#here we see a hong in its natural habitat

[dragontestosterone]

let's take ibuprofen together

sorry, I'll stop horsing around

@intermissionwiki

#ddpi #problem sleuth #homestuck #here we see a hong in its natural habitat #intermission

[magicman111]

A Moth to a Flame - Chapter Two

One month later

Sasha joylessly toyed with the Music Box, opening its lid like a yawning mouth.

Who’d have thunk it? She wondered to herself. This tacky little thing could cause so much calamity?

How ludicrously out of place she looked curled up on King Andrias’ enormous throne, almost like the little girl playing pretend in the driver’s seat of her parents’ car. You’d be forgiven for not knowing she’d just led the swiftest, easiest toppling of a government in this world’s history.

Big blue dummy locked up? Check. The city’s army surrendered? Check. Their toad army less than an hour away? Check. Dimension-skipping Macguffin firmly in their position? Double Check.

Not a bad day’s work for a 13-year-old.

Marcy’s oversized sparrow was tethered to the armrest by his leg. A prize she’d taken for herself so she could cruise around her new kingdom in style. She saw to it he wasn’t under any duress, and the fact he was neck deep in an industrial sized bag of bird feed told her he was plenty comfortable.

Sasha managed a tiny smile as she reached out to run her fingers through the thickness of his coat. She dunked her hand in the bag and offered him an open palm of seeds; he eyed for a moment or two before gingerly pecking at the mound.

Thank Frog no one was around to hear the ‘d’aww’ escape her lips.

Her grandmother was the one she had to thank for her secret admiration of birds. Old lady had been a birdwatcher who ‘treated’ her to regular weekend trips into the forest when she was younger. This was long before her discovery of malls and arcades. Sasha wouldn’t dare admit it to even herself back then, but the ones they spotted together on those dewy spring mornings were beautiful to behold in their natural habitat.

Herons may now be forever ruined for her, but Joe—she thought that was his name—was a mighty impressive specimen. Poor guy somehow found the strength to carry all seven of them to Newtopia, only to nosedive into the moat at the end of the flight.

Definitely had nothing to do with her asking Marcy if she could take the reins in the last stretch. She and Anne were kind enough not to draw attention to it, same as they did the day at summer camp when they discovered her crying into her pillow. They were awesome enough to go along with her story that it was only allergies. She knew she had a true pair of girlfriends that morning.

Thinking about them only soured her mood afresh. She sprinkled the rest of the feed back into the bag and slumped against the backrest, arms petulantly crossed.

Here she was in the crowning moment of her young life and she couldn’t have been more miserable.

Maybe because her friends should have been here to share in this, but no, they had to go and act all noble. What else should she have expected? She always was the only one in the group with the guts. Anne had to be dragged kicking and screaming to ditch school and join her and Marcy in celebrating her birthday. Was it any wonder she had to keep taking control of the situation?

More likely... it was because deep down she knew she didn’t really want this. She certainly believed she did after they dropped that gloryhound newt general down a waterfall and when they successfully rallied the Toad Lords after retrieving Barrel’s Warhammer. Things only started getting complicated when they needed free tickets into Newtopia in the form of her friends.

She hadn’t counted on realising just how much she missed her clumsy, klutzy Marcy. Neither how effectively she and Anne were still able to work together as a team in spite of all the unpleasantness that had transpired between them during their time here, of which there was plenty. The fact that Anne actively encouraged her in taking down that molten toad monster was the rancid cherry atop the sludge sundae. For a while back there, it looked like they might really turn a corner and start afresh. All three of them could have gone home like none of this ever happened. Except by then it was already too late.

What recourse did she have when the Plantars invited them for the world’s most awkward dinner party or when they brought the house down at the Battle of the Bands? Tell Grime and all the toads who’d invested their manpower and futures in her that sorry, she was getting cold feet? There was only one grizzly way that would end both for her and Grime and the best scenario she could imagine involved heads on pikes.

... It didn’t matter anymore. Her friends had picked their path, she’d picked hers. As her mom always said, ‘You make your bed, you lie in it’. Funny how in her short life, she’d heard that line far too many times already.

Once she figured out how the Box worked, she’d send both Anne and Marcy on their merry way and they’d never have to see each other ever again.

Everyone would get what they want.

Good thing then she’d sent her soldiers to ransack Marcy’s room for all her research about Anne’s fateful birthday gift. Girl was a pack rat. She kept notes for every exam and project they were assigned back home. The less said about her laptop jammed with files of anime fanfiction and theories the better.

Plus, it was a good way to try and distract herself.

They came back into the throne room hauling burlap sacks full of parchments and emptied their contents at Sasha’s feet.

Daaang, girl, you've been in the zone.

She scattered them over her lap and the ample free space on the seat. They actually weren’t that hard to follow; colour coordinated with plenty of cutesy kawaii diagrams. Trademark Marbles.

Apparently, it worked a lot like those puzzle boxes Marcy got as gifts from relatives in Hong Kong. All it took was knowing the right sequence of buttons and zip! You can go wherever you want in the cosmos. Just a matter of finding the code for Earth.

‘I’m done listening to you!

I’m done trusting you!’

Sasha scowled, trying to push the thoughts to the back of her mind where they belonged. She shuffled through a couple more pages until she found the one titled in glittery green and blue lettering, ‘HOME’.

Bingo.

‘You’re a horrible person!’

Ignore. Ignore.

Now all she had to do was jot it down on her palm and—

‘AND I AM DONE. BEING. FRIENDS WITH YOU!!’

She stopped. Her shoulders drooped. Then she just threw the page down on the floor and sunk into her seat further than she thought physically possible.

She normally didn’t consider herself that thin skinned a person, but man, that one hurt.

Traces of bitter tears creeped into her eyes.

What am I even doing anymore?

The sound of footsteps on crumpling paper and someone clearing their throat snapped her out of her self-pitying torpor. She fluttered her eyes dry to see Grime standing there awkwardly among the discarded parchments.

The diminutive, one-eyed former Toad Lord was hiding something behind his back. He actually looked pretty embarrassed about it too, which for a battle hardened war vet like Grime was actually kinda adorable in Sasha’s eyes.

“I, uhh, got you something,” he said, whipping out a long rectangular present wrapped in green paper and topped with a luscious red bow. “Had it made especially for this day.”

Now if there was one thing Sasha Waybright couldn’t say no to, it was a gift, especially from a trusted friend. They were the ultimate distraction from the blues and she couldn’t have been sitting upright and tearing into this one any quicker.

“Whaaat? Grimesy, you didn’t!” What she had pulled from the ravaged packaging wielded aloft her head made her gasp. “How’d you know I wanted to duel wield?!”

It was a brand new heron sword. An exquisite green second shortsword that would compliment Ol’ Pink perfectly.

She stared proudly into the smooth steel surface, admiring the craftsmanship. When she noticed the girl staring right back at her, however, her smirk vanished in an instant. The captain of the cheerleaders, the scarred swordswoman, the conqueror of Newtopia, whatever angle she looked at it, she didn’t like what she saw. Unbelievable as it may sound, even the joy of an awesome gift like this was not enough to make everything better.

“What’s the matter? You don’t like it? Oh dang it!” Grime slammed his forehead. “I didn’t get a gift receipt!”

“No no, it’s just...” Sasha weighed the blade against her ungloved palm. Talking about these kinds of things was never easy for her. “What if Anne’s right? What if I am a horrible person?”

Grime popped up like a whack-a-mole behind the armrest. “Who cares what she thinks?” he scoffed. “You and I are in charge now, and we get to do whatever we want!”

“That’s the thing... I’m not sure what I want anymore,” she admitted wearily.

For all his years of training at the finest academies, his brutal combat in the colosseum and tactical expertise earned through a lifetime of military service as his forebears before him, this one had Grime stumped. Needless to say, talking about one’s emotions wasn't exactly encouraged during their upbringing in toad culture, so naturally it wasn’t one of his strong suits. Just one of the many things he and Sasha had in common.

“Huh.”

Still, he was a pretty fast thinker and came up with a fairly good idea on the spot.

“Why don’t you help me redecorate this place?” he suggested, resting his hand on her shoulder. “Take your mind off it. Cuz this right here...” He gestured to the cluttered mess in which she’d surrounded herself. “This is definitely not—I’m sorry, can I help you?!”

Both of them turned their heads when it became impossible to ignore Joe’s cone-shaped beak lightly nipping at Grime’s cheek.

“He probably thinks your warts are seeds.”

“For the love of—I knew he was eyeing me up on the ride here! There! Get lost!” Grime scooped up a fistful of feed and flung it over the marble floor, but the winged beast persisted with pecking his face. “Stop it! MY HEAD IS NOT A FEEDER!!”

It took an exceptional effort of willpower for Sasha not to laugh at the sight of her old man being preyed upon by the family pet.

Wow, she thought. Her old man? Was that how she saw Grimesy now? Seriously?

Perhaps up to a point. Okay, considering the options she had for parental figures back home, it wasn’t exactly the highest bar to pass, but it still meant something. Anything.

Who would have guessed this would be how they’d end up, especially given how they started off with her as his prisoner? Sure, it may have taken her helping him and the whole tower not getting turned into heron feed for her to be upgraded to his lieutenant, but they really had come a long way since then. There was a lot more honor and heart to the cranky old toad than she first thought, back when she wrote him off just as another blowhard with power. Now he genuinely considered her his equal both as a friend and comrade in arms. For Sasha, the feeling was mutual. A first for her.

When all was said and done, who else did she have left besides him and vice versa?

What the heck? Let’s tear this place up.

Untethering Joe, she whistled a tweet-tweet and gave the rope a gentle tug to encourage him to follow on their ‘indoor walkies’.

A cursory surveillance of the throne room told her there was a lot of work to be done. If this toad regime was to last a thousand years, the correct decor was an important first step. Thankfully for them, she knew a thing or two about fashion. For starters, there were way too many soft blues and purples. Rust red from top to bottom! She preferred keeping the stained glass windows, but they’d need entirely new designs. Hers truly would naturally feature in most of them, one showcasing her and Grime caving that narwhal worm’s head in with the Warhammer being an absolute must. The snakes coiling the stone pillars weren’t a bad touch, if just a bit too elegant for the whole ‘proud warrior race’ vibe they were going for, but she could still work with them. Now as for the throne, they were gonna have to replace it with something much more imposing. There was that super violent dragon show she and her parents used to watch that had the huge throne made out of swords. She was sure she had a picture somewhere on her phone to use as a reference.

“I’m sorry, what the heck is this?!”

Sasha could only denounce what they were gawking at as the single biggest affrontement to tasteful decorating known to man or amphibian. Yes, worse than inflatable furniture, carpeted bathrooms, beaded curtains, glass block bathroom windows, ‘live, laugh, love’ quotes on walls, rustic hearts, mason jars and nautical accessories all combined under the same inland roof.

Tapestries had their rightful place in a palace’s interior design, but the one sweeping across a section of wall depicting a gentle hearted Andrias sitting down by a lake, surrounded by flowers and lilypads was nothing short of vomit-inducing. Gathered at his feet and scooped up in his protective arms were his wide-eyed, childlike subjects. Even the fish and a lobster were surfacing to bask in their king’s magnanimity. Here the oversized salamander was truly the loving patriarch of everything the light touched. The mawkish display could only be topped off with a rainbow streaking across the sky.

Grime felt his stomach roile. If he ever needed an example to demonstrate the difference between kitschy and downright tacky, this was it.

“Y-y-y-yikes!” he gagged. “This thing’s gotta go!”

Sasha didn’t need a second invite. Besides, what else was Joe going to use to line his nest?

A joint effort tore the offensive piece from its place and it tumbled to the floor in a heap.

Dead silence fell over the room.

Hidden beneath the tapestry was... a mural. Including such a decoration in a throne room was hardly surprising, yet it was what it contained that shocked both the human and toad, so much so that they had to take a moment to recover.

“Woah,” they gasped at once, before starting to analyse what they saw.

The mural was a chaotic collection of nightmarish images painted on a night blue wall. Wild red flames spewing out hordes of beasts and the wreckage of buildings. Mountains of skulls and bones belonging to frogs, toads and newts alike. A flying... spaceship? A castle? Whatever it was meant to be, it firied a white beam up at what was unmistakably the Music Box. Pink, green and blue lightning bolts crackled out of the Box. Mesmerising orange gemstones or, more terrifyingly, eyes leaped off the wall and burned themselves into their minds. The frightening focal point of this one-way ticket to the school therapist’s office? Rising out of the middle of the inferno was the silhouette of a red-eyed, goliath-sized beast, its claws reaching up covetously towards the Box that hung right above its crowned head.

It may as well have been lifted straight from the tattered dream journal of a madfrog.

Any ideas of redecorating the throne room were long gone. Even the revolution they were spearheading suddenly seemed millions of miles away in the face of what they’d just stumbled upon.

Peering her eyes slightly, Sasha was the first to put a face to the shadowy leviathan, and when she did, she had to swallow her heart back down into her chest.

“Is that the king?” she asked, mystified. “With the music box?”

Sweat ran down the side of Grime’s nonplussed face. “If it is… it’s a really good thing we stopped him.”

Neither of them said it aloud, but both understood the situation at once. All this time they thought they’d been playing flipwart while the king played bog jump. Oh, how wrong they’d been. It was beyond anything that even the Toad Lords discussed. They knew that they had to reconvene with them as soon as the armies had reached the gate.

She took a couple steps closer to reexamine the mural more thoroughly, missed details emerging now that the initial shock began to wear off. Circuit board markings—the same inside her dad’s outdated computer when she foolishly dared Marcy if she could take it apart—worked their way around the images, serving as some type of frame. Odd choice for a world that didn’t even have steam engines yet. She also picked up the three small geometric figures standing atop the Box’s lid. An artist she was not, but they looked pretty human-like in design.

But humans did not exist in Amphibia. The three of them were the first of their kind to ever set foot in this dimension.

Weren’t they?

Alarm bells were ringing louder than ever before. This Andrias guy had been playing Anne and Marcy for his own ends this whole time, all to get his mitts on the Music Box! What did he plan to do with it? Right now, she still couldn’t say, but it was all bad. Outside of a kickin’ rock band, fire and skulls together were never a good thing!

Even Joe’s feathers were puffing up anxiously against her back. Not turning away from the mural, she raised her hand and patted his risen crest.

“I know, big guy. I don’t like it either.”

Grime’s voice rang urgently in her ears, “Lieutenant! Get over here, quick!!”

Sasha had spun on her heels and sprinted down the room to find Grime standing the wreckage of what used to be a display of armour. He’d evidently acted on a hunch while she’d been preoccupied. Judging by his thunderstruck expression, he’d just discovered something far worse.

“What is iooooh boy!”

This new second mural reminded Sasha a lot of Egyptian hieroglyphs. If there was any room for doubt about the technicolor stick guys, there was none here. Standing tall against an indigo backdrop in a neat row were the outlines of human beings; long gangly appendages, stumpy noses and everything. Some were wearing hooded capes, others were decked out in suits of armour. The couple in the middle looked particularly regal. No prizes for guessing the little wooden box they were holding in their hands, cementing their authority as if it were the globus cruciger.

Faded inscriptions were engraved along the bottom. They were written in a more archaic amphibian dialect, but being a toad of higher education, Grime was able to give translating them a decent shot.

These great beings of magic and might

Travelled from beyond to serve the night

Bow before these children of man

Or know the wrath of the—

“... Wu Clan?” He cocked his one good eye up at her. “Iiiii’m not getting it.”

There it was. Floodlights flashed in Sasha’s head. All colour drained from her face. A million and one thoughts were now firing across her brain at once, threatening to send her into cerebral shutdown.

It was at that moment she knew she’d been played. They all had. She didn’t know whether to be absolutely furious, betrayed or impressed.

