#esoteric ecology

[prinsomnia]

colorful ecology

#illustration #plants #aesthetic #botanical #ecology #roses #water lily #violets #carnation #lavender #queer #washi tape #esoteric #stars #digital art #art fart #prinsomnia #art ph #portfolio

[inkskinned]

so we toured the crypt during valentine's day because, beloved, you're into esoteric creepy shit and besides. i need to fill my daylight hours with activities or i melt into a puddle and drown in myself. and... you know, what's the point of having friends if not to stop the ecological collapse of the other person.

"it's about memory." our tour guide was named remy and had orange hair ties. "i want you to think about how we create homage."

i looked over at you. i had made all these plans so i could not-remember. i do not want to remember anything anymore, i think. i want to be sleek in my brain so all the thoughts scoop right off.

remy held a heavy flashlight and often took their weight backwards onto their left heel like they were always trying to step out of the situation. underground the building kept the lights off, only candles and fairy lights trailing over our feet. our shadows kissed the high corners. the pipes were humming - i liked their low labored breathing, a little aria for the ones who are dead-and-sleeping. the darkness past the crypt doors went all-the-way-back. we gathered around pictures of dead bodies. well, actually, tobehonest, you gathered. i stayed put, firmly, clutching the light, resolute.

in this last year i think something really, really, really important happened in me. it feels like i hatched something. if you were to ask me what the thing is, i wouldn't be able to point to it. i don't seem that different. i just... get this feeling. like it's time to put away my skin. like the memories aren't grabbing at my hopechest anymore; they've all been folded and put away proper. buried but no longer radioactive. a wasp removed of sting.

remy said. when you think about it, graveyards are just how we make memory tangible.

if i was to make my memories tangible, i think they'd be the shape of an ox. or maybe a firedrill. or maybe a rope swing. i want to believe they could take the form of dancers. i want to believe they could grow wings or webbed fingers. i want to believe the shadows they'd cast in a crypt would look like a love letter.

i started to tell you, but didn't want to interrupt the tour, so. that first tombstone? in latin it read: soon for us all.

i don't want my soul to be loud, but i do want it to echo. remy said - this place has no ghosts, because they wanted to be here. i want a place that wants me back. i want a home.

i want my memories to turn into fish. to scatter, their scales a silver stiletto. i want to wade through them as a heron. letting them pass beneath me. tilting my head this way and that.

just-so. just-so.

#..... #writeblr

[hurgablurg]

I'll be honest, four-limbed dragons (not wyverns, but dragon-dragons) are pretty lame. Not because of any style reason, but for the baffling demand for "realism" and "logic" that comes with them.

You take something fantastical and symbolic, intelligent and avaricious, and then whinge over how it's unrealistic that this already-impossible entity has 6 limbs instead of 4, before trying to neatly slot it into an actual ecology, as if the giant snake-bat-cow-cat from a time before time guarding an ill-gotten pile of stolen valuables, knowledge, love, and valour needed to be phylogenetically catalogued like a breed of pug.

Nerds HATE things that are esoteric or exist-as-they-are, so they try to categorise it to understand it better. They write stories about and publish lore books about dragon "breeds", chromatics, metallics, moral alignments, evolutionary lines, and reduce unique individuals to easily-identified archetypes that can be prepared for by googling elemental weaknesses outside the fiction in place of researching accounts and trying to understand the individual within the fictional itself.

As soon as you make a mythological creature a measurable, quantifiable species, you've killed it - and for what? Smaug satisfaction that you've connected dots that were never there in the first place?

It's like how disparate gods and spirits and monsters from all over the world are lumped under "dragon" because they have vague similarities to what Europeans reckon a dragon should be: "Their beliefs are misinterpretations, ours are one-to-one with reality." Quetzalcoatl is NOT a dragon, he's a snake, a god, and a scholar. It's why I don't count lóng as "dragons". They are serpentine spirits as wise and as powerful and as fickle as the river waters of which they are born. Nothing connects them to European dragons except a vague shape. Yeah, Dragonology was captivating for little me, but I can recognize it's flaws.

Just let dragons be weird freaks.

#dragons #fantasy #mythology #dragonology #killing the magic #the only 4-limb dragons I give a pass to are the elder scrolls' dovah #and thats because they have an interesting role as time-keeping reality-speaking rogue angels to make up for it #and maybe vermithrax because she's cute #but she's on thin ice

[a-mole-of-iron]

Yes, we can stop climate change - and solve ecological problems in general

In the last few years, I have seen again and again a particular social response to climate change that can leave human civilization just as devastated as denying or ignoring climate change: and that is doomism, and fellow-traveler ideas of eco-fascism and eco-austerity. Make no mistake: climate change is a very serious issue that can cause noticeable damage to Earth and a hell of a lot of damage to humanity, but people absolutely love to take it to lurid extremes, like "Mad Max hellworld" and "Earth becoming the second Venus by 2100". In this post, I'm just going to lay out numerous reasons why the situation is far from hopeless, why sensationalized narratives of climate change are just a petty excuse for inaction, why "we'd better start taking mud baths to get used to being in the ground" rhetoric is incredibly dangerous (not to mention a betrayal of the weak and vulnerable by the strong and well-off), and why, ultimately, things aren't as dire as "the common wisdom" proclaims - so that people can stop feeling crushed by hopelessness, and start solving all of the very, very real environmental problems the way they're already being solved. All my examples will be sourced from the IPCC reports and real-world accomplishments in eco-restoration, via an extremely helpful blog called Doomsday Debunked, which just reprints all the IPCC and IPBES findings that doomist media and activism deliberately omits.

Most of this post is adapted from one I already made before elsewhere - but perhaps on Tumblr it's going to become more popular and widespread. I'm going to split it into three different sections: climate change mitigation, biodiversity recovery, and why "green austerity" is not a brilliant idea, will not save anything, and is ultimately an outdated falsehood that emerged from a place of insufficient knowledge and understanding. Almost all paragraphs contain links to sources/more info, but they may be hard to see in some custom Tumblr themes - be sure to mouse over if you want to find the links.

CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND YOU: how renewable energy really can save the world!

