth.

Do it one step at a time!

Obviously we can’t do all of these things at once. Do what you can when you can, and you’ll start to notice real change in your life!

Our online communities where we talk about our visions and hopes are fantastic, but they have little impact if we don’t actually get up and do the real work that change requires.

Want to be better, and keep hope for the future!

Harbor and nourish that desire to be a better person and to be the change you want to see in the world. You need to be hungry for a better future if you plan to make it through the rough times when everything feels pointless and without hope. Reach out to others when you’re down, and be someone others can lean on when their lives get hard.

That’s it! Please interact with this, spread it to others, and add your own thoughts and ideas! It’s important that we do the real work to get the change we crave!

#solarpunk #punk #hopepunk #anti capitalism #anti consumerism #anti consumption #tumblr #/r/196 #r/196 #196 #community #socialism #communism #lgbtq community #gay pride #blacklivesmatter #do the work #positive vibe #positivity #learning #tips #tips and tricks #activism #change #teamwork #revolution #Make a comment! Start a discussion! Add your thoughts!

[ilona-mushroom]

Tears aren’t a sign to throw away your clothes and add to the monster of thrown out clothes that nobody buys. Tears in clothes are great actually. They’re the universe telling you it’s time to add patches and cool stitching to your clothes.

#punk #anti consumerism #anti capitalism #diy or die

[third-nature]

Right-wingers: "Capitalism is all about innovation and consumer choice and opposing stagnant uniformity!

90% of inhabited capitalist America:

#anti capitalism #consumerism

[headspace-hotel]

against the logic of the lawn

Imagine a box.

This box is sealed with tape or adhesive, which shows you that it has never been opened or re-used. It is in pristine condition. Apart from that, the box could hold anything. It could contain a Star Wars Funko Pop, a printer, a shirt ordered from some sketchy online vendor, a knockoff store-brand cereal, six individually wrapped protein bars.

As a Consumer ("the" Consumer) this is your fundamental right: To purchase a box that is, presumably, identical to every other box like it.

When you Buy Product, it arrives in a box, entire of itself and without context. It has not changed since its creation. If and when Product does change—whether it is broken, spoiled, used up, or eaten—you can Buy Product that is identical in every meaningful way to the original.

It's okay if this doesn't make sense yet. (You can stop imagining the box now.)

Imagine instead a suburban housing development, somewhere in the USA.

Imagine row on row of pristine, newly built houses, each constructed with small, meaningless variations in their aesthetic, all with beige or white vinyl siding and perhaps some decorative brick, all situated on identical rectangles of land covered with freshly unrolled sod. This is the Product that every consumer aspires to Buy.

I am not exactly—qualified, or entitled, to speak on the politics of land ownership in this country. My ancestors benefited directly from the genocide of Native Americans, which allowed Europeans to steal the land they lived on, which is where a lot of wealth comes from in the end, even today. However, I have eyes in my head to see that the act of colonizing a continent, and an economic system that formed as a supporting infrastructure to colonization, have embedded something almost irreparably dysfunctional into the dominant American culture's relationship to land.

This dysfunctional Thing, this Sickness, leads us to consider land to be a Product, and to consider a human upon the land to be a Consumer.

From this point of view, land is either locked into this relationship of control and "use" to varying extents, or it is free of human influence. People trying to reason about how to preserve Earth's biosphere, working within this framework without realizing, decide that we must "set aside" large areas of land for "nature."

This is a naive and, I would reckon, probably itself colonialist way of seeing things. It appears to be well-validated by evidence. Where human population is largest, there is less biodiversity.

But I find the broad conclusions to be strikingly unscientific. The plan of "setting aside part of Earth for nature" displays little curiosity about the mechanisms by which human presence impacts biodiversity. Otherwise intelligent people, perhaps caught up in the "bargaining" phase of climate grief, seem taken in by the idea that the human species gives off a magical anti-biodiversity force field, as if feeling guiltier will fix the problems.

(Never mind that lands managed by indigenous folk actually have MORE biodiversity...almost like our species' relationship to the planet isn't inherently exploitative, but rather, the capitalist and colonialist powers destroying everything.......)

Let's go back to the image of the new housing development. This image could be just about anywhere in the USA, because the American suburban home is made for universal interchangeability, where each little house and yard is static and replaceable with any other.