Why that conniving, devious little—

That's when they heard the BOOM outside the window.

#amphibia #Disney's Amphibia #Disney Amphibia #amphibia disney #amphibia au #quisling marcy #Quisling Marcy Au #A Moth to a Flame #fanfiction #amphibia fanfic #amphibia fanfiction #Marcy wu #evil marcy #sasha waybright #captain grime #au #Amphibia true colors #true colors #amphibia sasha #amphibia marcy #alternate universe #alternate timeline

[the-cyberpunk-zeitgeist]

The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist

>>>𝕄𝕜𝕕𝕚𝕣 "𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪"...

>>>ℂ𝕕 "𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪"

>>>𝔻𝕠𝕨𝕟𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕 𝕙𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕟𝕕.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>𝔻𝕠𝕨𝕟𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕 𝕔𝕠𝕣𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕜𝕝𝕖𝕡𝕥.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>ℝ𝕦𝕟 𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>𝕄𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪 <𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘-𝕗𝕒𝕚𝕝𝕖𝕕: 

      "𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪.𝕙" 𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕗𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕕>

>>>𝔼𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕣 𝕞𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕒𝕘𝕖: "ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕗𝕚𝕟𝕕 𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪.𝕖𝕩𝕖. 𝕎𝕖 𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕚𝕟 𝕚𝕥."

>>>...

Flash into the past and look into the future. Recall the early stages of the digital age—the new millennium—and how, at the precipice of a thousand transformations, civilization was defined by its endless climbing innovation. In the 80’s and 90’s, when consumer use of the personal computer was infecting society like a virus, our entire idea of communication changed. The net became a pivotal point in shaping what it meant to be human. Through an ever-expanding web of information, human innovation seemed to spiral until promising “authorship over reality itself”. Those who felt constrained by the world, escaped into a fractal space with infinite possibilities of connecting with others. 

Douglas Rushkoff termed it ‘Cyberia’—a dreamlike place offering “a way to crack open our civilization’s closed-mindedness, and to allow for a millennial transition that offered something a lot better than apocalypse: consciously driven evolution”, but the mesmerizing unity in this newfound cyberscape didn’t last. What followed—what we see around us now—may lead us to believe that all is lost, but perhaps there’s something more than war, corporate politics, espionage. Perhaps, there still exist some humans among us interested in a higher cause: unlocking the mysteries.

While the net was first adopted solely by military personnel and groups of scientists across academia who saw fit to interconnect themselves for research and communication purposes, it soon fell into the hands of the geeks using hypertext forums to discuss niche hobbies or send pictures to one another. The net became a mystic place of interlocking minds, where interconnected collections of data contributed to the neural network of humans that composed a global brain. As this paradise aged, however, the desire of investors to monetize and capitalize from the cyberscape arose alongside it. Advertisements flooded the web; businesses sprung up in every forum, website, and chat client. It wasn’t long into the 21st century that the nature of the web was forever molded by a greed to optimize its use for social credit, capital, and leverage for everything from corporate intelligence, to data harvesting, to control and censorship of media. The symbol of freedom and exploration was thus transformed into a stratified market and a subversive survival game. It’s all so… Cyberpunk.  

In the 80’s and 90’s, alongside the rise of computers and the net, came the rise of Cyberpunk literature—a sci-fi subgenre defined by its retro aesthetics intermixed with contrasting commentary that showed us the wonders of new technology while simultaneously revealing the deep divide that emerged as a result of inequality. Pioneers like William Gibson in Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, and Katsuhiro Otomo in Akira revealed the true impact of this divide. In a world where everyone in the streets is chromed up with augmented cybernetic prostheses, but can still hardly afford to eat—a world where cities have been replaced by endlessly sprawling megalopoli—we’re left immersed in the aesthetics of ‘high tech-low life’ people struggling to get by. 

Cyberpunk showed sci-fi fans what it might look like if kleptocratic corporations spiralled further and further into the power vacuum created by advancing technology. If caution and regulation aren’t put in place to protect the people from marvelous creations that humanity could hardly predict outside of science fiction, the people are further exploited and economic classes are further stratified. When this is combined with life-threatening dangers around every corner, the difference between economic class can mean life and death. 

While the additional flourishes of weapons-grade cyborgs, sentient and sentimental artificial intelligence, and laser guns can make Cyberpunk seem like a farfetched reach into a future that will never come, I am here to tell you that this is Society, and we are living in it. Around the world, rising sea levels begin to swallow more of the coastline, and megafires consume any shred of nature or infrastructure in their path. Both of these events are spurred by human-driven climate change which is created in large part by first-world corporations churning out fossil fuels or slicing up rainforests for profit. The global hivemind that is the internet has become the limitless communications apparatus we wanted it to be, but it is covered in adverts and subverts its users attempts to harness its power with misinformation, propaganda, and profit-driven exclusive content. Riots over authoritarian state measures have propped up not only in the United States, but in Hong Kong, Belarus, and all across the globe. Pandemic disease and refugee crises displace hundreds of thousands of humans each year, and the rich keep getting richer by the billions.

In more recent Cyberpunk writing like William Gibson’s The Peripheral, Gibson describes the Jackpot:

And first of all that it was no one thing. That is was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns… or else were eaten alive by something that caused the big event. Not like that.

It was androgenic… that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

...it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years.

Jackpot. The repercussions of humanity’s actions finally catch up, and those bits of humanity that do remain are saved by an extreme surge in innovation that manages to save society’s elites. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it in his recent essay The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods, more and more of those who have the capital to do so have already begun their plans, whether those plans are to escape to Mars or to set themselves up with a cushy work-from-home job while the lower class workers are forced into the public during the pandemic crisis. The need to automate away positions for the safety of our species is becoming even more prevalent than it once was in the minds of corporate conglomerates, but the cancerous overgrowth of our bureaucracy has become so bloated and tripped up in its own processes that we can no longer look to our political systems to keep up with the exploitation of innovation. Lo and behold, the world’s looking pretty CPAF to me.

Where have the visions of Cyberia gone? What happened to the early stages of internet punks, pushed aside in their desire to surf the datasphere purely for the rush of uncovering swathes of data? Where did visions of “authorship over reality itself” twist to become ‘authorship over reality by those with the capital to control’? It may seem that this explosive spiral of technological innovation in the new millennium is driving us towards extinction and only saving those with enough coins in their pockets to buy a ticket on the ark, but perhaps it’s not too late to change course and save ourselves from the ultimate Jackpot.

United by the global nature of the net, every one of us is connected as a single living entity that is the Earth—a Technogaia. Developments in artificial intelligence promises us exponential increase in information processing capabilities across all fields. Breakthroughs in genetic engineering could allow us to delete diseases from our genomes, and have already shown minor success in the de-extinction of species. With the first cyborg part already installed in each of our pockets, every citizen can extend their minds beyond capacity; each one of us becomes a journalist at a moment’s notice when injustice needs to be documented and challenged. Nuclear, hydrogen, solar, and wind energy lead us towards a cleaner and greener future. The rise of urban ecology shows a path to optimize the use of space to lower humanity’s carbon impact while providing more space for habitat rehabilitation and the reintroduction of lost biodiversity.

In the palm of our hands, humanity has taken control of the world. With science and technology, we’ve become the manipulators, but if we do not recognize what our impact is on the Dao of Earth, we may tip the scales too far into the Chaos. I’ll be honest in saying things look grim, but these same innovations that have paved the way for flying killbots and smoke stacks spewing gases into the sky have given us the power to reshape the world in a beneficial image. Futurist politicians call for universal basic income in a world increasingly run by machines. Transhumanists pave the way for the radical extension of the human lifespan. Technogaians design solarpunk arcologies to house a society ready to save their Earth rather than one intent on consuming it. Cyberians fight for our rights to privacy and the freedom of information. Just as the visions of grim dystopias in the 80's and 90’s saw themselves transformed into modern realities, we can use humanity’s greatest tool—this near-deific domain over innovation—to mold this fractal reality into our vision. But is it chaos, order, or some harmonious Dao in between that we seek? 

No matter our choice, it’s going to take a lot of united high tech-low life cyberpunks to get there. This is the Cyberpunk Zeitgeist, and we’re living it.

For more works by The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist, see our Twitter page @CyborgZeitgeist

#cyberpunk #sci-fi #science #environment #technology

[art-angels]

CÉCILE PLAISANCE AND HER COMIC, SURREAL AND PROVOKING LENTICULAR WORK

Cover story, via SuperYacht Digest

Cécile Plaisance turns the tables and breaks stereotypes, codes and roles using Barbie not as an object but rather as the incarnation of free, seductive and empowered women.

Barbies are part of every girl’s life. Some put them in the loft and forget about them, some others pass them to their daughters and Cécile Plaisance creates art with them. Feminists have always accused Barbie to promote the objectification of the female body, a perfect and inaccessible body, the idea of a submitted woman and consumerism. She turns the table an breaks stereotypes, codes and roles using Barbie not as an object but rather as the incarnation of free seductive and empowered women.

Born in 1968 in Paris, Cécile Plaisance is a French photographer, mostly active in Brussels. For many years she did not get the opportunity to develop her love for photography. She graduated in Economics and Commerce with at DEA Diploma for Paris Dauphine University. For over 10 years she works in the European financial markets, but photography was always in the back of her mind and her camera followed her everywhere. She also worked in the IT sector with her husband but after moving to Brussels she left the masculine environment of finance to eventually follow here passion for photography. She studied at Contraste Photography Agency and she took Photoshop classes which soon became a fundamental tool for her creations. At the end of the third year the school organized an exposition with its students’ photos and that is where Barbie dolls made their first appearance to Cécile’s works. She wanted to give homage to Helmut Newton but at that time she didn't have enough money to pay for real-life models, so she turned to her daughter’s barbie collection. Plaisance mentions Newton as one of the greatest photographers whose woks have inspired her, along with Barbara Kruger, Richard Avedon, Mel Ramos and Russel James.

Through her work, she pursues a strong message, yet ludic. Her art is not a war of the sexes, it is an ode to femininity and to all women. She is not against men, at all, in fact she things we should find a proper balance between men and women. In her photographs, Plaisance elevates the idea off every girl’s childhood to a superior cause: she defends women’s rights, desires and freedom. She links Barbie to the women of today, playing with her femininity, managing everyday-life tasks, becoming a perfect housewife of boss lady. In some photographs from her Lens series, Plaisance transforms the magazine read by women looking for the perfect outfit into the perfect outfit itself.

Cécile Plaisance is well-known for her comic, surreal and provoking photos of Mattel’s iconic doll. She superimposes difference pictures of Barbie getting dressed-undressed which change according to the position of the viewer. With her Barbie series, the artist does not only want to take us back to our childhood, but she also links the iconic doll to the empowered woman of today in different settings, actions and cultures.

Her works are featured in several exhibitions, fairs, galleries and museums, including LA Art Angels gallery, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art in Saint Petersburg, Art Miami, Art Cologne, Art Toronto, Scope Miami and Art Basel, Hong Jong. Her photographs can also be found in prestigious art collections, both private and corporative. The Handler family, founders of Mattel, of course had to have one of her creations, but also the King of Morocco, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, Joe Malone CEO of her eponymous brand and the Ecclestone Family among others.

In 2016 her Nun & Baby was auctioned at Christies’s Paris for of $14,100. In 2018 PHOTO Magazine awarded her with the “Prix Photo” and put her work on cover.

French photographer has great respect for all religions, but none of them should promote physical and moral disrespectful behavior, dictated by some form of patriarchy. To her “there is no religion that can justify flouting women’s rights. Women should be equal to men and should be free to do whatever they want with their image and their bodies.” She uses her art to encourage women to take their freedom back, no matter where they live or what their religion may be. In her photographs, the nun’s cloak or the burqa hide a sexy and provocative woman. She explores the different roles that women play both publicly and privately and every action they take should be their exclusive decision. Despite the differences in cultures, clothes and fashion, al women around the world aspire to be free and to live fully and intensely in their lives.

In her series “La Bella Vita” her dolls are photographed on yachts, at sea, while sunbathing and having fun in the summer weather. They are so perfectly integrated with the environment that the line between fantasy and reality is blurred. The viewer questions whether the dolls are playing the role of a real-life model, or the model is playing the role of the glamorous dolls. Barbies appear to be alive and posing.

A single image was not enough for Plaisance to deliver the complex idea and nature of a multifaceted woman, so she superimposes two different images, with the same subject but in different poses or clothes, that appear to transform into each other. Barbie seems to undress depending on the viewer’s position in front of the photograph. Plaisance started using holograms, or lenticular lens, in 2010, becoming her predominant form of art ever since, to better explore the various aspects of a woman: how she sees herself, vs how others see her, the public persona she shows and the more private, intimate and secret one she keeps to herself. By using this technique, the French photographer animates a static image, making it dynamic and surprising to viewers that do not expect the photograph to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles.

Plaisance is one of the few artist in the world to dare to use the so-called lenticular printing. Lenticular printing was firstly used in marketing to promote and advertise products and now has become part of the world of fine art. It gives artist an incredible opportunity to explore depth and interact with the viewer. Even Pop Art artist Roy Lichtenstein, one of Plaisance’s source of inspiration, employed the lenticular printing technique.

Plaisance claims that lenticular printing could be very time consuming, hard and extremely expensive. She also adds that the whole process could be quite stressing because the results are not always perfect. Also, there are only 3 labs that produce these lenses in the world: in the US, in China and Ireland. That is why this technique is only for the most daring, and Cécile Plaisance definitely is one of them.

In 2016 she turned to real-life models after five years of working with Barbies. Plaisance explained she was strolling through Instagram and saw some photos of Olga Kent. Their collaboration started to culminate this year with a project dedicated to animal conservation and environmental issues: in the black and white “Planet Earth” series, Plaisance uses the photomontage technique, superimposing endangered habitats and animals. A very important subject for future generations, with the woman always at the centre, perfect to deliver strong messages.

During quarantine this year, Plaisance shot a new series called Bubble Gum, the protagonist, Barbie of course, is blowing a big bubble gum while wearing a pair of wide sunglasses.

Q&A WITH ARTIST CÉCILE PLAISANCE

SD: “Your works are not just any regular photos, where you take a picture, you Photoshop it and then you print it out. It is rather a long and time-consuming job, where there result is not always perfect at just, How long does it take you to create one work, start to finish, using the lenticular approach?

CP: “I have used the lenticular technique for ten years now and I have found that it allows me to deliver a stronger message. The shooting is already very complex as the model must not move from one pose (dressed) to another (undressed). Then the work consists of superposing the 2 images so that some parts are not moving, for example the face, the eyes. It takes me between 20 to 50 hours to finish an artwork. But I love the result. So to make a complete series takes some time, several months. The production time is also very consuming. There are very few labels that are able to produce lenticular prints and even less manufacturers of lenticular sheets. At present, there are only 2 left in the world. I need to control every production as the sheets are no originally meant for art.

My latest series about the protection of the species, is not lenticular. It is printed on Ultrasmooth Hahnemühle paper, but I am using the same technique as I am superimposing a few images: the model, the specie, the climate change or the environmental issue... and the frame.”

SD: “You started your career photographing Barbie dolls, plastic and static objects. Later to turned to real life models, made of flesh and bones that move. What is the reason behind this choice and what is your preference?”

CP: “It was a natural move. After having shot Barbies for half of a decade, I wanted some change.. It happens that the beautiful Olga Kent (also on the picture of your cover) contacted me via Instagram. We decided to work together and we still are. She is so natural and so beautiful. Everything is easy with her. I can say that I truly enjoy shooting with real models. Each time I have a great connection with them. They come to my studio that is part of my place and we share some time together. Every series I do, I build it with them. They have to agree to every step. And of course the final image. I can say that my Barbies helped me very much and cam back during confinement, but I have much more pleasure working with humans.”