Here's the biggest thing first: Climate Action Tracker, which is a pretty damn respectable source, has slashed off 1.1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius off its average warming projections since 2010, according to their own records. Hell, in 2018, three degrees of warming was a pledge, and four degrees was the expected upper limit; now three degrees is expected if the current level of fossil fuel consumption continues without any reduction - and two degrees is the policy target, while optimistic projections are inching closer to 1.5 degrees. And to "achieve" 5 degrees Celsius of warming, which is misleadingly described by journalists as "business as usual" when by our current day it's anything but, we would need an economic mobilization from now to 2100 to burn all the coal that we can possibly burn. With coal plants shutting down in reality simply due to being unprofitable, I don't have to tell you how "realistic" and "plausible" that is. The takeaway from this is simple: the Paris Agreement and environmental activism work, and I really don't see them winding down unless we let doomism reign supreme.

A specific example of policy and technology that can seriously reduce climate change is the amazing growth of solar power over the last 10 years. I am old enough to remember the early 2000s, when solar photovoltaics (the panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity) were an unproven, esoteric, and expensive technology, and people meant solar water heaters when they said "solar power"… but nowadays? There is literally predictions that if solar energy keeps growing at current rates, and considering it already beats fossil fuels on price, it might simply price out gas, coal, and oil before 2050, rendering them entirely obsolete. Even now, investment into coal or gas power plants is seen as an incredibly stupid thing to do, because they might become "stranded assets" - too expensive to run, and unable to even recoup their initial cost.

The clathrate gun/Arctic methane bomb hypothesis has been effectively disproven at the current time. The release of methane from clathrates is endothermic, meaning it takes in more heating than it releases; a direct opposite of a gunshot/explosion, which is an exothermic reaction. More modern research also turned up the fact that methane has been seeping upwards at a constant rate for millennia now - we just didn't monitor it. Seabed disturbance could possibly upturn some of the clathrates, but ocean warming alone simply can't do it - it would take thousands of years of warming for the temperature change to propagate to the kind of depth that methane clathrates are found at.

The hypothesis of runaway greenhouse effect has effectively been disproven too: with a more powerful greenhouse effect, Earth's albedo grows just as fast as the heat-trapping capacity, meaning runaway warming is highly unlikely and the only cause are human industry CO2 emissions, which can be obsoleted by renewables and thus stopped.

The biggest threat from climate change as it is now appear to be extreme weather events; for example physically straining heatwaves, or severe floods from large amounts of rainfall. And those are serious problems. But heatwaves can be deal with by adapting our environments - the most obvious example being to plant some trees instead of layering our cities in concrete. Similarly, flood management isn't some arcane art; we know how to do it. It's just been ignored due to complacency and budgetary stinginess.

The expectations of social collapse from climate change are… overstated, let's say. The IPCC's own worst-case scenario is NOT "Earth as a lifeless desert" or "collapse of human society"; the situation IPCC associated with three-degree warming is that hundreds of millions risk being displaced by sea level rise and temperatures in the tropics getting too hot for comfortable life with no weather difficulties (NOT THE SAME as "you go out at any point during the summer, you die in ten minutes"), and the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be left in ruins. In other words, the poor people of the world will go back to starving and suffering, and the rich, especially in the West, will for the most part retain their quality of life. And so to me, as a non-Western, not-ultra-rich person, doomism is a personal affront, and doomism from solarpunks and environmentalists is a grave betrayal.

Speaking of the IPCC reports: the last one states with decent confidence that as soon as we stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, temperatures will begin to drop. Just think on this for a minute.

The "1970s MIT supercomputer that predicted the collapse of civilization by 2040"? That computer was not just less powerful than a smartphone from five years ago - it modeled the world as a single pixel, primitive even by the standards of the day. (Link to article that features actual model comparisons, via browser-based Javascript emulation. 'Nuff said.)

The so-called "deep adaptation" paper that managed to put people into therapy by its sheer grimness? Junk science that was rebuffed by Michael Mann - the author of the "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures, so not a climate denier by any means - in a four-letter tweet.

Earth turning into a second Venus by 2100? Yeah. That's… not gonna happen. We literally don't have enough fossil fuels to induce a greenhouse effect this bad, at any timescale, and I don't know if we could do it even if we started importing dry ice from space and cracking carbonate minerals for their carbon content to deliberately destroy the planet for some stupid reason.

And just because I feel like mentioning it: no, Earth can't run out of oxygen for us to breathe, barring an invasion of Galactus or some other planet-devouring alien.

BIODIVERSITY + CONSERVATION: lies, damned lies, and statistics

The infamous notion that we are heading for a world without insects was based on a study where half the map was blank, and some countries only counted the domestic honeybee (which relies on humans to thrive). Not all plants need insects to pollinate them, either. But at the same time, overuse of insecticides in agriculture is a serious issue with many adverse effects, and it has to be fought against. There is currently a campaign in Europe with this aim. Native grass lawns in cities help a lot too, more than you would think at first.

Similarly, there is a general notion that we are "in the middle of a sixth mass extinction", except we're not "in the middle". We're in the beginning of one. Now, if we all start/keep behaving like the Glukkons from the Oddworld series of games, or the Blargs from the first Ratchet & Clank game, for a few hundred more years - then we're totally going to face an impoverished biosphere with half or more known species dead. But if we do that, I'd say extinction of species would be far from our only problem.

The number one agricultural land use that drives deforestation is grazing cattle and growing crops to feed them; cropland and cities simply don't compare. Ergo, just by shifting to plant-based diets supplemented by lab-grown meat cultures and sustainable fish, we can rewild nearly 30% of Earth. And climate impacts there can be reduced too, if you simply buy local.

For a reforestation success story on a massive scale, look no further than the Loess Plateau.

Conservation success stories are actually plentiful; however, they do not get aired on the news because good news does not draw in views, clicks, and outrage. You can just go through this article on Doomsday Debunked to see how successful nature conservation can actually be.

The only two biomes that are most endangered by climate change are coral reefs (which would be replaced by the more resilient sponge reefs at 3 degrees of warming or around that), and the mountain glaciers, which will take thousands of years to recover, unlike the polar ice caps that'll be back in a couple of decades. But even corals have shown more resilience than expected before, so the scale of devastation is not nearly as huge as people might imagine.