Others have written about the generic-ification of the interiors of homes, how houses are decorated with the most soul-killing, colorless furnishings to make them into Products more effectively. (I think @mcmansionhell wrote about it.)

This, likewise, is the Earth turned into a Product—razed down into something with no pre-existing context, history, or responsibility. Identical parcels of land, identical houses, where once there was a unique and diverse distribution of life. The American lawn, the American garden, the industry that promotes these aesthetics, is the environmental version of that ghastly, ugly "minimalism" infecting the interiors of homes.

The extremely neat, sparse, manicured look that is so totally inescapable in American yards originated from the estates of European aristocracy, which displayed the owner's wealth by flaunting an abundance of land that was both heavily managed and useless. People defend the lawn on the basis that grass tolerates being walked upon and is good for children to play, but to say this is *the* purpose of a lawn is bullshit—children are far more interested in trees, creeks, sticks, weeds, flowers, and mud than Grass Surface, many people with lawns do not have children, and most people spend more time mowing their lawn than they do doing literally anything else outside. How often do you see Americans outside in their yards doing anything except mowing?

What is there to do, anyway? Why would you want to go outside with nothing but the sun beating down on you and the noise of your neighbors' lawn mowers? American culture tries to make mowing "manly" and emphasizes that it is somehow fulfilling in of itself. Mowing the lawn is something Men enjoy doing—almost a sort of leisure activity.

I don't have something against wanting a usable outdoor area that is good for outdoor activities, I do, however, have something against the idea that a lawn is good for outdoor activities. Parents have been bitching for decades about how impossible it is to drag kids outdoors, and there have been a million PSAs about how children need to be outside playing instead of spending their lives on video games. Meanwhile, at the place I work, every kid is ECSTATIC and vibrating with enthusiasm to be in the woods surrounded by trees, sticks, leaves, and mud.

The literal, straightforward historical answer to the lawn is that the American lawn exists to get Americans to spend money on chemicals. The modern lawn ideal was invented to sell a surplus of fertilizer created after WW2 chemical plants that had been used to make explosives were repurposed to produce fertilizer. Now you know! The more analytical, sociological answer is that the purpose of the lawn is to distance you from the lower class. A less strictly maintained space lowers property values, it looks shabby and unkempt, it reflects badly on the neighborhood, it makes you look like a "redneck." And so on. The largest, most lavish McMansions in my area all have the emptiest, most desolate yards, and the lush gardens all belong to tiny, run-down houses.

But the answer that really cuts to the core of it, I think, is that lawns are a technology for making land into a Product for consumers. (This coexists with the above answers.) Turfgrass is a perfectly generic blank slate onto which anything can be projected. It is emptiness. It is stasis.

I worry about the flattening of our imaginations. Illustrations in books generally cover the ground outdoors in a uniform layer of green, sometimes with strokes suggesting individual blades of grass if they want to get fancy. Video games do this. Animated shows and movies do this.

Short, carpet-like turfgrass as the Universal Outdoor Surface is so ubiquitous and intuitive that any alternative is bizarre, socially unacceptable, and for many, completely unimaginable. When I am a passenger in a car, what horrifies me the most to see out the window is not only the turfgrass lawns of individuals, but rather, the turfgrass Surface that the entire inhabited landscape has been rendered into—vacant stretches of land surrounding businesses and churches, separating parking lots, bordering Wal-Marts, apartment complexes, and roadsides.

These spaces are not used, they are almost never walked upon. They do nothing. They are maintained, ceaselessly, by gas-powered machines that are far, far more carbon-emitting than cars per hour of use, emitting in one hour the same amount of pollution as a 500-mile drive. It is an endless effort to keep the land in the same state, never mind that it's a shitty, useless state.

Nature is dynamic. Biodiversity is dynamic. From a business point of view, the lawn care industry has found a brilliant scheme to milk limitless money from people, since trying to put a stop to the dynamism and constant change of nature is a Sisyphean situation, and nature responds with increasingly aggressive and rapid change as disturbance gets more intense.

On r/lawncare, a man posted despairingly that he had spent over $1500 tearing out every inch of sod in his yard, only for the exact same weeds to return. That subreddit strikes horror in my heart that I cannot describe, and the more I learn about ecology, the more terrible it gets. It was common practice for people in r/lawncare to advise others to soak their entire yard in Roundup to kill all plant life and start over from a "blank slate."