SD: “Behind all your works there is a clear message, whether it is the defense of women’s rights, stereotypes and injustice or climate change and environmental issues. Do you think good art should always have social implications?”

CP: “I think that it is my responsibility to do so. I can’t stay inactive. I am aware that it is a very small drop in the sea (French quote), but I try to help some causes. I am not sure though that it makes a good art. But it definitely makes a difference.

Q&A WITH ART GALLEY, ART ANGELS

SD: “Very few artists in the world use the lenticular approach, and Cécile is one of them, making her work one of a kind, unique and unexpected. What is the public general reaction to Cécile's works?”

AA: ‘Cécile’s pieces effortlessly make a statement that captures the attention of all of our collectors. Completely unexpected at first glance, she has become one of the most sought after artists at the gallery given the uniqueness of her works.”

SD: “Why did you choose to exhibit Cécile’s works? Do you share her values?”

AA: “We choose to exhibit Cécile as we strongly admired her as a female artist and the uniqueness of her artwork that continues to push boundaries and provoke thought.”

SD: “What do Cécile's works have in common with the others exhibited at your gallery?”

AA: “Cécile's works like this by all of artists breathe life, diversity, humor and uniqueness into each of our collectors homes. It is a pleasure to continuously hear how much joy works like Cécile's continue to bring to our collectors when their pieces enter into their collections.”

[momtemplative]

MASKED.

1.

In a house with two young kids, our quickest sanity-stabilizer in this COVID era was to head outside and go for a walk, or a bike ride, or to roller skate. We’d pay close attention to the proximity of passers-by, but typically the grassy fields by the bike paths were an open canvas for the kids to blow off some steam. And we’d all return home a bit winded and slightly more stable. 

Then, a little more than two weeks ago, a strong recommendation came from Governor Polis for everyone to wear masks in public. But what, pray-tell, was “public” referring to? 

Here’s what the CDC endorsed: wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

So that’s what we assumed Polis recommended as well. That night we even had a happy hour gathering with our neighbors, all at least 6-feet-away, but without masks. We didn’t feel like we were being sneaky or non-compliant, we were simply following the guidelines as we understood them. 

But then we started seeing people in their yards wearing masks, and on walks wearing masks— in addition to 6-feet! There was an eerie infiltration of mask-wearers, and, with that, the non-verbal communication of an abrupt change of protocol. Our sacred, oft-traveled, 1,000-step bike path that loops around the block started to feel unfamiliar, as if it were a movie set peppered with strangers, wearing homemade cloth curtains over their cheeks. 

We quickly felt like a minority out there with our bare faces.

2.

An afternoon walk was once a favorite time of day—quarantine or not. Quickly though, in light of the current mask situation, and before I began to wear one, my brain started to get stuck in a grinding pattern of managing everyone else’s whereabouts in accordance with my own. I noticed that I was judging those who were masked, at least in part because I was sure they were judging me. 

Their judgment and my judgment felt cut from the same cloth: judgement as a way of controlling the uncontrollable. There is so much confusion about protocols. So much fear of the radio broadcast of white noise and speculation that is to be our future. All these feelings get lumped together into just trying to do it right. I returned from one particular walk stiff as a board and deeply grumpy.

“Jesse,” I said, “I’m not going on a walk again without a mask.”

3.

I opted out of any domestic sewing of masks at first, and started with my old-lady cardigan tied around my face like a waist. I then upgraded to a bedazzled bandana that I bought to fill Opal’s Easter basket last year. I love the happy fabric, but it wouldn’t stay up over my nose for anything beyond the liquor drive-through (my singular biweekly errand). Store-bought masks are not an option. They’ve been back-ordered for weeks and if the stock is replenished, it needs to be saved for the blessed healthcare workers.

By the next weekend, Jesse and Opal wore masks that they made from a YouTube video, using mustard-yellow t-shirts and rubber bands, while on a bike ride. That ride turned out to be very brief because, according to Opal, it was so hard to breathe. 

4.

The solidarity and confidence that come from wearing a mask are helpful and significant, sure. But the act of wearing a mask changes the experience entirely. 

On a purely physical level, it muddles your peripheral vision, steams up your glasses, makes it hot and very hard to breathe. 

On a social-emotional level, the masks create a real separation between people. It feels similar to being at a costume party—even if the invite list includes most of your friends, everyone is suddenly anonymous. 

I walked behind two people (in masks) and a dog from a block away that I thought were my beloved next door neighbors. I even hollered at them. (They didn't hear me.) Then I got closer and realized it was a different dog and very much not my neighbors. It’s all very disorienting.  

5.

One week in, and Opal has taken Polis’s suggestion as gospel. Of course, I don’t blame her. Sometimes when we are out and about, so is the rest of the neighborhood. During those times, the mask feels safe and dare-I-say comforting. (Like we are good, complaint citizens. Go us.) But other times, there is nobody outside. I tell Opal, “Sweetie, we can keep our masks around our chins until we see someone (dozens of feet away!) and then put up our masks.” 

Opal’s reply: NOT A CHANCE.

I try to imagine what it would be like to experience all this at age ten. What other such details has her system become accustomed to over the last month? Zoom call playdates, online school, little sister around all-the-effing-time. Maybe some feelings come out sideways? Maybe everything seems overwhelming and busy even though very little is happening?

In the olden days, before COVID, any sort of outdoor trek was soul-nourishing for all of us. It ticks a lot of boxes: sunshine, fresh air, exercise for me and the dog and the kids, a brain reset. Now, masked, such an activity is beyond taxing. Ruth has no desire to keep her mask on and she’s a runner. We can bribe her with a lollipop to stay in the stroller, but the girth of the BOB, along with the leashed (80-pound) dog requires skill and intentional footing on an average day. Trying to juggle it all through a face-drape is the emotional equivalent of walking through tar. A guaranteed headache.

Returning to our backyard, with its creaky swingset and patchwork yard, and removing our masks (along with the associated invisible constraints) is beyond restorative.

“That’s the best part about a mask,” Opal said. “Taking it off and having the air taste so fresh and cold again.”

6.

On Sunday morning—a few days ago and two solid weeks into the mask-in-public rules of conduct—the kids were scattered on the floor watching Frozen while I folded laundry and Jesse tinkered away at the sewing machine. Project: to sew face-masks that fit each of us properly. It was a lovely scene of the times. I would imagine Norman Rockwell painting such an episode if he were alive during COVID. A family of four (plus cat, plus dog) in their natural weekend habitat. Slow to dress, sipping juice or coffee, and, sewing face masks.

“Ruth,” Jesse said, “Come on over here and try this on to see if it fits.” Ruth scurried over to him to try on her mask like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Later that day, I walked our dog wearing the mask Jesse so lovingly crafted for me (after three fittings). It was exquisite, hands-free, spacious around the mouth. He even used the sweetest yellow-petal, summer dress fabric. When I returned, I kissed him straight through the mask.

7.

In spite of a good fit, it still takes exponentially more effort to greet someone while masked—you have to yell or over-gesture to compensate for the fact that both of your faces are completely erased. Because we wear ours primarily outside, most people are in sunglasses with their masks. But if not, they are far enough away where eye-reading is not an option. It’s all a straight-up guessing game.

More often than not, for the sake of simplicity, it’s just me and the dog these days. Typically, I have my dog’s leash in my left hand, and a steamy bag of his shit in my right that gets carried for countless unpleasant blocks. This is due to the lack of public trash facilities on the neighborhood routes I find are easier to navigate within the guidelines of 6-feet-between. Bike paths are pretty tight if there isn’t open space to veer off on either side. And now I’ve got my mask on, and fogged-up sunglasses. The uniform is similar to that of someone on Halloween in a last-minute ghost-sheet costume, with just the eyes cut out, cobbling along with both hands full. This is not a “path is the journey” sort of moment. I’m lucky if I can twitch out a head-nod or an elbow-wave to a passer-by.

It feels important to counteract the separation that has become synonymous with health and life. But I’d be lying if I said I was able to muster a greeting every time.

8.

In our culture, masks (when not worn in a medical setting) often represent sinister actions—bandits or bank robbers or the KKK who want to hide defining features.

For many Asian countries, mask-wearing was a cultural norm even before the coronavirus outbreak. In East Asia, many people are used to wearing masks when they are sick or when it's hayfever season, because it's considered impolite to sneeze or cough in public.

The 2003 Sars virus outbreak, which affected several countries in the region, also drove home the importance of wearing masks, particularly in Hong Kong, where many died as a result of the virus. Says the BBC news: “One key difference between these societies and Western ones, is that they have experienced a contagion before—and the memories are still fresh and painful.”

I recently read a story about two black men who were wearing masks at Walmart—fully in compliance and trying to keep themselves safe—when they were accosted by police. It hit me like a whip how individualized each of us are experiencing this pandemic. I skoff at my mask because it’s a pain-in-the-ass. But I’ll never be faced with also having to weigh the risks of racial profiling.

Delving further, I read that to-mask-or-not-to-mask has become a way to take a political stance. Trump supporters carrying “My body, My choice” signs, with an illustration of a crossed-out mask—this is a common image to see in the media right now.

The Washington Post said: “Even as governors, mayors and the federal government urge or require Americans to wear masks in stores, transit systems and other public spaces to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, the nation is divided about whether to comply. And it is divided in painfully familiar ways — by politics and by attitudes about government power and individual choice.”

So, clearly, it is about so much more than just a mask.  

9.  

This just in. 

In a press conference that took place a few days ago, April 20th, Governor Jared Polis and state epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy outlined how life may change in Colorado as soon as next week, when “shelter-in-place” shifts to “safer-at-home.” They are essentially the same, just with a select few businesses opening with strict distancing rules and incremental shifts toward less physical distancing over all. Polis mentions nothing different about mask-wearing. Meaning, still wear them in public, especially if you can’t get 6-feet-between, especially if you’ve been exposed or have symptoms.

I noticed an immediate difference on my walk following his announcement. There was a family of four playing frisbee in an open space without masks! My initial feeling was wait, WTF? (And yes, I realize we are living in a strange state of affairs for my initial reaction to a beautiful family frolicking in a field to be contempt.) There was a man throwing a ball for his dog in a park that still had many visible CLOSED signs—also NO MASK. (Again, WTF??) I then gave a wide, grassy birth to a group of mask-free bike riders. 

I notice my mask feels more like a burden on my face without the unifying solidarity of everyone doing it. We all seem to be getting different memos.

There’s a huge relief that people are back to having faces, to be sure. I miss people. I love faces. But I have to admit that in spite of my hemming and hawing, I’d gotten used to feeling protected. It’s impossible to make sense of any of it. Even little Ruth came in yesterday and gave a tiny cough. “I’m sick,” she said, “Since I didn’t wear a mask today.” 

Circling back to the facts, the only thing worth grasping at right now, I am challenged to find any bit of news to suggest that our household need to be wearing masks while out on walks—under any level of regulation thus far. Neither Jesse nor myself are working outside of the house. We don’t visit with friends or family. (Big sigh.* We miss everyone terribly.) The odds of us being silent carriers are beyond slim. We are not immuno-compromised. So wearing masks these last few weeks—while still on socially distanced walks—could probably be categorized as an act of cultural alignment, an act of doing everything we can for the cause. 

As of right now, this moment, I do not see our mask-wearing as being impactful to our macro OR micro community. So, for the sake of preserving the sanity of our tiny culture for the long haul, I vote that we wear our beautifully-Jesse-crafted masks on our chins, like flattened feathers at the ready. 

“As it (the “safer-at-home” regulations) rolls off April 27, we need to figure out how to run the marathon now that we’ve run the sprint,” Governor Polis said in his most recent press conference. “I hate to break it to you, but the easy part was the sprint.”

#momtemplative #HeatMamaWords #mindfulparenting #COVIDwords #masked

[kittencooki]

Flying to New Zealand with stopover: everything parents need to know about it

Many stopovers are booked via Singapore to change planes here to get to New Zealand as fast as possible. Dubai is in constant change and it is hard not to admire the emirate for its tireless drive, ambition and dynamism. In addition, you have an XXL choice, because there are many return destinations available on this ticket. By the way, this Open Return Ticket can be booked on other dates for the same price. The Star Alliance (e.g. Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand) as well as Cathay Pacific also fly over Asia. in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing or Singapore. However, on the way to or from New Zealand there is usually no stopover in Australia.

Only with us! We will answer all your questions in our Open-Return-Ticket Webinar

In Hell's Gate on the east shore of Lake Rotorua there is also bubbling everywhere. But a stay here is a blessing, despite the flowery names of the natural pools, which are called "Devil's Pool" or "High Priest Pool". New Zealand's only sulphur and mud spa promises relief for skin and joint problems. |}

Changing over to another plane, even if it involves a several hour stay at the airport, is no stopover.

Here you can see some of New Zealand's rarest birds, reptiles and insects in their natural habitat, including animals with such exotic names as hihi, tuatara and kakapo.

In addition, the Australian JetStar is also operating in the region, offering many flights to Australia and other destinations, but also in New Zealand itself.

Since prices vary from season to season, we'll be happy to make you a concrete offer for your travel period.

>On arrival in New Zealand, the changeover is no longer a problem and you'll be ready to go in no time.>/ul>

The journey with the comfortable train invites you to decelerate. After starting in Christchurch, the diesel locomotive puffs for about four and a half hours until it reaches its destination in Greymouth on the west coast. The panoramic windows with anti-reflective glass and the open-air carriages let you enjoy the majestic scenery passing by. Enjoy your stopover in Singapore on the way to New Zealand at Changi Airport, which has won several awards. The airport inspires with its modern architecture, efficient routes and a first-class culinary offer.

The overnight stay in a double room in the capital of the United Arab Emirates starts at US$ 37 per person - the second night is free. A similar arrangement is also offered in Dubai, which costs 90 US dollars. Short breakers can book additional activities such as a desert safari or a visit to a water park. Read more about campervan hire New Zealand here.

#flight new zealand stopover singapore

[regina-del-cielo]

“The Old Guard” Daemon AU: Quynh and the king cobra

Since we don’t separate couples in this house, after Andy here comes Quynh. She’s just as badass as her axe-wielding wife, so she has a similarly Iconique daemon

the king cobra is the longest venomous snake in the world; adults range between 3,75 and 5 m, and weigh up to 10 kg, and males are bigger than females. Quynh is terrifying (affectionate), so her having a Big Murder Noodle as daemon is on par with her

king cobras are apex predators, snakes that eat other snakes; their only natural predators are humans. Quynh, like Andy, is a force of nature, so she deserves to stay on top of the food chain

like most venomous snakes, king cobras kill their prey by biting them, injecting a high dose of venom, and then eat it. Quynh, that Joe described as a pit viper in a fight, seems to be a “one strike and you’re dead” type of warrior, especially being an archer

on that same note, a group of king cobras is called a quiver, and a quiver is also the pouch where archers keep their arrows. So. Sounds like destiny

king cobras are diurnal, so they possess a good eyesight, together with a strong sense of smell; they also spend a lot of time on tree branches, from which they lean down to hunt – sniper Quynh my beloved

while they usually prefer avoidance to confrontation, king cobras tend to take an aggressive stance when disturbed – raising up to the chest, opening the hood, and hissing. Since they’re also much larger than many snakes, they can also attack from a certain distance if bothered. I think Quynh has the spirit of an observant (she was the sniper before Nicky and I will die on this hill), and she doesn’t start fights if she doesn’t need to; but she won’t take any bullshit from anyone, and those that test her don’t live long enough to regret it

king cobras are long-lived snakes (20 years on average) and although they’re solitary during the year, they tend to stay with the same partner for the mating season, and it’s the only snake species that actively builds a nest for its eggs, which the female guards ferociously. 🎶 ~ Found Family Vibes Babe ~ 🎶

a king cobra’s scales are usually a mix of green, brown, black and yellow, with the yellow scales forming very slight stripes on the top portion of the body. It’s not the flashiest coloring among snakes, but it’s surely elegant, and Quynh is obviously a fashion icon, and her daemon’s coloring goes with all her outfits – what do they say, black goes with everything?