GREEN AUSTERITY: "Friendly fire! Stop shooting, you pointy-eared leaf lover!"

A common, in fact extremely common, idea is that the only way to save the planet is accepting massive reductions to our quality of life - and by "massive" I mean "living in dugouts and doing subsistence agriculture while literally billions of people die for lack of warmth and medicine". Not only is this unacceptable, it's also a complete lie. The best way for someone living in the car-dependent, fossil-fuel-hungry sprawl of North America to reduce their carbon footprint is actually moving to a country with walkable, bikeable cities and good public transportation, like the Netherlands… or preferably, reforming and rebuilding their own local environment to this standard that used to exist in NA before its suburbanization that included zero public transport due to auto industry lobbying. NotJustBikes is an entire YouTube channel that explains this better than I ever could.

Another common idea is that building enough renewable generation capacity is just not possible with existing resources here on Earth. But consider this for a moment: when we mine metals and make them into electric engines or batteries, they don't go anywhere, with the only possible exception being metal flaking off due to corrosion. The metals composing wind turbine generators, electric vehicle motors, and batteries, or silicon composing the solar panels, remain in place and can be recycled several times, if not infinitely. Oil and coal that our current civilization burns for fuel EMPHATICALLY CANNOT be recycled - the entire problem we have is that they turn into carbon dioxide and clog our atmosphere, while soot and other exhaust fumes damage the health of people living in cities. Getting rid of 99% or more of fossil fuel infrastructure doesn't seem like that hard of a choice when you remember that feeding a renewables-based infrastructure requires a far more modest production capacity.

The issue of soil depletion from intensive agriculture is not only exaggerated by the negative/doomist framing (no, we are NOT going to run out of topsoil in 60 years!) - it's also a problem of mismanagement rather than an inherent agricultural problem. Stop oversaturating fields with fertilizer, introduce polyculture and crop rotation, and you'll see how much better things can get.

Similar to the above: the production of fertilizer does not require fossil fuels, no matter what some people might be saying. The three types of fertilizer are nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. All of those are abundant chemical elements on Earth, and circulate through the biosphere freely; nitrogen is the 70% of our atmosphere and cannot possibly run out, and phosphate with potassium are abundant in the Earth's crust. The only direct use of fossil fuels in fertilizer production is the Haber-Bosch process that condenses nitrogen from the air into ammonia, and guess what molecule it needs for that? Hydrogen, which is the stronger half of the elements composing hydrocarbon fuels and which we could have in abundance by simple electrolysis of water!

Related to the above: it is beyond ridiculous how cow manure is dumped into rivers or similar by most modern farmers, when with right subsidies it could be transformed into cheap-as-free fertilizer to be used in agriculture. Someone should go create subsidies for large-scale composting...

Surprisingly enough, even consistent economic growth - which I am not a fan of by any means - can be achieved on a finite planet, because economic growth is all in what you count and how you count it. If we calculate economic growth not by production, but by improvements in human condition and condition of ecosystems (i.e. an economy that grows with the growth of trees), then we'll see that right now some world regions (like, again, North America) are failing as much as countries poor in money, but also that there is an enormous space for growth measured in sustainable prosperity.

The much-touted problem of water wars is an actual problem only for regions way, way inland. Any coastal countries have access to efficient desalination; it's not 1850 anymore. Water doesn't disappear from the world after people use it in cities and industries, it goes right back into the soil/atmosphere/rivers and oceans, so we can't "run out of water".

Interesting fact: we don't actually require any particularly specialized carbon capture technology to remove all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, and will not require us to divert society's resources to expensive machinery. The old adage about the best carbon capture technology that's called "planting trees" still holds - and what's even more interesting is that there actually are even better methods that are not much more complex… and produce other things for the environment and for civilization in the process.

CONCLUSION

To sum things up: yes, the situation is serious, and "already bad enough" as Michael Mann put it (admittedly, he's been leaning into negative framing himself… but it can't be all positive, the problems of climate change really are dangerous, especially to the world's poor), and there's been a lot of environmental damage due to industries and rich consumers deliberately ignoring the externalities/knock-on effects of their resource use - but it's not nearly as horrifically bleak as some people presume. Right now there is great momentum behind climate action - which, yes, is partially propelled by increasingly hostile weather, but also by an understanding that social progress, democracy, and collective action are vital to build any form of a decent society, as well as by seeing new opportunities rise from cheaper renewable energy, better cities, and other innovations that will both stop climate change and make life actually worth living no matter where you might be. And in these conditions, throwing in the towel or surrendering to eco-austerity or even eco-fascist thinking is the worst possible action any one person can take. The green, sustainable, egalitarian future is not merely a dream or flight of fancy - it's eminently attainable if only we keep pushing for it and help eachother achieve it. But of course, there are people who stay up nights thinking how to take that future away from us, and now that climate change denial is no longer tenable, with more and more people believing their own eyes, the doomism and inactivism have become their primary, perhaps only, means of holding onto their power…

I hope this post will be helpful to people here who find themselves in the grip of doomism and hopelessness. I expect some people to disagree, but I prefer to believe the sources like the IPCC, IPBES, Climate Action Tracker, and all the climatologists behind these organizations' reporting - who've been closely watching both the worsening extreme weather from climate change, and the emergence of all the simple, usable, life-improving technologies and social practices to combat it. If we don't believe these people, then really, who can we believe? And if you do trust their reports on all the positive things being done and planned for environmental needs, it is not simply an idea that we can deal with climate change and restore, then protect our environment - it's objective reality, it's respectable science, and thus, it's good hard common sense.

More information: Doomsday Debunked (layman explanations and positive framing, also covering a ton of other "not actually the end of the world" topics for scared people), Carbon Brief (more technical and a bit less brazenly optimistic, but showing things like the absolutely crazy speed of renewable energy development), Not Just Bikes (an urbanist YouTube channel showing how cities can be improved, not made poorer, in the process of reducing fossil fuel use and car dependency).

#climate change #global warming #solarpunk #bright green environmentalism #hope #reasons for hope #psa #problem solving #debunking doomsday #long post

[eritvita]

continued from x ;

@mystraguideme

And Roland snorts, nursing a steaming cup of gifted coffee in this early, twittering Morning; his eyes haphazard with low-hanging bags of tireless, sleepless Nights.