Before giving up, I tried to explain over and over that it was 100% impossible to get a "blank slate." Weeds typically spread by wind and their seeds can persist for DECADES in the soil seed bank, waiting for a disastrous event to trigger them to sprout. They will always come back. It's their job.

It was impossible for those guys to understand that they were inherently not just constructing a lawn from scratch, and were contending with another power or entity (Nature) with its own interests.

The logic of the lawn also extends into our gardens. We are encouraged to see the dynamism of nature as something that acts against our interests (and thus requires Buy Product) so much, that we think any unexpected change in our yard is bad. People are sometimes baffled when I see a random plant popping up among my flowers as potentially a good thing.

"That's a weed!" Maybe! Nonetheless, it has a purpose. I don't know who this stranger is, so I would be a fool to kill it!

A good caretaker knows that the place they care for will change on its own, and that this is GOOD and brings blessings or at least messages. I didn't have to buy goldenrod plants—they came by themselves! Several of our trees arrived on their own. The logic that sees all "weeds" as an enemy to be destroyed without even identifying ignores the wisdom of nature's processes.

The other day at work, the ecologist took me to see pink lady's slipper orchids. The forest there was razed and logged about a hundred years ago, and it got into my head to ask how the orchids returned. He only shrugged. "Who knows?"

Garden centers put plants out for sale when they are blooming. People buy trees from Fast Growing Trees dot com. The quick, final results that are standard with Buy Product, which are so completely opposite the constant slow chaos of nature, have become so standard in the gardening world that the hideous black mulch sold at garden centers is severed from the very purpose of mulch, and instead serves to visually emphasize small, lonely plants against its dark background. (For the record, once your plants mature, you should not be able to SEE the mulch.)

Landscapers regularly place shrubs, bushes, trees and flowers in places where they have no room to reach maturity. It's standard—landscapers seem to plan with the expectation that everything will be ripped out within 5-10 years. The average person has no clue how big trees and bushes get because their entire surroundings, which are made of living things (which do in fact feel and communicate) are treated as disposable.

Because in ten years, this building won't be an orthodontists' office, in ten years, this old lady will be dead, in ten years, the kids will have grown, and capitalism is incapable of preparing for a future, only for the next buyer.

The logic of the lawn is that gardens and ecosystems that take time to build are not to be valued, because a lush, biodiverse garden is not easily sold, easily bought, easily maintained, easily owned, or easily treated with indifference. An ecosystem requires wisdom from the caretaker. That runs contrary to the Consumer identity.

And it's this disposable-ness, this indifference, that I am ultimately so strongly against, not grass, or low turf that you can step on.

What if we saw buying land as implying a responsibility to be its caretaker? To respect the inhabitants, whether or not we are personally pleased by them or think they look pretty? What creature could deserve to be killed just because it didn't make a person happy?

But the Consumer identity gives you something else...a sense of entitlement. "This is MY yard, and that possum doesn't get to live there." "This is MY yard, and I don't want bugs in it." "This is MY yard, and I can kill the spiders if I want to."

Meanwhile there is no responsibility to build the soil up for the next gardener. No responsibility to plant oaks that will grow mighty and life-giving. No responsibility to plant fruit-producing trees, brambles, and bushes. None of these things, any of which could have fulfilled a responsibility to the future. Rather, just to do whatever you damn well please, and leave those that come after with depleted, compacted soil and the aftermath of years of constant damage. It took my Meadow ten years to recover from being the garden patch of the guy that lived here before us. Who knows what he did to it.

The loss of topsoil in all our farmland is a bigger example, and explains how this is directly connected to colonialism. The Dust Bowl, the unsustainable farming practices that followed, the disappearance of the lush fertile prairie topsoil because of greed and colonizer mindset, and simple refusal to learn from what could be observed in nature. The colonizing peoples envisioned the continent as an "Empty" place, a Blank Slate that could be used and exploited however.

THAT is what's killing the planet, this idea that the planet is to be used and abused and bought and sold, that the power given by wealth gives you entitlement to do whatever you want. That "Land" is just another Product, and our strategies for taking care of Earth should be whatever causes the most Buy Product.

It's like I always write..."You are not a consumer! You are a caretaker!"

#plants #native plants #no lawns #kill your lawn #anti lawn #consumerism #capitalism #colonialism #genocide tw