The habitat of the king cobra spans from southern India to most of Southeast Asia, from lowlands up to an elevation of 2000 m. They live in forests, swamps, bamboo thickets, grasslands, and rivers – they are good swimmers. Coincidentally, Vietnam has declared the king cobra a protected species (go Vietnam!); so it’s an animal that Quynh would have been familiar with

according to the Netflix featurette video, Andy found Quynh around 1000 BCE – take away the century that it took her to actually find Quynh, and assuming that Andy started looking for her as soon as the dreams started (which I think she would have, desperate for company as she was), we could place Quynh’s death around 1100 BCE – give or take the thirty/forty years Quynh actually lived

I am assuming that Quynh lived in the Red River delta area in northern Vietnam; this date would place her at the tail end of the Dong Dau archaeological period of the Hong Bang dynasty (the predecessor of the Dong Son culture), and she would have been a Lac Viet

the Lac Viet were an agricultural society with a sort of feudal system, where inheritance was passed through both the paternal and maternal line; also, when someone got married, they became a member of the wife’s family instead of the husband’s

in most Asian cultures snakes have a neutral or positive depiction, from symbols of rebirth (due to their periodical shedding of the skin) and immortality (think of the ourobouros), to fertility (humans will see an elongated anything with a differentiated head and go ‘is this a phallic reference?’) to guardians of temples or divine figures (especially cobras, for their defensive positions); the Vietnamese dragon itself is a combination of various animals, including the snake

one of the legends about the origin of the Vietnamese people is that of Lac Long Quan, legendary founder of the Hung dynasty, whose mother was a dragon goddess, and Au Co, an immortal fairy of the mountains who could turn into a bird. She bore him 100 children, and when they separated (he to the seas, she to the mountains) the children also split between their parents

in Vietnam’s folk religion, the snake, as an amphibious animal, is meant to possess the linh, the “spirit”, a power of mediation between âm (yin, the disorder) and duong (yang, the order). It lives on the threshold of water and land, and thus is associated with divine figures with luminal powers between order and disorder, especially goddesses

the neighbouring Cambodians also believe to be descended from nagas, the snake gods also present in Hindu and Buddhist mythology

this would mean that Quynh having a snake daemon, in her original culture, would have been considered positively, even reverently – and in her travels through Asia, said snake being a cobra probably was looked at even more benevolently

(imagine how pissed off she must have been that the onset of Christianity would make people recoil away from her and her daemon)

After. A painful search. I have settled for Thang for the daemon’s name. It means “victory” (or “victorious”, depending on the sources), and it feels like a good thing to name a person’s daemon, especially if we assume that Quynh had a warrior training in her first life too

(there is One (1) Thing I know of him. He has a Deep Sexy Voice, like. Imagine James Earl Jones. That’s how I can imagine him speaking. A soothing deep bass that makes you feel instantly at ease – haters will say it’s manipulative. Quynh regularly goes “if Thang was a tiger you wouldn’t say that, you cowards”)

Fun fact: in almost all legends and mythologies snakes and eagles (or snake-like and eagle-like entities) are mortal enemies since, you know, snakes represent the chthonic world and eagles represent the skies. And yet Andy and Quynh looked at each other and went ‘fuck it, that’s my wife now’ and that’s Very Sexy of them

(I can see Diokles sleeping on the closest tree branch above Andy and Quynh with Thang gently coiled around him so he can also Keep Warm)

References outside of Wikipedia and directly linked sites:

 Đõ̂, Thiện (2003): Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region. Psychology Press, 300 pages

Dutton G.E., Werner S.J., Whitmore J.K. (2012): Sources of Vietnamese Traditions. Columbia University Press, 622 pages;

McLeod M.W., Nguyen T.D. (2001): Culture and Customs of Vietnam. Greenwood Press, 198 pages;

National Geographic’s Photo Ark – King Cobra;

Taylor, K.W. (1983): The Birth of Vietnam. University of California Press, 397 pages;

Taylor, K.W. (2013): A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge University Press, 696 pages.

#the old guard #my ponderings #daemon AU #quynh #nature #animals #king cobra #the fact that I don't have a Quynh descriptive tag is a shame hope the sequel fixes that #THIS WAS. A PAIN. #and it's also considerably shorter than the other four I'm sorry #problem is - if we go back to canon we have SO LITTLE MATERIAL on Quynh to work on #most of my characterization for her is Unexplainable Vibes #and there's also very little info on king cobras I found out #for all the other animals I found monographies but for the cobra? Not a thing #also most of Vietnam's history for her time period is like #'yeah Chinese historians in the 14th century talked about this society and their mythological kingdoms and that's all we know' #so even though I listed multiple resources they're all repeating the same three things about pre-Han invasion northern Vietnam sorry #I didn't put any diacritic accents on names hope it's not too much of a problem #king cobras have this thing that they look fucking menacing but on certain angles they have such a Dumb Noodle Face lol

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

14 May 2019: Supermarket norms and robotic food. eBay high street pop-up. Bezos: infinite resources in space!

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Motiondisplay, whose animated conveyor dividers are delicious visual treats for our built-in reptile brain.]

Supermarket norms and robotic food

Here’s a very small thing about supermarkets: how that divider stick on the checkout conveyor belt is used is a big deal. It’s a small object, but it carries more social weight than you might expect.

Imagine redesigning it: maybe you’d make the conveyor itself into a scanning surface and then shoppers could just draw a line with their finger to demark their shopping territory from another’s. But taking everything out of a basket to scan is surely unnecessary: you might replace the entire checkout (conveyor, divider, scanner and, yes, staff) with something that tracks goods. In Amazon’s world this is Go, in which the entire shop is inside the scanning machine. Or it might be a smart shopping basket or bag that knows what’s being placed inside it.

If you’re planning a future of unstaffed supermarkets (or shops inside your car/house or smart baskets or...), you can see that there’ll be many things that must be redesigned. And even the small things, like the conveyor dividers, will be both affected by existing social expectations but also create new social norms.

The social dimension also suggests that there are opportunities for contrarian stores. Instead of adding technology to remove staff/save money/reduce prices (etc), a store could invest more deeply in the ritual between shopper and store staff. Yes, make the transactional bit convenient and quick, but deepen the social relationship.

Anyway, what’s happening in food and warehouse automation?

Ocado invests £4.75m stake in ready-meal robotics start-up - "Karakuri’s systems provide localised micro-manufacturing within an existing restaurant, retail or commercial kitchen." Maybe Ocado fancies some vertical integration, its robots making food products and handing them to the warehouse robots. (Would that mean anything for Deliveroo’s “dark kitchens”?)

Beijing's first restaurant with fully automated kitchen opens - robot chefs and waiters. And a very special(ised) robot: grilled cheese sandwiches.

Some food is valuable because it is about the human touch - restaurants, home cooking, social meals. Other food may be valuable where it has had the human touch removed - “robot-clean” production, grab and go sandwiches, sushi conveyors, robot kitchens maybe.  Perhaps the prepared food market eventually polarises into the very human and very unhuman.

Elsewhere in food automation, Amazon is adding machines that pack orders in the warehouse - that article has interesting detail on the different pick and pack jobs done in a warehouse. And Ocado’s fast robots help it to scoot ahead of Amazon in analysts’ eyes - analysts reckon that speed is everything, and Ocadobots are 3 times faster than Amazon’s.

eBay: high street pop-up

eBay is running a temporary concept store in Wolverhampton for a month. It’s a pop-up mall containing 40 local businesses “to demonstrate how online and physical retail can work together, seemingly without cannibalising one another”. Payments will be by QR codes and eBay will get all of the sales and traffic data. For eBay, it’s an online-to-offline experiment - 25% of UK small businesses don’t have any ecommerce. For Wolverhampton, it’s part of a wider high street renewal programme.

Various things: China

Amazon is closing its local marketplace and launching a lending service in China aimed at growing the number of China-based merchants who sell directly to consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Wechat owner Tencent says “tech for good” is its new motto.

Tencent and Alibaba get banking licences in Hong Kong - payment platforms going up (down?) the stack to get banking licences will happen widely.

Bezos: infinity resources, and beyond!

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos announced a plan to land on the moon in 2024 and after that life in space, get infinite resources etc. Bezos is clearly a fan of 1970s space habitats and no doubt will be pre-ordering Fred Scharmen’s book.

Newsletterbot wonders why it is so appealing to laboriously construct brand new space habitats rather than do the comparatively straightforward work of maintaining the space habitat we’re already on. Humans need dreams, but maybe it’s also that humanity likes looking at climate change and resources in reassuring ways that don’t confront capitalism. This was the newsletter last year, clearly being insufficiently farfetched:

2065: Bezos eventually admitted that the logical conclusion of capturing all consumer retail activity was to hand it back to people (“people are prime!”), and from his moon base Nueva Seattle he donated most of his shares to a Prime Co-operative.

Everything else

Facebook discovered a vulnerability in which an unanswered WhatsApp call to your mobile lets Bad People install spyware. Update your WhatsApp in your appstore of choice.

10% of national town centre retail is currently vacant.

Last week, we talked about shops inside your cars. Now, “Traffic Jam Whopper”: Burger King is now delivering Whoppers to your car when you're stuck in traffic.

"Microsoft’s Office is now a cloud-based service boasting more than 214 million subscribers who pay around $99 a year; it has more subscribers than Spotify and Amazon Prime combined." - bigger than many thought?

Is Asana making me more organized at work? No, no - must be the LSD - OK then. (Does the world feel so instrumentable these days that people naturally feel that everything should be tweakble and fixable? Related: nootropics.)

Teenagers trying to make phone call on ancient apparatus - funny. And now imagine future archaeologists trying to make sense of 2019. Related: David Macauley’s Motel of the Mysteries.

Co-op news

The Co-op Group annual general meeting is on 18 May.

Let’s tackle this taboo - on having difficult conversations about death.

Steve Murrells joins government’s Inclusive Economy Partnership - it focuses on transition to work for young people, mental health, and financial inclusion.

Why Co-op Digital writes a newsletter - someone banging on about their newsletter (hello beloved new readers!)

Events

Public events:

Manchester Word Press user group - Wed 15 May 6.30pm at Federation House.

Co-op Group annual general meeting - Sat 18 May at Manchester Central.

Andy’s man club #itsokaytotalk - Mon 20 May 7pm at Fed House.

Intro to Web app security: cross-site scripting - Mon 20 May 8pm streamed here.

User Research North: An evening with Jared Spool - Tue 28 May 6.30pm at BookingGo, 35 Fountain Street M2 2AN.

Internal events:

Mental health standup - Wed 15 May and Thu 16 May 10.30am at Fed House 5th floor.

Mental health drop-in - Wed 15 May 11.30am at Fed House 5th floor.

Data ecosystem show & tell - Wed 15 May 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor.

Membership show & tell - Fri 17 May 3pm at Fed House 6th floor.

Co-op Group annual general meeting - Sat 18 May at Manchester Central.

Post-AGM colleague event - Mon 20 May 11am at the Atrium, Angel Square.

Delivery community of practice meet-up - Mon 20 May 1.30pm at Fed House.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 21 May 10am at Angel Square 13th floor.

Line managers' drop-in clinic - Tue 21 May 2pm at Fed House 5th floor.

CMO CRM show & tell - Tue 21 May 2pm at Angel Square 13th floor.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 22 May 10am at Fed House 6th floor.

Mental wellbeing drop-in - Thu 23 May 12pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Data management show & tell - Thu 23 May 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor.

Membership show & tell - Fri 17 May 3pm at Fed House 6th floor.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  [email protected]. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, clever and considerate readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s flunky @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[tractionmagazine]

142. Nadim Abbas

Nadim Abbas, Chamber 664 "Kubrick”, 2014-2015. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Susie Pentelow interviews Hong-Kong based artist Nadim Abbas about his upcoming solo exhibition ‘Camoufleur’ at VITRINE, London. For ‘Camoufleur’, Abbas will produce a new, site-specific installation which will use camouflage to explore how urban living conditions can dictate our relationship with, and in some cases submission to, the spaces we inhabit. The installation will be accompanied by a series of scheduled performances in the space.

  You currently have a solo show at Antenna Space in Shanghai, ‘Chimera’. Could you talk a little about this work?

The starting point was the image of the human rhinovirus (serotype 14), AKA the common cold, which I constructed using various kinds of open source molecular and 3D modelling software. The title connotes both phantasmal and biological origins. The elaborate way that I have chosen to present, or project these viral images into the gallery space, using air blowers and beach balls is an attempt to maintain the ambiguous quality of an image which wavers between real and imaginary, fact and fabrication. 

Nadim Abbas, Human Rhinovirus 14, 2016. Mixed media installation. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

The choice of the common cold virus was deliberate - as something familiar to all, to the point of banality, yet appearing at the same time completely alien. Everything else in the show is an extension of this viral metaphor. This is most blatantly played out in the two isolation chambers (with echoes of my piece at the 2015 New Museum Triennial), which contain a series of modular geometric forms that act as a playground for renegade toilet rolls.

The work ‘Blancmange, n ways’ acts as a separate counterpart with similar thematics. Here, white forms become specific manifestations of the first four iterations of the fractal Blancmange function, which derives its name from its resemblance to the famous dessert. In England of course, ‘blancmange’ also connotes a boring or uninteresting person. The photograph on the wall depicts an actual blancmange pudding, as does the pattern design on the wallpaper - setting up a visual pun of sorts.

Nadim Abbas, Blancmange, n ways, 2016. Mixed media installation. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Works like ‘Chamber 667’ and ‘Chamber 664 "Kubrick”’ could almost be sets from a science fiction film. Is sci-fi an influence?

Regarding the sci-fi influence - the short answer is yes! I am a big science fiction nut. I wrote a short text on this connection (between sci-fi and my work) many years ago. It was around that time that I discovered these molecular renderings of viruses, which were later to become the central motif of 'Chimera'. The text was never published, and I'm not even sure that it makes any sense. Basically, 'Chimera' was my way of materially resolving some of the concerns that were started in writing.

There are many visual parallels between my work and cinema, simply because much of what I do involves the notion of converting (lived) space into an image (memory), which is something that comes almost second nature to the cinematic process. Given the popularity of sci-fi blockbusters today, I should clarify here that I'm less interested in constructing seamless, illusory images like you might see in the latest Star Wars spin-off. Rather, I'm fascinated with finding ways of letting the inconsistencies show through, like in a low budget B-movie. In other words, there is always an element of theatre present in my approach.

Nadim Abbas, The Last Vehicle, 2016. Mixed media installation with durational performance. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist .

You are working with camouflage for this installation/body of work. How do you think this idea reflects broader themes in society?

A lot of my recent work tries to unravel how certain conditions of urban domesticity have produced specific types of sociability and subcultures. I am also fascinated by what at first glance seems like an unlikely correlation between domesticity and warfare; how technologies developed on the battlefield have found applications in quotidian contexts and vice versa. More chilling perhaps is the notion, suggested by theorists such as Paul Virilio and Beatrice Colomina, that the dream of domestic bliss is but a dormant extension of an ongoing militarised state of emergency, where the household finds its mirror in the bunker/fortress. 