"Thus 'twards the entirety of a present Topic," comments he, as he huddles upon a log and remains in that simplistic of photogenic fabrics: his trousers and embroidered tunic, unbecoming of shoework and comforted by his hanging satchel. He blows lightly upon the steam of his coffee, and sups at it gently. "What is thine favor? Mysticisms of the beguiling?" inquires he. "Esoteric Study of the Universal Mind? Biology of the scattered, ecological Spheres?"

And Roland's handsome brows dost bounce in happy thrice, and concurs he to lean in naked curiosity 'twards Gale's opened book.

#O M G rambo this is absolutely fantastic #i love gale!!💖💖💖 im so excited!!! #mystraguideme #v; the weight #th; morning Spheres

[mademoisellesarcasme]

i am concerned that polls are taking the ecological place of stupid uquizzes in the tumblr environment and consider this a great poverty; just as much as i want to vote for something on which i have a niche and useless opinion, i desire to be told by way of esoteric photographs and stupid song lyrics what character from the latest hot media i am

#tumblr stuff

[haggishlyhagging]

Feminists who identity their deep centering Selves with the term witch are not being merely metaphorical, or cute, or popularizing, or "trivializing." I suggest, rather, that the reverse is true: that to limit the term to apply only to those who have esoteric knowledge of and participate formally in "the Craft" is the real reductionism. This is the case particularly since the cult, as Murray demonstrated (perhaps inadvertently), has been strongly invaded by patriarchal influences.

Together with Robin Morgan, who has done so much both to elicit in women the wide and deep intuition of the meaning of Witch and to resist simple vulgarization, I hope that more feminists will give to the study of witches “the serious study that it warrants, recognizing it as a part of our entombed history, a remnant of the Old Religion which pre-dated all patriarchal faiths and which was a Goddess-worshipping, matriarchal faith . . . [reading] the anthropological, religious, and mythographic studies on the subject.” Hopefully, in doing so we will not sacrifice the original vigor and integrity that inspired the "New York Covens" in the late sixties to proclaim:

“You are a Witch by saying aloud, "I am a Witch" three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.”

Many women have understood this identity of the Witch within, the Self who is the target of the fathers' attacks and the center of original movement. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English did much to spread knowledge among women of the role of the witches as midwives and healers, showing that their suppression coincided with the creation of a new male medical profession. In the early seventies, Andrea Dworkin named the witchcraze for what it is: gynocide. She showed its interconnectedness with other horrors such as foot-binding, fairy tales, rape, and pornography. Others have searched out pieces of the mosaic which are not easy to find.

Such works should be valued for igniting the Spark which inflames the desire to search further. There is much to be done. Working with increased confidence and precision, Hags must continue in the spiritual tradition of such visionaries as Matilda Joslyn Gage, continuing to uncover our past and paths to our future. This will be possible to the degree that we continue with courage in the Journey of our own time/space. Seeing through the fraudulent re-presentations of the witchcraze will help us recognize the tactics of today's Male Midwives, the professional Wizards who have unsuccessfully "succeeded" the Wise Women—the Unhealers of Modern Medicine.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #witches #feminist witchcraft #patriarchal reversal

[toskarin]

With your esoteric Touhou knowledge, can you definitively put to rest what the relationship between Sumierko, Renko, and the Sealing Club is

well, there's surprisingly little connecting sumireko and renko in any canon work. it's actually kind of funny, given that they're one of the most obvious connections most people would run to make

rambling below break

sumireko's hifuu club is notably different from renko and maribel's because she made it by herself. iirc we don't really have detailed information on why renko and maribel made their hifuu club, but it probably wasn't to go at things alone, given that there's the two of them and they make a point of hanging out at the Old Adam bar for exchanging stories

in short, there's two hifuu clubs that existed at different points in time, separated by generations. sumireko's existed in about 2015 and renko's existed in the ambiguous "near future", which is never pinned down because touhou's timeline progresses just about on-pace with the real passage of time and it'd catch up

but ZUN's definition of near-future is interesting and kind of misleading when discussing timelines. it's much further ahead than most people realise

we know that enough time has passed for...

... presumably, a theory of everything being developed for long enough that it's now a normal college major

… manned martian probes and commercial moon tours to be a thing (albeit not affordably, "約120億円")

... commercial satellites containing cafes catered towards space travellers to be a thing (it's explicitly noted that the moon isn't colonised so presumably this is all for tourists from earth)

… a terraforming project to be underway for earth, involving a now-abandoned ecological space station (full of chimeras but that's not relevant to this)

… nearly every single disease to be cured, and disabilities to be fully accommodated through societal change

so it's safe to say that sumireko is probably at absolute least renko's grandmother, or a relative of similar age, because that's the scale we're working on

which is all a very long way of saying "there isn't really a connection yet"

if you really squint, you can imagine that sumireko's time in gensokyo inspired her to pass on her aspirations through her family, where they eventually reach renko (and through that connection, maribel joins her as an esper) leading to the second hifuu club being founded

[antisocialxconstruct]

Have you read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel by Philip K. Dick that Blade Runner is based off of? There's so much thematic content there that's not covered by the movie, from the moral fallouts of complete ecological destruction to how faith is used in society (both good and bad) to biting critics of consumerism, it's really great. Plus, in my opinion, it's got one of the best and most heartfelt defenses of low empathy individuals I've ever read, and makes a compelling argument for why it is compassion and community that matters, not empathy. All the themes tie in very well to one another in a somewhat esoteric but very evocative narrative, and it's not very long. I like Blade Runner, but I love DADoES, and I've genuinely thought so much about it that it sometimes haunts my sleep. Highly recommend it as a cyberpunk/dystopian novel, especially if you wanted a bit more out of Blade Runner.

I'm actually a bit embarrassed to admit that I haven't read DADoES yet, despite it being generally regarded as like, one of the foundational texts of the cyberpunk genre gfdsgsd (granted I also didn't read Neuromancer until a couple years ago, I'm a fake fan 😔) That's all extremely intriguing though! I suppose it makes sense that the novel would have a lot of deeper commentary that didn't or couldn't really translate onto the screen... that definitely makes me want to rewatch the movie and then read it while that's still fresh in my mind just to be able to make some serious comparisons 👀 Thank you for the recommendation!