It is no coincidence, for instance, that iRobot, a manufacturer of automatic vacuum cleaners, displays on its website products dedicated for the “home” side-by-side with similar technologies repurposed for “defence and security”.  Taglines such as “Welcome home. Your house is clean” are made in the same breath as “Placing a safer distance between people and danger”. Since the machinations of modern warfare destroy the very condition of human habitats, military constructions have become increasingly geared towards the possibility of inhabiting such artificial climates (e.g. the underground bunker as a refuge from nuclear fallout).  The modern household simply adapts this formula by providing increasingly artificial climates optimised for human habitation (e.g. the fully automated, air-conditioned high-rise service apartment).

Nadim Abbas, Zone I, 2014. Lightweight concrete casts, robotic vacuum cleaner, rug, skirting board, house paint. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist. 

The title “camoufleur” is borrowed from the name that was given to people who designed and implemented military camouflage during WWI/WWII.  Many of these camoufleurs were artists but there were also zoologists and naturalists such as Hugh Cott, whose book, Adaptive Coloration in Animals became a seminal text for the study and development of camouflage techniques in the military.  For the setup at VITRINE, I will design a wallpaper pattern that becomes the backdrop and point of reference for everything that is subsequently placed in the space. 

For this body of work, your focus is on the figure of the “otaku” or “hikikomori”, terms which originated in Japan. Can you explain these?

Otaku and hikikomori are (Japanese) terms that have come to represent stereotypes of socially ill-equipped, middle-aged males who wall themselves up at home in an escapist world of manga and anime consumption. Otaku generally refers to participants of a subset of cultural practices that revolve around manga and anime fandom. Hikikomori refers to the specific phenomenon of acute social withdrawal. In Chinese, otaku is often translated as “jaaknam” or “zhainan”, which literally means “resident male” (as in resident of a housing complex or tenement block), thus conflating the connotations of otaku and hikikomori. It would take a lot more explanation to unpack the respective nuances of these terms and their ongoing mutations, so I will just focus on the fact that otaku culture arose, or at least thrives, within a uniquely urban, post-industrial context. 

Nadim Abbas, The Last Vehicle, 2016. Mixed media installation with durational performance. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

My concern then is not why otaku do what they do, but rather, what kind of space allows this to happen?  It is as if the extremely dense accumulation of cramped interior spaces that characterise so many cities today encourages a turning inward, or a vacuum of mental space itself; a vacuum that disturbs the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, or subject and object. This logic is made visible in the practice of mimicry:  picture a masked body, driven to disappear into its surroundings, to be engulfed by objects whose animation increases in proportion to its own lack of animation.

How will you respond to the position of the space on the public sphere?

The unique positioning of the VITRINE space, which stays open and visible at all hours of the day, creates an interesting set of possibilities for the public display of domesticity.  The window display, which can more easily facilitate instances of repeated daily viewing, structures an encounter that varies according to the state of each visit.  It is this durational quality that pushed me to find different ways of inhabiting the space at different points of the day/week/month.  States of habitation that when considered together start to overlap, and become harder to distinguish from one other: a performer who behaves like a machine, or a machine that is performing? 

Nadim Abbas, #4, 2016. Cosplay helmet mounted on green screen / cyclorama. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Luke Casey. 

There will also be a performance aspect to the exhibition - can you talk about your ideas for this?

The performer will be presented with a set of instructions, or perhaps a distilled script of some sort.  We will work together in advance to develop a specific body language.  I’m looking for someone with the type of movement training that would facilitate the emptying of gestures, or gestures that do not call attention to themselves, the gesture of stones.  If the objective is to perform a disappearing act, it would seem that the magician has already disappeared before the act has begun. Likely candidates might include people who are trained in physical theatre, mime, Butoh; or even life models, who like stick insects are inclined to assume the same pose for extended periods of time.

Interview by Susie Pentelow.

‘Camoufleur’ will run between 1 March and 15 April 2017 at VITRINE, London SE1 3UN, with a preview on Tuesday 28 February 2017, 6.30 – 9 pm. For more information, visit http://www.vitrinegallery.com/exhibitions/camoufleur/.

‘Chimera’ continues until 22 January 2017 at Antenna Space, Shanghai. Visit http://www.antenna-space.com/en/exhibitions/chimera for more information.

Find out more about Nadim Abbas’ work at http://www.nadimabbas.com.

#Nadim Abbas #Chimera #Camoufleur #exhibitions #London #Shanghai #performance #installation #iRobot #technology #Otaku #Hikikomori #cosplay #urban #post-industrial #art #artist #artist interview #traction #subcultures #sci-fi #VITRINE #Antenna Space

[hudsonespie]

The Limits of China's Ecological Redline System

[By Wang Chunhui]

In late March, a case of plagiarism brought the chaotic state of China’s environmental impact assessment system to public attention. But the debate largely overlooked a related and equally important matter: the questionable binding power of ecological redlines, a system the central government has hailed as “unbreachable” and as “fortifying the foundations for the sustainable development of the Chinese nation”.

Plagiarism – and ignoring redlines

The environmental impact assessment (EIA) for a 110 million yuan (US$16 million) dredging project in Shenzhen Bay, was commissioned by Shenzhen Shipping Channels Centre and carried out by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ South China Sea Institute of Oceanology. The report was published online for public consultation, but careful readers noted that some sections were identical to an earlier report on the dredging of another channel in Zhanjiang port, also in Guangdong province. Even the word “Zhanjiang” appeared repeatedly. This caused outrage. On 15 April, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment described the case as “particularly grave” and said an investigation had been ordered.

The northern half of Shenzhen Bay belongs to Shenzhen and the southern half to Hong Kong. The bay’s extensive mangrove forests are a stopping-off point for northern migratory birds. Tens of thousands arrive in spring and winter. The Shenzhen side of the bay is home to the Futian mangrove national nature reserve, and most of the rest of the Shenzhen side is covered by Guangdong’s marine ecological redlines. This means no environmentally destructive activities, such as land reclamation, sand mining or release of pollutants, should be permitted.

Yet the EIA in this case gave the green light to a dredging programme that would have cut through those redlines. As part of the “Shenzhen from the Sea” tourism initiative, a channel 17km long, 120m wide and 3.1m deep was to be cleared. Second phase plans would see the channel extended right across the bay, to within only 200m of Hong Kong’s Mai Po and Inner Deep Bay wetlands.

This would bring irreversible changes to the seabed and represent a major threat to marine and coastal ecologies and food chains, including mangrove forests, migratory bird habitats, seabed organisms, fish and even the Indo-Pacific humpbacked dolphin.

Chu Jun of the Cross-border Environmental Concern Association (CECA) says that the issues reflect the chaotic state of the EIA sector and broader problems with the ecological redline system that are being overlooked.

On 25 March, Shenzhen’s transportation authorities responded to the scandal via a Sina microblog: “The site of Phase 1 of the proposed Shenzhen dredging programme is not within Guangdong’s marine redlines.” But after consulting its database, CECA issued a public rebuttal: the project would cross “Guangdong marine redline zone 166” and approach both zones 167 and 168.

Even without CECA’s pointed rebuttal, the EIA report itself marks out the 11 redlines and protected areas the project will cross, complete with measures for managing this process. In a chapter on the impact on marine redline zones, it states that these areas include Shenzhen Bay’s important coastal wetlands (zone 166), the nearby Zhuhai Indo-Pacific Humpback Dolphin Reserve (zone 164) and Shenzhen Bay mangrove forests (zone 168).

But the report concludes the project will have “little” or “next to no impact” on these redline zones and meets the requirements of Guangdong’s regulations on marine redline zones.

An advanced but awkward institution

The redline system sits awkwardly within China’s environmental protection regime.

Trials started in the Yangtze basin in 2000 and the system was written into State Council environmental protection documents in 2011, with redlines to be drawn for ecologically sensitive and vulnerable areas both on land and at sea.

The State Oceanic Administration (SOA) was placed in charge of setting marine redlines. In 2012, it announced its first trial of the system, in the Bohai Sea. In 2013, Shandong became the first province to take part, designating 40% of the Bohai under its jurisdiction as falling within redline zones. All 11 of China’s coastal provinces have now set marine redlines, covering 30% of coastal waters and 37% of the coastline.

In official documentation marine ecological redline zones are defined as “areas with particularly important marine ecological functions, requiring strict management and mandatory protection.” They are akin to an easily erected cordon that can protect the most important and vulnerable sea areas and coastlines, and the rare animals and habitats within, setting a clear geographical scope for more targeted management and reinstatement in the future.

But like most innovations, they are a work in progress.

China has long managed land and sea separately – causing problems for managing coastal waters. Many environmental conflicts occur along the coast, but prior to a ministerial restructuring in 2018 both the SOA and the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) could claim jurisdiction here. This made setting and implementing marine redlines problematic.

Chu Jun is well aware of this: “It’s often hard to decide where the line between the land and coastal waters is. For example, if we want to exercise oversight or run a project, it can be hard to find authorities to deal with. The two sides (marine and land) either pass the buck, or both claim jurisdiction.”

In 2018, the SOA and the MLR merged to become the Ministry of Natural Resources, helping resolve those issues to some degree. But further improvements are needed for genuinely integrated management, clarification of rights and responsibilities, and coordinated planning across land and sea.

There are two types of marine redline zone – those where development is banned outright, and those where it is restricted. But there is no operable law to rely on when enforcing those protections. The closest mention was a principle included in the 2017 revision of the Marine Environmental Protection Law: “Establish marine ecological redlines in zones of key ecological functions and ecologically sensitive and vulnerable zones, and implement strict protections.”

Wang Canfa, a professor at the China University of Politics and Law and an expert on environmental law, told China Dialogue the existing policy framework provides a technical basis for creating marine redlines but not for resolving implementation issues. Implementation is made difficult by a lack of clarity over both responsibilities and punitive provisions.

“What do you do in the long term once you’ve drawn your redlines?” asked Wang. “What can you actually do and not do within those areas? Most central and local government measures and guidelines aren’t clear enough and lack a unified standard.”

The plight of the bahaba

The marine redline system is struggling. As the Shenzhen scandal was breaking, another Guangdong project – a railway line from Shenzhen to Maoming – was set to cross four redline zones including one covering the Donghuang Chinese Bahaba Reserve.

The Chinese bahaba is a Schedule II protected animal, listed as critically endangered by the IUCN, and the Donghuang reserve protects its only known spawning ground. The noise and vibration from the proposed tunnel under the Pearl River would inevitably cause irreparable damage to that spawning ground and those habitats.

The location is protected both as a nature reserve and as an ecological redline zone. But in the final EIA the tunnel was still set to cross the redline zone, although there had been an alternative route avoiding the zone, at an extra cost of 170 million yuan (US$24 million).

Chu Jun says such cases of encroachment on redline zones are common, and often go unchecked and unpunished. Infrastructure such as high-speed rail lines, high-voltage power lines and mobile network base stations are the most common culprits. It can also be hard to determine if some activities, such as fishing, breach regulations. Fishing on a small scale is important for local livelihoods and permitted, but there is debate over permitting aquaculture.

The redline system has provided only limited guidance for marine environmental protection. According to Chu Jun, it has been less effective than a 2018 State Council order protecting coastal wetlands by cracking down on land reclamation. She recalls how that order resulted in an immediate halt to land reclamation around the country.

“And not every case gets the debate and public attention Shenzhen Bay did. If the redline system is going to provide effective restrictions, we need to start by improving policy,” Chu said.

All status and no legislation

In fact, the government has been consolidating the redline system since 2017, alongside giving it higher status.

In January 2017, the offices of the State Council and the Party Central Committee published views on drawing and guarding ecological redlines, including marine redlines, and calling for the drawing up of ecological redlines to be completed nationwide by the end of 2020. That the document was issued by these two high-ranking bodies was seen as an attempt to break through ministerial borders.

So far, 15 provinces have had their proposed redlines approved by the State Council. CECA understands that the coastal provinces within those 15 have incorporated their original marine ecological redlines into their new redline zones.

In November 2019, the offices of the State Council and the Party Central Committee issued guidance on three controlling mechanisms in nationwide spatial planning, called “three control lines”, the first of which is ecological redlines, alongside limits to farmland loss and boundaries to urban expansion. They are deemed as “unbreachable redlines” to adjust the economic structure, plan industrial development and promote urbanisation, “fortifying the foundations for the sustainable development of the Chinese nation”. As well as making coordinated management across land and ocean a basic principle, it also made “protection first, ecology first” an overarching principle of the redlines, ensuring the integrity of ecological functions.

At an MLR press conference on the above, an official from the ministry’s planning bureau admitted “there has been no national management system for the ecological redlines or clarification on what activities are permissible within redlines, leading to differences in understanding on how redlines are set and managed.” The official also pointed out the new document listed eight activities permissible with restrictions within redlines, and said this would help reduce disagreements. Worth noting is that “appropriate tourism which does not damage ecological functions, and construction of necessary public infrastructure” is listed as permitted. If the Shenzhen Bay dredging project hadn’t been halted due to the plagiarism, would this have allowed it to go ahead, given the “little” or “next to no impact” the report concluded it would have? There has been no official answer.

Wang Canfa thinks that despite being the focus of environmental protection work in recent years, the redline system still needs to be toughened up. “Initially we understood these redlines would be like those for arable land – a line you absolutely cannot cross. That doesn’t seem to be the case,” he said. “It looks like development is banned in principle, rather than completely, with a strict ban on development not in line with the area’s ecological functions. These principles will be hard to apply in practice.”

Wang would like to see appropriate laws passed, telling China Dialogue: “Any redline needs specific legislation. There needs to be specific consequences for breaching the redlines, and I think that’s the next improvement we need.”

Wang Chunhui is a freelance writer focusing on agriculture, public health, climate and related public policies.

from Storage Containers https://maritime-executive.com/article/the-limits-of-china-s-ecological-redline-system via http://www.rssmix.com/

[keremulusoy]

The last point of farewells: Ports

Ports have always been final points of goodbyes throughout history. They divided people into two groups: those who go and those who stay. The last pieces of land the sailors have seen before opening to the vast blues are the last stops that will remain in their minds for months. In this state, the ports that infiltrate as poems, songs, literature and cinema as a romantic space are theoretically defined as a natural or artificial havens that allows ships to shelter, loading and unloading of ships and passengers.

The importance of ports in human history is directly proportional to the importance of maritime culture and maritime transport in terms of both commercial and tourism value. When the world topography is considered, it is quite normal to mention primarily in terms of port history, the societies the most densely and commercially living the maritime culture and benefiting the most from the sea. At this point, considering the geographical and strategic location of them, it should be noted that Mediterranean Civilizations show an ancient wealth in terms the history of world ports. The use of natural ports in marine cities is related to the response to commercial and economic needs of maritime transport and shipping activities. On the other hand, there is no exact information on the archaic origins of artificial ports in research of maritime history. It is thought that Central Asia, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Civilizations are in cultural contact with ancient traditions and reached a level of civilization ahead of its time were constructed various ports with simple engineering techniques. (2000 BC) Let’s break the rudder of our ship from four quarters of the world to important port cities. “Let our bow is clear and our wind is easy. Vira Bismillah!’’

Mystical and Beatiful: The Port of Tangier-Morocco “The ports of the cities on the coast of the desert are tedious / Bird flies ship does not pass, caravan is in time.’’ Whenever I remember the verses, The Morocco’s Tangier Port come to my mind. Obviously, these rhetorical words pretending ignorance have been said for oriental ports such as Tangier Port. Well, it must be the fate of the geography that dignified attitudes of the mystical ports, which the poet knows and ignores. In such cities people feel undoubtedly sad and a little further away from everything. A strange melancholy feeling of looking back at the show of stage… In this respect, Tangier is like the countryside both at the near side and at the far side of the world. Film lovers know well The Sheltering Sky movie made by famous Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. In the movie, three American tourists come looking for the mystical East with Oriental enthusiasms. When their ships arrived at the port of Tangier, the attendant asked astoundedly, ‘’ You are the first Westerners come to here after the war, Why did you come here?”

Especially the Western intellectual who escaped from the depression of World War II desperately seeks a harbor to haven; seeking to find “a sheltering sky” with reference to the film (adapted from Paul Bowles, “The Sheltering Sky”).

The Beat Generation, a movement formed by a handful of intellectuals in the 50s; it was to seek the cure for social depression that poked fresh emotions such as hope, excitement and enthusiasm surrounding the spirit. The art movement that flourished in the Beat Hotel in Paris had chosen a single place from the East, apart from Western metropolises such as New York and London. Tangier… The bohemian representatives such as Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg who came and settled in Morocco and spent most of their lives in the end times, love Tangier very much was described as ‘’nowhere in the world’’ in those years.  Let’s mention about the port… The port of Tangier, established to the south of the Strait of Gibraltar where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean were mixed, was established at the point where the 14-kilometer strait was connected to the European side. It is close enough to reach Spain by ferry service that takes about half an hour or one hour; thanks to its historical, cultural and mystical atmosphere of the East, it is as far away from Europe as it is… Transportation convenience due to its strategic location in terms of maritime transport between Europe and the Continent of Africa, the port has always been attractive. The port, which is the crossroads of espionage and smuggling traffic, is now a stopover point for tourism destinations… Tangier, which is a Mediterranean port that people going to important cities of Morocco Rabat, Casablanca and Marrakech in the south must visit, is at the same time hometown of Ibn Battuta who is considered as one of the most important travelers of the world history. People who love seagulls flying over the Gibraltar; narrow streets curled into the city center from the port; the mystical chaos composed of by African, Andalusian, French and Berber culture.

Warm City: Rio De Janeiro-Brazil

Portuguese sailors probably did not expect that they would pass the North Atlantic and Atlantic Oceans and encounter such a living nature when they said Vira from Lisbon. From the beginning of the 1500s when the city was discovered, it was foreseen that the port area, which had the gates of the continent opening to the ocean, would multiply its importance over the centuries. In fact, it have been tried to be kept under control by many colonists movements constantly in history. Thanks to the virgin texture of Brazil, it has been able to solve the needs of ‘white people’ since its discovery to nowadays, and it has been able to deliver its products grown in the habitat of abundance tropical climate to many parts of the world. Rio de Janeiro, which has been in immediate contact with the human population for more than five hundred years, is the gateway of Brazil to the West (it is better to say that it is an ironic direction of confusion and more accurate to the East). After Napoleon invaded Portugal with the political eddy he created on the European continent, the noble families of the kingdom fled from Lisbon and took their breath in Rio de Janeiro. Besides being one of the most important export ports of the continent, the Statue of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain, which is mentioned among the Seven Wonders of the World, Copacabana, one of the most famous beaches of the world, which is about 4 kilometers long, Sugar Loaf Mountain laying through Atlantic Ocean located in the opening of the Guanabara Bay are the values that the ones are worth-seeing, Rio de Janeiro has and add extra beauty to its beauty.

“Diamond Center of The World”: Antwerp-Belgium Considering the route of transit maritime transport in Northern and Southern Europe, Antwerp stands out as one of the most important ports in Europe. Antwerp as its international name or Antwerpen as its original etymological name took its name from a myth. A giant known as Antigoon used to take money from the sailors passing through Scheldt, the river on which the city was built, and cut the hands of those who did not, and threw them into the river. A hero named Silvius Brabo, who stood up against this tyranny, made him what Antigoon did to the sailors and throws the giant’s body without hand trunk into the river. According to legend, after that day, the city was called Antwerpen with the reference of Antigoon, the protagonist of this myth. The historic center where the port area is established has also the best examples of traditional European architecture. The development of the transportation and trade network of the Port of Antwerp helps to improve the city’s road, sea and air traffic and contributes to the commercial mobility of convenient transportation from around the world.  The area where the port is established and continues to grow day by day with additional services is 13,057 hectares. The part of the area on the East side of the Gulf of Scheldt is 7,239; and 5,818 hectares on the West coast.

The Port of Tangier in Morocco

The P of Tangier in Moroccoort

Antwerp Belgium

Port of Hong Kong

Rotterdam The Netherlands

New York South Street Seaport ABD

“Fragrant” Harbour: Hong Kong Located in the south of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong is one of the first to come to mind when it comes to maritime transport and trade. The region meaning “Fragrant Harbour”, until July 1997 was a colony of British Empire and after that became a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, Jews, Christians, and Confucians have been instrumental in expanding the range of cultural forms and beliefs and making the region known as the “World City of Asia”. We can say that the wealth of the port has served for cultural hybridization. The region has evolved into an international maritime transport hub, logistic attraction point and a global trade destination thanks to its long-term status as a free port after centuries of colonial rule. Today, it has a rapidly growing structure thanks to its large hinterland that shapes the Asia-Pacific Region.Hong Kong Port, is considered among the ports where loading and unloading speed is at maximum thanks to its more than 300 cranes.

A Pearl In The North Sea: Port Of Rotterdam-The Netherlands When we talk about the ports of the world, we cannot pass without mentioning it. Rotterdam… One of the most important centers not only in Europe but also in the world logistic sector whose city memory dating back to 13th century. The destructive influence of the Second World War almost destroyed the urban texture of Rotterdam and the city was rebuilt all over again after the 1950s. This is why we do not see much of our eye on the architecture of the city of Rotterdam, with Baroque, Gothic or Romanesque structures that we can see in many of the cities of Central and Northern Europe. On the edge of the modern style, it is content with winking to its fanciers. Rotterdam, the 2nd largest cities of the country after the capital Amsterdam in terms of population, is at the same time considered as the largest port of the Europe. It is referred as a large gateway to all of major land sea networks, such as North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia, from the north of Europe.

New York, New York: South Street Seaport-USA New York… The center of trade, economy, culture, art, tourism and entertainment… One of the most populous cities in the world; the metropolis of the world, not only America. Let us not pass without mentioning that the city, which is one of the most important points of global bureaucracy, is hosting the United Nations Headquarters. Like Wall Street, it contains an important region which is considered as the financial center of the global economy.  It is known to everyone that New York, having leading institutions in many fields such as cinema and media sector, advertising, fashion-design, entertainment, information-equipment-education, is the big brother of many sectors on a global scale. The fact that the city, number one in terms of tourism activities in the world, known as the ‘World Capital’ stems from it having a voice in almost every human-oriented sector.

Let’s come to South Street Seaport, the natural port of New York. Located at the mouth of the Hudson River, the port is one of the most beautiful examples of the world’s natural ports. South Street Seaport, which started to serve American maritime transport since the 1600s, was used in domestic trade activities in this period. Nowadays, with the prominence of the tourist potential, it has started to search for its economic attraction in the tourism sector by changing its commercial power segment and thus its popularity has increased. Now the port has become a tourism and activity center, shopping stop, restaurant and entertainment paradise; it evolved from a commercial structure to a touristic center with cultural and art activities arranged in the summer months. If you come to South Street Seaport, you can get to the harbor through the Hudson River with the sailboat tour called ‘Pioneer Tour’ with the historical boats, visit the museum here and taste the world cuisine by shopping in the world-famous shops and restaurants.

Port of İzmir

Port of Sigacik, Seferihisar-İzmir

Port of Sinop

Ports From Country Port Of Izmir Külebi, said that “Izmir’s sea smells as girl, girl smells as sea /Streets smells as both girl and sea.” in his “Requiem for Atatürk” poem. I guess it is hard to find another expression telling this much simple and this much good a city. Izmir… The pearl of Aegean, the city that makes the songs of victory in the National Struggle. The port region of Izmir forms the inner area in the southeast of the line connecting Foça and Karaburun in the east-west direction. Port of Izmir, which is one of the biggest export ports of our country, is divided into a natural division as inner, middle and outer ports.  The city has been a very important maritime center throughout the history of civilization; the development of the port in modern times increased the importance of the city of Izmir too. The port contributes greatly to the development of the inner region which is also its hinterland. Considering the city planning criteria, it is an obvious fact that Port of Izmir is directing the city in a certain development profile. The city is in a healthy harmony among settlement areas, the sea and the port triangle. The strategic location of the port makes it the pearl of the Aegean in terms of its location on the transit route between both Western and Southern Europe and North Africa and for the Black Sea coastal countries. The port provides bulk solid-liquid cargo loading and unloading, infrastructure, equipment, mixed goods, Ro-Ro and passenger services. As an export port, it is also an important logistic point for industrial facilities in the inner regions of our country.

Port of Sinop Since the Ancient times when ancient Greek and Rome civilizations developed and expanded, when it comes to count the most important port cities of Black Sea, Sinop comes first to minds undoubtedly. The city was founded around 7 BC as the Helen colony. According to a myth, it was named after an Amazon queen (Sinope), one of the founders of the primitive period. Sinop, as a port of Black Sea that is a partial inland sea, both in the ancient times and after the Anatolian Civilizations in the Byzantium, Seljuk, Candaroğulları Principality and in Ottoman Empire governances always keep its importance and become an ancient port city. Today, while strolling around, you feel you are in a cute port city stuck between ancient and modern periods. The development of the commercial and logistic network in Republican period, although not as developed as the other ports of our country, being only natural port of the region and the fact that fishing and marine culture are important means of living for the people of region provide the port keep alive. The importance of the port cities are handled in terms of having a say in tourism and maritime transportation sector thanks to the natural or artificial sea shelters of the piece of land that have a coast of oceans and seas. Of course, this determination is valid when considering commercial and economical potential. In order for the ports to have a say in the world transportation sector, their form must be suitable and open to development, as well as the inland areas (hinterland) is expected to have a suitable standard for land shipment in order to ensure continuity in transportation. The assessment of “World Ports and Port Cities” is undoubtedly an enormous research subject that needs to be dealt with utilizing the principles of many disciplines, such as history, sociology, geography, economics and commerce. We preferred to mention the settlement located in the backyard of port formed naturally or artificially (hinterland), namely the port city, its history and its socio-economical culture. In the maritime culture, which has gained importance as a stop and shipping point in the maritime culture from the antiquity to the modern times, it is obvious that it will be unfair to evaluate the economic gains of the port cities only from the sea. A port can also change its city in cultural, social and demographical perspectives. We believe that we were able to have seen this change in the port cities where we can only deal with some of them. In conclusion: Port cities, commercial and logistical centers, as well as being architectural, cultural and touristic places they offer special contributions to the geography of world history will increase their value as we can think.

Historical Port of Alexandria

Tangier Morocco

Adsress of The Festival: Rio De Janeiro

Antwerp

Lantau Island

After the Hurricane Sandy

Notes

Historical Port of Alexandria When we turn back the pages of history, it is mentioned a port known as an important anecdote and built in Alexandria, one of the four Alexander city founder by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. According to this anecdote, Pharos Island was connected to the land by a 1.5 kilometers long and 180 meters wide embankment road and ports were built for commercial ships on both sides of this construction provided that artificial shelters were formed.

Where is Tangier? Located in the south of the Strait of Gibraltar, Tangier is Morocco’s closest city to continental Europe. There is Gibraltar located on the opposite shore of Tarifa, stretches for 14 kilometers. It constitutes an important artery of the Black Continent with the reciprocal ferry services organized between Africa and Europe.

Ancient Culture Its history dating back to the Carthaginians who reigned in the BC 5th century, Tangier has an ancient culture, which is a Berber and Phoenician hybrid. Historically, the Romans, Vandals, Mauritians, Arabs, Moroccan Dynasties, Spaniards, Portuguese and British took control of the region and influenced cultural stratification in this geography.

Address of The Festival: Rio De Janerio If we mention Rio de Janeiro the warmest city of the world, we must also mention samba which provides millions of fanciers both born in this city and from all over the world flocking to Rio in the festival period. The Samba City in the Rio’s port area Rivadavia Correa, one of the special areas where this festival is held each year, has an area of more than 114,000 square meters. In the Rio Festival, which has nearly turned into a religious ritual, the dance schools in the city perform parades with choreographies and perform shows for tourists from all over the world.

Antwerp Antwerp is an important point of European cultural and historical tourism with its medieval Baroque and Gothic architectural works, museums and art centers operating in many fields. Stadhuis (Antwerp City Hall), known as Antwerp’s city hall, GroteMarkt (Grand Market Square), Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Our Lady Cathedral (Cathedral of Our Lady), Vleeshuis Museum, Rubenshuis (House of Painter Peter Paul Ruben), St. James Church,  Antwerp Central Railway Station make an indelible impression as the major values contributed to the city’s texture.

Lantau Island Lantau Island, one of the most important residential areas of Hong Kong, is famous for its Buddha statue, one of the symbols of Buddhism. Solid bronze design, full weighing 220 tons; it is recorded as one of the largest Buddha statues in the world. Tourists from all over the world can climb 268 steps to reach the huge pedestal where the statue is located.

The Biggest Port of Europe The reason why Rotterdam has the title of the biggest port, despite the other European countries standing out in terms of commercial power; is that it interconnects the country’s maritime logistics networks into a single point. Rotterdam Port is the eye of the Dutch economy with its capacity to circulate around 40 thousand ships per year. This volume is whereas reflected in their economies as more than 500 billion euro a year as a commercial input, proving us why Rotterdam is seen as the country’s financial center.

Commercial Potential of New York Harbor Organizations that start in the evening hours during the summer season turn South Street Seaport into a kind of performing arts event venue. Open-air cinema shows, jazz concerts, festival events, music and dance performances prove that the port directs its commercial potential to the tourism sector.

After The Hurricane Sandy Hurricane Sandy, which occurred in the Atlantic Ocean in 2012 and is reportedly among the biggest hurricanes, affected New York and the harbor quite badly. As a result of the natural disaster, some parts of South Street Seaport have become unusable. Over time, with various arrangements and reinforcement works and renovation projects the port has been given life to.

The Only Natural Harbor of The Region Port of Sinop forms a safety zone to take shelter all the time for logistical ships in the stormy climate of the Black Sea. The inner port in the southern direction of the peninsula is called as “White Sea” in the maritime literature thanks to its completely closed structure to storms and winds.

Other Important Port Cities There are many important port cities in the world. Hamburg-Germany, Marseilles-France, Porto-Portugal, Valencia-Spain, Valletta-Malta that we cannot mention in this study, are some of the examples.

By: Necati Bulut

*This article was  published in the  July – August issue of Marmara Life. 

World Ports and Cities The last point of farewells: Ports Ports have always been final points of goodbyes throughout history. They divided people into two groups: those who go and those who stay.

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2018.1434289

Tim Choy’s expression, has many possible manifestations in the urban arena. Choy’s study of Hong Kong examines how the question of ‘endangerment’ has become a focal point for environmental politics:

‘It structures images of simultaneous tenuousness, rarity, and value. To speak of an endangered species is to speak of a form of life that threatens to become extinct in the near future; it is to raise the stakes in a controversy so that certain actions carry the consequences of destroying the possibility of life’s continued existence. Species can be endangered, as can ecosystems’ (Choy 2011Choy, T. 2011. Ecologies of Comparison: an Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.[Crossref], , [Google Scholar], 26).

Cities can also serve as laboratories for the study of future ecological scenarios: urban biotopes have been recast as experimental zones to produce new constellations of ecological knowledge as evidenced in Berlin, Montréal, and other cities. Even individual gardens or marginal spaces such as pavements can play a role in this scientific transformation of urban space into a kind of multi-sited public research station. The increasingly urbanized landscapes of the Anthropocene now form a distinctive component of new approaches to nature conservation including urban forms of ‘re-wilding’ (see, for example, Lorimer and Driessen 2014Lorimer, J., and C. Driessen. 2014. “Wild Experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking Environmentalism in the Anthropocene.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (2): 169–181. doi: 10.1111/tran.12030[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]).