#ask #anon #rom speaks

[prinsomnia]

queer in ecology ✶ got to be a part of the @thewashistation’s pride collection 🌞🌈🌷 i had such a blast making this tape as a nature-loving gay. i reflected a lot on queer ecology and our role in that realm and i simply rolled it all up in a colorful-stamp-style-with-gold-foil goodness. 🤲🏳️‍🌈 thank you again for having me! see more of this tape and the rest of the collection at thewashistation.com ✨ let’s keep supporting the queers even beyond pride month! 🌈💐🌷🌺🌻

#illustration #aesthetic #plants #washi tape #pride #pride month #botanical #ecology #esoteric #stamps #lilies #pansy #sappho #violet #roses #lavender #art ph #artists support #the washi station #art #prinsom #portfolio

[zerogate]

Animism is the ‘Big Step’ for our culture to make – acquiring the understanding, the sense, that the elements of the non-human world are animate in some way and have a spiritual nature: rocks, rivers, soil, not to mention all the other-than-human entities (which include not only plants and living organisms but also what are called ‘spirits’ in old parlance). It requires our mainstream cultural re-education as to the nature of reality, and the shedding of a number of received prejudices about the nature of mind. As it stands, animism is utter anathema to modern thought. But it has been a reality, a spiritual fact, to the countless ages of humanity that have preceded us.

Such mythopoetic relationship with the environment was one example of what the ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called participation mystique. By this is meant a local relationship with the land that went beyond mere utility and subsistence. To the indigenous person, ‘Earth and sea are to him as living books in which the myths are inscribed,’ Levy-Bruhl stated (1935). Another anthropologist, A. P. Elkin, put it more specifically when writing about indigenous Australasian peoples: ‘The bond between a person and his (or her) country is not merely geographical or fortuitous, but living and spiritual and sacred. His country … is the symbol of, and gateway to, the great unseen world of heroes, ancestors, and life-giving powers which avail for man and nature’ (cited in Lévy-Bruhl, 1935, p.43).

In the West, this kind of relationship was noted at least as long ago as ancient Greece, where there were two words for subtly different senses of place, chora and topos. Chora is the older of the two terms, and was an holistic reference to place: place as expressive, place as a keeper of memory, imagination and mythic presence. Topos, on the other hand, signified place in much the way we think of it nowadays – simple location, and the objective, physical features of a locale. Topography. But, ultimately, even sacred places have become topoi.

[...]

Concepts of animism can take various forms. For many ancient societies the land was so alive it had a voice in their dreams. A clear account of this was provided by a Paiute Indian, Hoavadunuki, who was a hundred years old by the time he was interviewed by ethnographers in the 1930s. The old Indian stated that a local peak, Birch Mountain, spoke to him in his dreams, urging him to become a ‘doctor’ (shaman). The Paiute resisted, he said, because he didn’t want the pressures and problems that would come with that (Steward, 1934). Communication from this mountain occurred a number of times throughout the old man’s long life and was not seen as strange or peculiar by him – indeed, the idea of the land being capable of speaking to humans was probably widespread in ancient sensibility.

[...]

Sacred soundscapes were simply a natural corollary of that sensibility. The basic notion of the land having speech, or of being read like a text, was lodged deeply in some schools of Japanese Buddhism – in early medieval Shingon Esoteric Buddhism, founded by Kūkai, for instance. He likened the natural landscape around Chuzenji temple and the lake at the foot of Mount Nantai, near Nikko, to descriptions in the Buddhist scriptures of the Pure Land, the habitation of the buddhas. Kūkai considered that the landscape not only symbolised but was of the same essence as the mind of the Buddha. Like the Buddha mind, the landscape spoke in a natural language, offering supernatural discourse. ‘Thus, waves, pebbles, winds, and birds were the elementary and unconscious performers of the cosmic speech of buddhas and bodhisattvas,’ explains Allan Grapard (1994).

-- Jack Hunter (ed.), Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience

#quotes

[shituationist]

Do you have any good sources/links critiquing market socialism? I’m thinking C4SS in particular.

I think the best book critiquing market liberalism in general is John O'Neill's the Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics, which comprehensively addresses major arguments in favor of markets or against socialist planning. O'Neill examines the Weber/von Mises "calculation problem," the von Hayek "knowledge problem," as well as critiques of planning from public choice theory and neoclassical welfare theory. O'Neill does this by contrasting the philosophies and underlying philosophical assumptions of pro-market thinkers to those of Otto Neurath, who was a partisan of non-monetary socialist planning up until his death, and whose contributions to the debate are often underpublicized (usually in favor of making Oskar Lange, himself a market socialist, the primary interlocuter with the Austrians).

Otto Neurath himself is worth reading because he provides an epistemological defense of economic planning. You can find his collected economic writings on libgen pretty easily. It's worth perusing in tandem with O'Neill's book.

Honorable mention to Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell's essay "Anti-Hayek", which is a decent materialist counter to the esoteric epistemology von Hayek uses to suggest socialist planning is ineffective. Their essay on Leonid Kantoravich's linear programming and in-kind planning is also worth reading as a critique of the Weber/von Mises position on economic calculation. Cockshott has unfortunately sullied his legacy via his 70s Maoist sex politics, but his essays critiquing the Austrian positions in the socialist planning debates are still worthy of consideration.

William Kapp was a critic of market liberalism whose book the Social Costs of Private Enterprise prefigured a lot of critiques of laissez-faire markets that later ecological economists like Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly (who were not exactly "anti-market" but whose critiques do underline how the neoclassical idealization of markets is not... ideal) would make more famous. Kapp focuses on the non-monetary and unmonetizable effects of private enterprise, which by definition can not enter into the strictly monetary accounting that informs the decision-making of any commercial enterprise, and which empirically cut against the pretensions of theoretical/rationalistic market liberal utopias.

The Parecon guys, Robin Hahnel and Michel Albert, provide both an institutional framework for planning and several critiques of market liberalism which are applicable to market socialism and market anarchism. Robin Hahnel's Milton's Myths series on socialisteconomist is really good and intended for a popular audience. Pat Devine is a thinker of a similar type who is less of a marginalist, unfortunately I can't name any essays or books of his off the top of my head, but he seems of interest.