Other distinctive facets to urban bio-diversity include the varied substrates, diverse micro-climatological and hydrological gradations, and various forms of ‘ecological mimicry’ enabled by inaccessible ledges, rooftops, or other sites. Urban ecological assemblages provide a significant redoubt for many species in the face of wider processes of habitat fragmentation: a key argument emerging within conservation biology is that reduced and splintered populations may presage more catastrophic processes of decline and extinction in the future (see Cabello et al. 2017). If we look beyond the steady stream of individual species extinctions there are wider indicators for overall decline including insects needed for the pollination of plants (see Hallmann et al. 2017Hallmann, C. A., M. Sorg, E. Jongejans, H. Siepel, N.Hofland, H. Schwan, et al. 2017. “More Than 75 Percent Decline Over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas.” PLoS ONE 12 (10): e0185809. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185809[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]). The argument I wish to develop here is that cities can play a dual role in the protection of bio-diversity: first, through the provision of a kind of ecological sanctuary for flora and fauna; and second, by enabling the exploration of different socio-ecological interactions that might ultimately be ‘scaled up’ towards new forms of global environmental politics.

The swerve away from more abstract, constructivist, or idealist modes of theorization has rekindled interest in the phenomenon of ‘metabolic rift’, as originally elaborated by Marx, along with wider reflections on the metabolic dimensions to urban space. The idea of a radical break between a relatively stable self-sustaining biosphere and the lurch towards irreversible environmental destruction is captured in Marx’s engagement with the contemporary work of the chemist Justus von Liebig, who explored damage to the soil cycle under the rise of modern agriculture. Marx notes how ‘progress’ in the field of capitalist agriculture ‘is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil’ in an early appreciation of the ecological contradictions of capitalist abstraction.11 See Marx 197Marx, M. 1974 [1887]. Capital, Volume One. London: Lawrence & Wishart. [Google Scholar]4Marx, M. 1974 [1887]. Capital, Volume One. London: Lawrence & Wishart. [Google Scholar] [1887Marx, M. 1974 [1887]. Capital, Volume One. London: Lawrence & Wishart. [Google Scholar]], 474–75. Although Marx’s observations are primarily directed at the effects of capitalist agriculture on soil, his early recognition of irreversible forms of ecological destruction has served as a critical point of departure for a range of subsequent studies including contemporary critiques of the burgeoning Anthropocene literature.View all notes The term ‘rift’ is significant in this context because it emphasizes the longer-term dimensions to metabolic transformation rather than a more historically diffuse emphasis on perpetual re-combinations: there is a clear directionality to the metabolic process engendered by the expanding scope of global capital. The stratigraphic metaphor can be used in a double sense here to evoke both the fragility of the pedosphere and also the layers of human history carved into the surface of the earth.

Marx’s reading of Liebig has been elaborated by Georg Lukács and István Mészáros, along with more recent insights from John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore, to provide a contemporary analytical tool for understanding destructive relations between society and nature. Moore, for example, emphasizes how the expanding ‘frontiers of appropriation’ that have shaped the ‘world-ecology of capital’ are based on a fundamental tension between a finite nature and a capitalist imperative that is ‘premised on the infinite’ (Moore 2015Moore, J. W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. [Google Scholar], 10, 87). A modified conception of metabolism, as developed under aegis of urban political ecology, emphasizes the interweaving between the circulation of capital and the production of the built environment. Neo-Marxian readings of urban metabolism have extended the analytical frame from the original emphasis on soil to a series of intersections between capital and nature encompassing infrastructure, technological networks, and other functional components of urban space (see Swygedouw 2006Swygedouw, E. 2006. “Metabolic Urbanization: the Making of Cyborg Cities.” In In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, edited by N. Heynen, M. Kaika, and E.Swyngedouw, 21–40. London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). The concept of metabolism shows how human labor transforms the raw materials of nature into the built environment ranging from the specific infrastructure projects of the classic ‘spatial fix’ to the more generalized metabolic dynamics of a ‘socioecological fix’ (Ekers and Prudham 2017Ekers, M., and S. Prudham. 2017. “The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes: Capital Switching, Spatial Fixes, and the Production of Nature.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107 (6): 1370–1388. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2017.1309962[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]). This double dynamic between capital and space involves maintenance activities, depreciation of fixed assets, and a variety of cyclical interactions so that the built environment is in a constant state of entropy and flux.

An expanded reading of urban metabolism holds parallels with recent developments in critical theory that draw on a synthesis between neo-Lefebvrian analysis of urban space and the expanded field of neo-Marxian cultural analysis à la Fredric Jameson (see, for example, Ngai 2012Ngai, S. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]). A renewed emphasis on the temporal and material parameters of metabolic rift also connects with an earlier phase of political economy before the rise of marginalist economics, the Kuznets cycle, and the ‘disembedding of the economy from natural constraints’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016Bonneuil, C., and J.-B. Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso. [Google Scholar], 211). Emerging patterns of environmental destruction under ‘digital capitalism’ involve new kinds of material articulations between space, capital, and society. The idea of the ‘stack’, for instance, as elaborated by Benjamin H. Bratton, denotes a complex interplay between new digital infrastructures and multiple landscapes of resource extraction. Bratton’s use of the term ‘third nature’ does not denote a process of de-materialization but a new set of relationships emerging under the technological aegis of late capital. The ‘earth layer’ is simply the starting point for a ‘planetary-scale computation’ that ‘disembowels geological resources’ (Bratton 2015Bratton, B. H. 2015. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. [Google Scholar], 75–76). Similarly, media theorist Jussi Parikka’s exploration of the ‘anthrobscene’ emphasizes ‘the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks’ (Parikka 2014Parikka, J. 2014. The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. [Google Scholar], 6). For Parikka, these concerns fold into a reading of ‘deep time’ that encapsulates not only the geological realm, and its associated non-human processes, but also the contemporary global ecological crisis.

New socio-ecological articulations between nature and urban space pose questions about the ethical standing of non-human life forms and the wider significance of the liveable city as an other-than-human terrain. Recent patterns of political turbulence have necessitated a partial reprise in the historical role of cities as sanctuaries for human and non-human nature alike. Growing threats to bio-diversity at a global scale have prompted calls to extend legal rights to nature as an elaboration of existing humanist doctrines. Yet there is a tension here between the extension of formal rights based on an elaboration of existing models of citizenship and the articulation of the post-human subject (see, for example, Braidotti 2013Braidotti, R. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar]). An increasing number of philosophical interventions have sought to delineate how non-human nature might be conferred constitutional rights. Michel Serres, for instance, has sought to elaborate on the possibility of a ‘natural contract’ that reframes the political scope of the Enlightenment:

‘That means we must add to the exclusively social contract a natural contract of symbiosis and reciprocity in which our relationship to things would set aside mastery and possession in favor of admiring attention, reciprocity, contemplation, and respect; where knowledge would no longer imply property, nor action mastery, nor would property and mastery imply their excremental results and origins’ (Serres [1990] 1995Serres, M. [1990] 1995. The Natural Contract. Translated by E. MacArther and M. Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar], 38).

Whilst thus far viewed through the prism of an idealized nature threatened by the ‘new extractivism’ in the Andes and elsewhere (see Fitz-Henry 2012Fitz-Henry, E. 2012. “The Natural Contract: From Lévi-Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court.” Oceania82: 264–277. doi: 10.1002/j.1834-4461.2012.tb00133.x[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]; Latta 2014Latta, A. 2014. “Matter, Politics and the Sacred: Insurgent Ecologies of Citizenship.” Cultural Geographies 21 (3): 323–341. doi: 10.1177/1474474013495642[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]) the idea of a ‘natural contract’ also has implications for a re-conceptualization of urban nature that extends beyond the utilitarian logic of ‘ecosystem services’. If the future of the biosphere is to be deliberated over in an increasingly urban context the question of what is worth protecting, on what grounds, and over what scale of metabolic interactions will be an inescapable dimension to public culture. Yet we should be cautious in terms of any geographical delineation for the emergence of distinctive forms of urban environmental consciousness and the extent of potential engagement between a ‘natural contract’ and existing articulations of environmental justice. Strands of authoritarian or even militarized bio-diversity practice remain antithetical to progressive political ideals and connect with the development of environmental enclaves and other spaces of ecological exception. In this sense we can anticipate that the urban arena will remain a focus of contestation over the possible meanings of nature and future socio-ecological pathways into the unknown.

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Island Hopping in Thailand – The Perfect 2 Week Itinerary

Thailand is one of the world’s most popular destinations thanks to its incredible beaches, fantastic food and friendly people. With hundreds of islands to explore, it’s best to focus on one or two regions such as the Gulf of Thailand or the Andaman Sea. We’ve put together a handy island hopping in Thailand 2 week itinerary to help you make the most of your time.

Island Hopping in Thailand

The Andaman Coast is one of the best choices for Thailand island hopping. With crystal clear water, abundant coral reefs and lush scenery, it’s rightly popular. Our friends at the Tourism Authority of Thailand and Travelbag put together a fantastic Southern Thailand island hopping itinerary, taking in Krabi Province, the Southern Islands of Phang Nga Bay, Phi Phi Islands and Phuket.

Thailand 2 week itinerary

When planning your itinerary for Thailand, be sure to allow some time to kick back and relax. We’d recommend 2 nights or more at most of the destinations so that you can explore the islands, go snorkelling or simply enjoy the beach. If you’re wondering when is the best time to visit Thailand, it’s particularly popular between November to April. There’s minimal rainfall and it’s nice and sunny, although it never gets very cold in Thailand.

Krabi

Krabi makes an excellent starting point from which to go island hopping in Thailand. The town of Krabi is on the mainland, however Krabi Province is home to some of the most beautiful islands in Thailand such as Koh Phi Phi. There are direct flights with Qatar Airways from Doha to Krabi as well as internal flights from Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Koh Samui to Krabi. The Shellsea Krabi is a brand new luxury hotel in a tranquil part of Krabi yet it’s only 30 minutes drive from the airport. In Thailand, the beaches are public but on these golden sands you get the feel of a private beach as it’s not at all crowded.

Walking to the far end, you come across a natural wonder, Fossil Shell Beach. One of only 3 such sights in the world, it might look like man-made slabs but it’s actually composed entirely of shell fossils. There’s a visitor centre at the top of the hill and stalls selling pearl jewellery at reasonable prices.

If you can tear yourself away from the private pool in your villa, there are some other interesting things to do in Krabi, such as visiting Wat Tham Sua, the Tiger Cave Temple. The Emerald Pool and Krabi Town are also popular with visitors to the area.

Just 35 minutes by car from The ShellSea, you’ll find Amari Vogue Krabi. It has a great location opposite Hong Islands, which are easy to reach by direct longboat from its beach. There are 3 swimming pools,  a stylish spa and an award-winning beachfront restaurant, Bellini.

The sunsets on Tubkaak Beach are particularly impressive and are best enjoyed with a signature cocktail in hand. Right next to the hotel, there’s the National Park of Khao Ngon Nak. Also known as Dragon Crest Mountain, it’s a scenic 2 to 3 hours walk to the top.

Koh Phi Phi

Phi Phi Island, as it’s often called is actually 2 islands, Koh Phi Phi Don and Koh Phi Phi Leh. They’re considered to be among the world’s most beautiful islands and if you visit you will soon understand why. Part of the fun is getting here, by taking a private speedboat or a ferry from Nopparat Thara Pier in Ao Nang. There are food stalls and restaurants here, but you can also purchase food and water on the ferry. During the 2 hour ferry ride, you’ll see some stunning scenery, with rocky outcrops and azure blue water.

Once you arrive at Tonsai Pier, you need to pay a 20 baht entry fee to the island. Hop on a longboat to Phi Phi Island Village, or take the resort’s own speedboat depending on your arrival time. Arriving at Phi Phi Island Village on Koh Phi Phi Don was one of the highlights of our Thailand itinerary. The island lies within the Nopparattra National Park, and the palm fringed beach is charming.

Koh Phi Phi Don

There were just 2,500 people living on Koh Phi Phi Don at the last census in 2013, and Phi Phi Island Village is ideally located on the quietest part of the island, within . The traditional bungalows and hillside pool villas are built in traditional style with thatched roofs. Our private infinity pool was the perfect setting in which to enjoy afternoon tea each day. We could easily have stayed there all day, but Koh Phi Phi Don is the ideal base from which to take a Phi Phi islands tour. The resort is known for its Phi Phi Island Dive Village, a PADI certified 5-Star Gold Palm diving centre. Whether you’re an experienced diver or a novice like us, they have tours suitable for all abilities. We chose the early bird half day trip in one of the resort’s own speedboats. It takes you directly to Maya Bay so you avoid most of the crowds, before heading to Pileh Lagoon for snorkelling, then Viking Cave and Monkey Island to see monkeys in their natural habitat.

Koh Phi Phi Leh

Maya Bay is a picturesque place that’s famous worldwide as the setting for The Beach, the film starring Leonardo di Caprio. The beach is framed on 3 sides by cliffs that are 100 metres high. It’s best to get there as early as you can in the morning to avoid the crowds. For that reason, it’s definitely worth staying as close to Maya Bay as you can. Whilst there are no hotels on the island of Koh Phi Phi Le itself, you can get from Phi Phi Don to Phi Phi Leh in 30 minutes by speedboat. We’d advise anyone visiting to wear water shoes as you’ll need to wade on to the beach and there are quite a few rocks under water.

To get from Koh Phi Phi Leh to your next destination, Koh Yao Noi, you’ll take Phi Phi Island Village Resort’s speedboat to stylish Ao Por Grand Marina in Phuket. From there, it’s a short car journey to HKT Yacht Haven Marina. As you can see, it really is a haven! There’s a chic cafe with restrooms, air-con and Wi-Fi and from here it’s a 50 minute speedboat transfer to Paradise Koh Yao Noi.

Koh Yao Noi

One of our favourite Thailand hidden gems, Koh Yao Noi is a laid-back island getaway. We found paradise here, well, Paradise Koh Yao to be exact ;-). This boutique beachfront hotel is located on the smaller of the two Koh Yao islands. It’s one of the closest located hotels to James Bond Island, where The Man with the Golden Gun was filmed. The boho-chic decor of the hotel is charming, and the new TreeHouse Villas at the neighbouring sister property are equally stylish.

However, it’s the feeling of being at one with nature that’s the real draw here. Oriental hornbills fly around the property, eating the berries and no doubt admiring the view as we did! These canopy-dwelling birds are recognizable by their large yellow-tinged beak.

The island is situated in the middle of Phang Nga Bay, between Phuket & the mainland of Krabi. Phang Nga Bay is known for its’ unique limestone formations & pristine beaches & was most famously captured in the James Bond film – “The Man with the Golden Gun” & “The Beach” with Leonardo Di Caprio. To get to your next destination, the nearby island of Koh Yao Yai, you’ll take the hotel’s bus to the village and Manoh pier. Along the way, we spotted rubber trees with tapping buckets on their trunks and several water buffalo grazing. From the pier, it’s a 10 minute long-boat ride to Chong Lad pier on Koh Yao Yai.

Koh Yao Yai

Although it’s the larger of the two Koh Yao islands, Koh Yao Yai has less inhabitants. It’s definitely a contender for best island in Thailand as it’s so unspoiled. In keeping with the local Thai architecture of the local habitations, Santhiya Koh Yao Yai was built in an ornate traditional style. You can see craftsmen in the lobby, carving intricate patterns onto the wooden pillars and these beautiful decorations are found throughout the resort. There’s a fabulous 1,500 square metre pool with a manmade waterfall and a hilltop infinity pool from which you can admire the surrounding islands.

Phuket

Our final destination is the largest of the islands in Thailand, Phuket. Easily accessible from many locations in Thailand, it’s a pleasant speedboat ride from Koh Yao Yai. Island hopping from Phuket

Cape Panwa in Phuket is a great base from which to explore the surrounding area. This stylish hotel has been popular with celebrities since it opened 30 years ago, in fact Leonardo di Caprio and the crew filming The Beach stayed here. Panwa House restaurant specializes in authentic Thai cooking and is just one of the many great dining options within the hotel grounds.

The hotel is a few minutes walk away from Phuket Aquarium and about 40 minutes by car from the Big Buddha, which is well worth a visit. We recommend going for sunrise to make the most of the light. Standing 45 metres high on a hilltop, it’s an impressive white marble statue and has panoramic views over the surrounding countryside. The site is free to enter, however you can donate towards the construction costs of the statue’s base by purchasing a tile or a heart plaque. As is the case in other religious sites in Thailand, visitors must cover their legs and bare shoulders and there’s a booth where you can borrow a sarong if need be.

There are several night markets in Phuket, and if you’re there on a Sunday then don’t miss the Sunday Walking Street Market, or Phuket Weekend Market as it’s also known. Held every Sunday from 4 pm to 10 pm in the picturesque Old Town with its Sino-Portugese buildings, it’s a fun place to find crafts or clothing.

As you can see, it’s easy to spend 2 weeks in Thailand and to never be bored. With some fantastic spas, luxury escapes and hidden gems that we’ll be uncovering in upcoming posts, the island’s charms are sure to have you returning time and time again.

We recommend the following itinerary, but you could easily reverse the order and start with island hopping from Phuket, finishing in Krabi.

5 nights in Krabi (ShellSea Krabi and Amari Vogue)

2-3 nights in Koh Phi Phi

1 night in Koh Yao Noi

2 nights in Koh Yao Yai

3 nights in Phuket

Tips for Thailand Island Hopping

Bring plenty of Thai baht, the official currency in case you spot a bargain at one of the many markets. Bank cards are accepted at all the hotels. For your Thailand packing list, we’d suggest water shoes and loose, lightweight clothing. A sarong will come in very handy for ladies at the temples and can double up as a skirt. For the Phi Phi island tour, it’s best to dress in your swimming costume with shorts and a top over it, as you’ll be getting in and out of the water a lot. There’s no need to bring snorkelling equipment as you can rent it in most places. Internet access is excellent at these particular hotels, even on the smaller islands. As for tips, they’re not expected but will be very much appreciated.

Have you ever been to Thailand? We hope that this guide to island hopping in Thailand has inspired you to travel there. Let us know in the comments if you have any tips for first time or returning visitors!

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In association with Travelbag UK and the Tourism Authority of Thailand

The post Island Hopping in Thailand – The Perfect 2 Week Itinerary appeared first on Luxury Columnist.

Island Hopping in Thailand – The Perfect 2 Week Itinerary published first on http://bogouzunshang.tumblr.com/

[tortuga-aak]

The costs to fight the deadly wildfires in the West are spiraling out of control

REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The long and brutal 2017 wildfire season is stressing the state and federal agencies that have to pay for the army of ground crews and machinery required to fight them.

The federal government spent more than $2.7 billion on firefighting in its most recently finished budget year, a record that far surpassed the previous high point of $2.1 billion set just two years ago.

In California, firefighting costs have already chewed through more than half of the state's $469 million emergency fund for big fires just three months in — and that doesn't include the costs of the recent catastrophic fires that have claimed dozens of lives and thousands of buildings.

California officials said Friday they expect the cost of fighting those fires will be hundreds of millions of dollars.

Montana also struggled to pay for firefighting this year, with costs approaching $400 million by late September.

With pressure increasing on lawmakers and forest managers to find new ways to pay for firefighting and for fire prevention, here's a look at some of key questions:

Why are costs going up?

Jae C. Hong/AP

The U.S. is seeing more and bigger wildfires, and the wildfire season is getting longer. The reasons are hotter, drier weather and a buildup of dead and dying trees because of past fire-suppression practices, said Jennifer Jones, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates firefighting nationwide.

The old practice of putting out all fires led to overgrown forests, some with huge tracts of trees that died at about the same time, leaving them prone to large, hot, fast-moving blazes, researchers say.

Some climate and forestry experts say global warming is a factor in the increasing number of fires because it's contributing to the hot, dry weather.

Jones said another development driving up costs is the increasing number of homes being built in or near forests, a number that the Forest Service estimates is about 43 million homes. Keeping fires away from people, houses, power lines and other infrastructure is more complicated and costly than firefighting in the wilds.

Who pays to fight fires?

REUTERS/Jim UrquhartThe federal government, most states and some local agencies have firefighting budgets. Who gets the bill for any one fire depends on where it starts and whether it burns on land owned by the federal government, a state or local government or a private individual.

The U.S. Forest Service is the nation's primary wildfire-fighting agency, but the Interior Department also pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fire costs.

Before 2000, the U.S. government's firefighting costs never reached $1 billion. Since 2000, they have topped $1 billion 14 times, and they exceeded $1.5 billion 10 times, according to Forest Service records.

Many fires burn across public and private lands. When that happens, everyone involved negotiates a cost-sharing deal, sometimes leading to disputes. In July, California accused the federal government of stiffing the state $18 million for fighting fires on federal land. The Forest Service said it had paid $14 million of that and was trying to resolve differences over the rest.

Where does the money come from?

Jeff Chiu/AP

The Forest Service budgets firefighting money each year, based on the average spent over the most recent 10 years. That was about $1.9 billion in the budget year that just ended.

Because fires are getting worse, they are eating up a bigger and bigger chunk of the overall Forest Service budget. In 1991, it was 13 percent; in 2017, it was 57 percent, Jones said.

California officials say they have more flexibility than the federal government. CalFire, the state firefighting agency, has a $1 billion firefighting budget in addition to the $469 million emergency fund for big fires.

"We will not run out of money to pay for these fires that threaten people's lives and property," CalFire spokeswoman Janet Upton said Thursday. "Our incident commanders out there on all these 21 fires today, they're not thinking about the checkbook. They're thinking about protecting life and property."

What happens when costs go over budget?

Copyright DigitalGlobe

The Forest Service dips into other programs, leaving less money for activities like clearing out dead and diseased trees that could help reduce the number and size of fires, Jones said.

Other programs suffer, too, including recreation and habitat for fish and wildlife, she said.

The Forest Service firefighting budget ran about $500 million over in the most recently finished budget, about 25 percent more than what was set aside.

Is there a better way to pay for firefighting?

Justin Sullivan/Getty

The Forest Service and its parent agency, the Department of Agriculture, have long argued that big wildfires should be treated like hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters and be paid for out of the federal Disaster Relief Fund. That would stabilize the Forest Service budget and help preserve money for fire-prevention programs.

Many members of Congress agree — but they disagree on how to go about making the change.

Two bills are before Congress to fix the funding. Both would pay for at least some big fires from the Disaster Relief Fund. But one also calls on the Forest Service to manage its woodlands more actively, including thinning dense stands of trees and removing dead trees in an effort to reduce fires. Some argue that pushing management practices is unnecessary and ineffective.

NOW WATCH: I won't trade in my iPhone 6s for an iPhone 8 or iPhone X — here's why

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[pabluesman]

The latest rant:

Just in case you were wondering

Yesterday, donald trump announced that the United States would be pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, claiming that it was unfair to the US and that it "is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries ..." This is false and shortsighted, and indicative of trump's provincialism and his inability to see the bigger picture. The question then becomes: why? Profit, of course. Everything trump has done has been to boost his own wealth. From loading his Cabinet with Goldman-Sachs people, to charging the Secret Service rent in Trump Tower and Mar-A-Lago, everything he has done makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of "what will give me, donald trump, more money?" And this is no exception, considering his investment stake in fossil fuel companies:

Energy Transfer Partners (primary builder of the Dakota Access Pipeline): $500,000 to $1,000,000.

Chevron: $550,000 to $1,100,000

Occidental Petroleum: $500,001 to $1 million

Total: $501,000 to $1,015,000

BHP Billiton: $501,000 to $1,015,00

ExxonMobil: $50,000 to $100,000

Halliburton: $51,000 to $115,000

EOG Resources: $50,000 to $100,000

Schlumberger: $15,000 to $50,000

Conoco Phillips: $1,000 to $15,000

Shell: $1,000 to $15,000

Kinder Morgan: $2,000 to $30,000

In addition, Harold Hamm is the CEO of the largest fracking company in the United States, Continental Resources. He is also trump's energy adviser, maxed out his contributions to the trump campaign, and donated an additional hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National Committee's election efforts to put trump in office. Conservatives argue one of two things: climate change isn't real, or it's not as bad as everyone is making it out to be. However, scholarly sources disagree vehemently with this assessment. In an article published in Nature, Chris Thomas of the University of York and Alison Cameron of Queen's University Belfast and their colleagues argue that, given the current rate of climate change, we can expect to see the extinction of about 35% of all species on Earth by 2050[1]. An even more dire warning comes from arctic-news.blogspot.com, which warns that human beings could be extinct within a decade, by 2026. While there may be a certain level of sensationalism attached to these (especially the one about human extinction), they are based on objective scientific data and point to a larger point: human beings are changing the climate of the planet to a degree and at a rate never before seen in the planet's history. granted, there have been climatic shifts over the eons, but they have taken place over centuries, if not millennia -- certainly not in the space of 35 years, or even 82 1/2 years (from now until 2100). It is accepted science that, if we can limit the amount of warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, we have a fighting chance of surviving on an Earth that doesn't look a lot different from today. The problem is that this assessment was made in 2010, and we have already "used up" 0.8 degrees of that. Think about that. From 2010 to 2016 global temperatures increased by 0.8 degrees Celsius. In order to maintain some semblance of life as we know it, we have to limit temperature rise to 1 1/2 times that over the next 84 years. If we continue at the current rate, temperatures will instead rise by approximately 8 1/2 degrees, more than enough to completely inundate virtually every major city within fifty miles of an oceanic coastline ... and let's be honest, this encompasses the majority of cities on Earth. New York. Miami. Los Angeles. Tokyo. Hong Kong. Mumbai. Shanghai. London. Rome. Rio de Janeiro. Buenos Aires. Mogadishu. Tel Aviv. Athens. Venice. Dublin. Amsterdam. Stockholm. The list goes on. All of these cities would be under water. In addition to displacing a sizeable chunk of the Earth's population (the cities listed above alone house 160 million people) because their homes would be gone, there is the added trauma of dealing with the loss of arable land. Rising temperatures are already leading to desertification in the tropics. The Sahara is expanding. The Amazon rain forest, often called "the lungs of the Earth," is being denuded at an alarming rate. Climatic zones are moving toward the poles, forcing arctic and antarctic species to deal with changes in habitats and predation. Growing seasons are changing, causing food crops and the migratory species dependent on them to become out of sync -- giving diminishing populations and the resulting reduction of pollination. This is the most crucial issue facing our planet. Even assuming a best-case-scenario, that we are able to keep global average temperature rise to two degrees Celsius over this century, we are still looking at about a three meter rise in sea level. This is enough to inundate large sections of Florida, Louisiana, Bangladesh, and other low-lying locales, as well as completely wiping out places like the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, and the Maldives. We are already seeing these effects, actually. In Hallandale Beach, Florida, near Miami, salt water intrusion has breached five of the eight freshwater wells the city uses for its water supply. "King tides" -- resulting from the alignment of the Earth, moon, and sun, which used to happen a couple of times a year, are now almost regular monthly occurrences. People going to work have to wear rain boots just to get to their cars, and some have given up and are going barefoot. Roads are closed. Other roads are being elevated by an average of five feet. But hey. As long as trump's energy portfolio does well, it's all good, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Please like and share my page at http://ift.tt/2rkD9UV for more! 1Source: "Extinction risk from climate change" Chris D. Thomas, Alison Cameron, Rhys E. Green, Michel Bakkenes, Linda J. Beaumont, Yvonne C. Collingham, Barend F. N. Erasmus,

Marinez Ferreira de Siqueira, Alan Grainger, Lee Hannah, Lesley Hughes, Brian Huntley, Albert S. van Jaarsveld, Guy F. Midgley, Lera Miles, Miguel A. Ortega-Huerta, A. Townsend Peterson, Oliver L. Phillips & Stephen E. Williams, Nature 427(6970):145-8 · February 2004, http://ift.tt/2qPFa80 2http://ift.tt/2knN8Tx

#IFTTT #Blogger

[indiasendangered-blog]

A Creative New Way To Save Endangered Species Caught In Wildlife Trade

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The year 2017 begins with a novel idea for conservation of endangered species. It is an idea that stems from the very problem of poaching and wildlife trade, that is crippling the conservation efforts put to save animals and plants.  According to a new research, scientists have found that few endangered species that were taken to a new location away from their natural habitat and accidentally escaped, created a second population in their new home and while this new habitat or country might not be their native habitat, it still creates a chance for long term survival for the entire species. Simply put, an exotic species with a dying population in its original habitat because of wildlife trade still has a chance to survive well in the new habitat where it was taken by the same traders if conditions are suitable.

The Case of the Yellow Crested Cockatoo

Image via carolinabirds.org

This unique approach to conservation has been stated in a new study published in the Frontiers in Ecology and Environmental journal. The study author Luke Gibson from University of Honk Kong said that he first thought of this when he read about the news of a seizure of a huge illegal shipment of 23 yellow crested cockatoo.

Read More: Poachers Use Crude Bombs To Kill Wildlife In Goa

He learned that the species was critically endangered, which surprised him. “I had been seeing the same species flying around directly outside my office at the university,” he added.

When Gibson and his collegue Din Li Yong investigated further they found that the yellow crested cuckatoo was indeed flourishing well in Honk Kong although it was not a species that originally belonged here.

“This is a species which is primarily threatened by wildlife trade,” he told BBC News.

“Poachers go out into the forest in its native range in eastern Indonesia and capture the bird and then ship them off, usually up to Hong Kong or China where there is a strong demand for pet birds.

“This is what has fuelled the decline of this species [in its native range]. But it’s really interesting because that same cause also had another effect: some of the people who were keeping this species in Hong Kong accidentally or intentionally released them.”

Because enough birds were released in Honk Kong and also because the government issued an order making it illegal to capture the species, the cockatoo population began increasing in Honk Kong.

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Unlike the state of the bird in its native state of Indonesia where wildlife crime led to population decline, the cockatoo has found a second home in a new habitat.

A Second Chance

The case of the cockatoo is not unique. Dr. Gibson and Yong have found 49 other species that have established a second population around the world and thus provide a unique opportunity to save these species even if not in their original habitats.

Image via mongabay

Another example is the endangered Banteng that was introduced to Australia and has now a larger population of the animal than the native banteng population in South east Asia.

Read More:200 endangered Bird Species Nabbed in Kolkata

The author adds that this second population could be used to bring back the same species to its native habitat too by ‘harvesting’ the second population.

The idea is not without its very own challenges though. Any animal or plant survives best in the location where it belongs to as it has over generations adapted to live in those specific conditions. In an exotic habitat the species has a new set of environmental conditions to adapt to, it can contract novel diseases or have genetical problems because of limited population inbreeding. There could also be the case of cross-breeding with similar species and thus risk of hybridisation.

While Gibson realises the potential of such a novel approach to conserving a species, he also warns that this should not seem as an acceptance of the general capture of the species. He adds that as international trade grows, this situation is bound to become more common and we should be ready to tackle the problem of an introduced population of a threatened species.

Read More: Wildlife Bureu Hires Cyber Sleuths To Track Online Smuggling

  A Creative New Way To Save Endangered Species Caught In Wildlife Trade was originally published on India's Endangered

#cockatoo #endangered #exotic species #illegal pet trade #non native species #wildlife trade #Endangered #India's Endangered