Paul Mattick's "Limits of the Mixed Economy" I think would be relevant to Keynesian and post-Keynesian policy recommendations, since Keynesianism is of enduring interest to social democrats. I've never finished it though, so I don't really know. I do know it's talked about a lot in that way. Would be interesting to come back to that book some day myself.

As far as mutualism goes, I think Marx's critique of Proudhon's mutualism and similar schemes in the Poverty of Philosophy is definitive, even if Marx was not entirely honest w/r/t his object of critique. Engels's additions to this critique in his late prefaces to the Poverty of Philosophy and his debates with German Proudhonists over the housing question provide a sound enough basis for rejecting those kinds of schemes in favor of common ownership (i.e. communism).

<everything beyond this is based on personal reminiscence and not really a direct answer, take with a grain of salt>

With regards to C4SS, it's harder to say, b/c C4SS's moment seems to have passed, their moment was not that long in the first place, and they've always been defined politically more by their break from right-wing libertarianism than their antagonism to, say, Marxists, who are antagonistic intellectually but don't really have neo-mutualists on their radar, or anarchist-communists, who either just side with the Marxists, gesture vaguely in the direction of "the commons", or otherwise don't care enough about the topic to argue about it. As such I don't think C4SS itself has ever been singled out by anyone in an important way, but insofar as market anarchism is just market liberalism taken to its logical conclusions, critiques of the latter apply just as much to the former, and the sources above all provide compelling arguments against market liberalism and in favor of socialist planning.

Groups like C4SS thrived (relatively - C4SS has never had that large of a following) in a political atmosphere where the word "socialism" was still a very dirty one, where there was a lot of enthusiasm around p2p filesharing networks and p2p networks in general, where the overarching political consensus was that there was no alternative to markets and commerce, and where acephalous and amorphous political movements (that were seemingly structurally analogous to markets) had not yet exposed their limitations but seemed to be a genuine threat to state power (and not just a particular state power, but state power in general). Under those conditions, where leftists felt embarrassed to be proponents of what in the popular imagination had just been discredited with the fall of the Soviet bloc, C4SS style p2p utopianism was something you could gesture vaguely towards as an alternative, since those p2p schemes avoided the "centralized," "monolithic," and "sclerotic" epithets so often applied to central planning regimes, and fit well within the American political imaginary which has long treated decentralization as a virtue (the list of American endorsers of decentralism includes such diverse names as Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, John C. Calhoun, Lysander Spooner, George Wallace, Murray Bookchin and Bob Black). That atmosphere has given way to one where the left once again favors more traditionally structured organizations, especially after the fizzle-out of the 2020 uprisings and the abject failure that was decentralist-anarchist (non-/anti-)leadership in places like Seattle and Portland, which resulted in no lasting victories and which frankly embarrassed the anarchist movement in North America (reminiscent of the numerous embarrassments for anarchists recounted in Engels's the Bakuninists at Work). There are still true believers, but right-wing libertarianism no longer funnels people in their direction as much now that the Libertarian Party has more or less successfully been merged into the network of miscellaneous reactionary movements. Self-identifying "left-libertarians" seem to me to be an increasingly rare breed.

Genuine market liberalism is also increasingly unpopular on the left and right. Liberals under Biden have embraced "industrial policy" which is ill-defined but seems to involve the state playing an active role in economic development, especially fostering domestic industries to reduce dependence on what the state identifies as its foreign rivals. Given how the libertarian movement continues to shed a lot of its left-wing cultural sympathies (not that there aren't holdouts), an SEK3 type is hard to imagine emerging from today's libertarian milieu, especially the libertarians below the age of 25.

I guess shameless self-promotion here for my own article for a "Mutual Exchange" series where I critiqued anarchist decentralism and the "decentralization/centralization" dichotomy that C4SS-ites are so endeared to: https://c4ss.org/content/53124

I know I've gone off a bit here, so I'll stop pontificating, but I hope this is helpful to anyone who's interested in these debates or in a potentially unreliable narrative developed primarily through online interactions.

[creative-anchorage]

As a digital migrant rather than a native, I remember how amazing it felt to stumble my way around the internet in the 90s and early 00s, uncovering its unexpected nooks and crannies with astonishment and delight; it was an exciting and genuinely joyful time. Now I watch other people shout at each other, assailed by news of catastrophes and bombarded with adverts for horrible trousers and cryptocurrency for the further enrichment of billionaires. I scroll, jaded, trying to recapture that sense of wonder I used to feel. Thankfully, there are still off-the-beaten-path pockets of astonishment out there and I thought it might be nice to gather some of them together. So, here is a selection of online things I love, and that other people I asked love – old and new stuff that is fascinating, beautiful, edifying and, above all, fun. Maybe one or two of them might give you a bit of internet joy back, too.

Dogs in Elk

Do me a favour: Google “dogs in elk”. Perhaps one day this post on a long-defunct forum will vanish into the ether, or perhaps it’s sufficiently beloved to survive, but either way you need this hilarious shaggy (bloody) dog story in your life. It was written by Anne, whose dogs discovered an elk carcass, got inside it and refused to leave. Anne and I once exchanged emails, so I can assure you that she exists and that this really happened.

The Fish Doorbell

There is a dam in the Netherlands where migrating fish get stuck, since it rarely opens in spring. The solution: an underwater camera linked to a website where viewers can press a button when they spot fish. That notifies the lock operator, who can open it up and let the fish go on their way. Ooh, I have just seen two! Press the button!

@crescentshay

Shay Rose is an effervescent and endlessly inventive costume-maker who shares her projects on Instagram. Nothing is too bonkers for her: a “social distancing” dress that enveloped her in a 3.7 metre (12ft) circle of pink tulle, anime cosplay or a fancy-dress costume that turned her into a perfect lifesize version of one of those stocking-filler wiggly worms on a string.

Strange Flowers

In his Wordpress cabinet of human curiosities, the Australian academic James Conway writes potted biographies of daring, transgressive, dangerous-to-know eccentrics of the past 200 years. Choose at random and you are unlikely to be disappointed, but how about Violette Murat, the fin de siècle lesbian who kept a decommissioned submarine in which to smoke opium, or Marchesa Casati, who, naked beneath her fur coat, wore a necklace of live snakes and paraded a cheetah on a lead?

Radiooooo

Pick a country from the world map, pick a decade and Radiooooo plays you music from that time and place (refined to slow, fast or “weird”, if you want to be more specific). I am writing this to a soundtrack of 1960s Morocco and feeling more cosmopolitan than I have any right to: “Oh, you’re not familiar with Abdelwahab Agoumi? You should check him out.” More seriously, Radiooooo gives you that expansive feeling that the world is vast, various and infinitely creative. That’s nice.

Crime Pays, But Botany Doesn’t

This YouTube channel describes itself as “a low-brow, crass approach to plant ecology & evolution as muttered by a misanthropic Chicago Italian”. A gruff botanist called Tony tells you about esoteric plants, and it is exceptionally soothing.

Kottke

Sifting through the internet to provide a miscellany of interesting stuff is a real talent; Jason Kottke’s magpie eye has been reliably curating interesting stuff – short, long, funny, serious, totally out-there – since 1998. Recent highlights include the best visual illusions of the year competition, Japan’s decorated manhole covers and stunning photos of the Milky Way.

Weird Medieval Guys

Check out the titles of some of these Substack posts by the historian Olivia Swarthout and tell me you don’t want to read more: “What does a biblically accurate angel look like?”; “No, the king doesn’t own all the swans in Britain”; “Do you have less free time than a medieval peasant?” Clickbait, but medieval (and highly informative).

Mimi Smartypants

The consistently hilarious Chicago-based medical publisher Mimi Smartypants has been blogging since the internet was just fields of billowing unspoilt html and her riffs on whatever amuses or outrages her – public transport encounters and the general absurdity of life – are endlessly delightful. Her newest entry describing the deficiencies of linen sheets made me laugh out loud (“Would you like to take a nap on Nan Pierce?”).

Sandwiches of History

An American man called Barry delves into old recipe books and then taste-tests the sandwiches he finds in them on YouTube. They are usually an affront to God and man (ironed bread and mushroom soup, condensed milk, flour, egg and vinegar) but Barry gives each one a fair go and a generous assessment. We should all be more Barry.

Closer to Van Eyck

This incredible site is dedicated to Jan van Eyck’s much-stolen Ghent Altarpiece, featuring the 15th-century Flemish master’s deeply weird Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Zoom in on every brushstroke and piece of craquelure, check out the X-ray and infrared imaging, delve deep into the strange history and iconography and pretend you are one of the posh experts on Fake or Fortune … hours of fun.

My80stv

Whatever year you are nostalgic for, scratch the itch here with a compendium of TV clips that you can channel-hop through as if you were watching telly in, say, 1989. It is very US-centric, but it gives me the time-travel feeling I crave. Other decade versions are also available.

David Rumsey’s Map Collection

Cartography enthusiast David Rumsey has put his entire collection of more than 150,000 maps online, from 16th to 21st century, terrestrial, maritime and celestial. It is the perfect place to get lost (sorry).

Found in a Library Book

The Oakland public library uploads the things people leave behind in library books (usually as bookmarks) to its website: it is a gripping, often touching collection of photos, drawings, sugar packets, letters, shopping lists and more.

Marine Traffic

There are a mind-boggling number of ships in the world and on this site you can watch them going about their business. They are colour-coded by type (cargo vessels, tankers, fishing boats) and you can find out where they have come from and where they are going.

Laura Ramoso

There is a lot of so-so observational comedy on the internet but Laura Ramoso’s Instagram and TikTok imitations of her German mother and Italian father have the ring of extremely funny truth.

The National Grid Live

Hear me out: this site lets you see how much power is being generated from different sources – watch as solar rises on a sunny day – and how much Great Britain is importing and exporting. It is weirdly compelling.

Tradle

Guess a place based on its exports: you get six chances, narrowing it down, thanks to information on how far off each wrong guess was. Warning: they are not all countries despite the game description: 77.3% “processed crustaceans” and 0.4% compasses is Saint Pierre et Miquelon, one of France’s semi-autonomous “overseas collectivities”. Nerdy but entertaining.

Forvo

A guide to pronouncing anything, including proper nouns and names in any language, Forvo has the power to save you significant embarrassment.

Lightning Maps

Follow storms erupting in real time. Yellow dots represent lightning strikes, and a white expanding circle shows the thunder sound movement. This is good for impressing kids, says a friend, because, like an omniscient weather god, you can “predict” when thunder is about to erupt.

Useless Farm

Karen the murderous emu, Brad, a furious fluffball cockerel, and several dopey alpacas live on this Canadian smallholding absolutely failing to earn their keep, other than on TikTok and Instagram. This kind of stuff can swiftly become annoying or samey, but useless animal wrangler Amanda has funny bones, and pretty much everything she posts is entertaining.

Messy Nessy Chic

I have no idea how Vanessa Grall comes up with the cabinet of art, design, fashion and historical wonders that have filled her website for the past 12 years; I just know she has better taste than I ever will. Dip in for the likes of a guide to Swedish islands, intimate Victorian portraiture by a viscountess or 1920s matchboxes.

Ridella

For Wordle addicts hungry for more once-daily stimulation, this site offers a riddle – the kind of thing a troll would make you solve to cross a bridge – one line at a time.

@dusttodigital

This Instagram music account is a celebration of the human desire to make sound in all its lovely diversity, from virtuoso to amateur and everything in between. I especially love the posts that showcase videos people send in of music they have encountered across the world, in the streets, in classrooms, rehearsal halls, fields …

Global Wind and Wave Patterns

You don’t have to have a clue what is going on to enjoy this site that lets you watch mesmerising animations of wind, wave and current patterns wherever you like on the globe.

The Worst Cat

This is a single-joke site – the joke being criticising baby hippos for being moist, ugly, frequently straw-covered cats – and has not been updated for years, but returning to it, I still laughed, again and again. It might work for you, too.

My Noise

My Noise feels like a gift to a fractious world: your choice of hundreds of customisable soundscapes, based on your needs (focus, sleep, stress, “pet comfort” and many more). There is an incredible variety – everything from “calm office”, to “European primeval forest” – and you can play around and mix your own blend based on whatever elements work best for you. My husband has found “rice field” with extra cicadas provides real relief from his tinnitus.

The Marginalian

The site formerly known as Brainpickings is a compendium of philosophy, poetry, visual arts, literature and other mediations on the business of being alive, collated by the author Maria Popova. Recently, I enjoyed 19th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Vérany’s chromographs of octopuses and Magritte’s exhortation to celebrate “joy for the eyes and the mind”.

One Zoom

Pick an animal, plant, or other living organism and, via this site, explore visually how it fits into the tree of life. Mesmerising.

Listen to the Clouds

On this dreamily weird site you can listen to live air traffic control chatter from a variety of airports across the world, against a background of ambient sound.

Library of Congress

The US Library of Congress has digitised big chunks of its collection – incredible photographs and early daguerrotypes, baseball cards, cartoons, maps and historical documents. It is overwhelming, but brilliant for a lunchtime browse.

How Many People Are in Space Right Now?

This site does exactly what it says on the tin (with details of who they are and a link to their Wikipedia page).

GeoGuessr

This quiz gives you a picture of somewhere and you have to put it on a map accurately. For an additional layer of complexity, try TimeGuessr, which asks you to identify the correct year as well as place for a photograph. I have just narrowed down a pic of an Edinburgh festival street performer to within 163 metres, but my guess of 2013 was four years out. Curses! Play again.

Martin Critchlow

The TikTok adventures of a scaffolder from King’s Lynn and his tiny mouse, Mr Jingles (the successor to Mrs Jingles, sadly deceased of natural causes). Mr Jingles really likes prawn crackers; Mr Critchlow really likes tiny harvest mice, I guess. Wholesome.

Explore webcams

There are an overwhelming number of wonderful wildlife cams out there but, for a sure bet, head to the “featured” camera on the Explore homepage. I just got bald eagles feeding their chicks, which proved very unhelpful for finishing this article.

The Lucyverse

I am torn about including writer Lucy Sweet’s brilliant newsletter because I’m sure she will end up getting my job, but I can’t in all conscience leave it out. Sweet reviews stuff: herbal teas, B&Q, Soreen mini loaves, Christmas decorations she finds in Home Bargains. The magic is in her forensically accurate skewerings. A taster: “Ugh, the Toast catalogue … Like a Guardian article on the dangers of foraging.” If you sign up, the newsletter arrives every Monday morning precisely when you most need a laugh.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel

Space is terrifying – my tiny medieval peasant mind can’t begin to comprehend its vastness. This site, which describes itself as “a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system” is such a good way to understand the vastness, through scrolling – something I am very good at – with manageable little nuggets of info along the way.

Mondo Mascots

Japan’s mascot culture is a repository of intense oddness, and the British writer and illustrator Chris Carlier gives an enthusiastic account of them on his site (in more detail than on his laconic and equally unmissable Twitter account @mondomascots). Discover, among others, an extinct river otter with a bowl of noodles as a hat that represents Susaki City, an “armless, dancing character based an ancient roof tile” or “Colon-chan, an intestine-haired lady who encourages colon cancer screenings”.

Post Secret

Post Secret predated Fesshole, the popular Twitter feed where people confess their sins anonymously and receive internet absolution or condemnation (more likely both). It is a combination of confessional and art project, since contributors send in their contributions on a postcard, sometimes elaborately decorated. “The day I leave this city I’m asking Tim for a kiss”; “Somebody else’s 23andMe DNA test destroyed my life”: each one is a baby-shoes-length short story.

Wikiloc

Wherever you are in the world, find a user-tested walk or cycle route. You can filter for distance, difficulty and for circular walks only. It has taken me to some spectacular spots (and trudging along a few A-roads, too, but that is mainly my incompetence).

Kingdom of Loathing

I don’t really understand what is going on in this long-running gentle, funny game full of stick people yet, but on my first try, I apparently gained “the patience of a tortoise” and a “liver popsicle”. Tell me more.

The Deep Sea

Scroll down, down, down this metre-by metre graphic of the sea and discover all the weird stuff that lives at various levels, with cool facts along the way. It is a good site for a “tag yourself” game with the creatures you encounter: I think I’m a headless chicken fish.

The Met’s Artist Project

Take a couple of minutes to watch a contemporary artist react to pieces in the Metropolitan Museum’s incredibly eclectic collection. Edmund de Waal reflects on why a 500-year-old Chinese jug was left white and Kehinde Wiley discusses class in John Singer Sargent’s portraiture. There are 120 entries in total.

@museumoflostmemories

There’s something really poignant about this Instagram account, which seeks to reunite photos found in junk shops and flea markets with their subjects (or subjects’ descendants): so many forgotten smiles and poses. The hit rate is low, but if you click “Returned!” you can enjoy some really satisfying success stories.

Antipodes Map

A simple site to answer that perennial question: where would you end up if you tunnelled right through the Earth and came out the other side?

Kids Favourite Jams By Their Dads’ Favourite Bands

On TikTok, songwriter Kevin Scott Rhoads spins a wheel to choose a band (Mumford & Sons, Bon Iver, The National) and a nursery rhyme and then produces pitch-perfect parodies. I particularly enjoyed Baby Shark in the style of Radiohead.

xkcd

I don’t understand all of Randall Munroe’s often science and tech-themed stick-figure web comic (Munroe is a physicist who worked for Nasa), but the bits I do get tend to be clever and very funny.

Things Magazine

This densely packed, very plainly formatted compendium of links to interesting things was created by a group of writers and historians with an interest in objects and what they tell us about the world. That doesn’t exactly narrow their remit and it can feel overwhelming, but there is so much delight and interest packed into every post. The newest one has links to a playlist of classic tracks from 1994, royal doppelgangers and a Museum of Failure. Just let your eye wander and alight on whatever link catches your attention, you won’t be disappointed.

Surprised Eel Historian

You may never have thought “I’d like to know more about the history of eels”, but that was a mistake, as this Twitter account full of fascinating eel facts demonstrates.

Owl in a Box

I had to include this, the OG of internet angry birds. There is not much to it: six photographs of a great horned owl found by the side of the road, absolutely furious to be rescued. The photos, in which only one giant yellow eye is visible, glaring balefully through the flap of a cardboard box, make all the years I have wasted on the internet worthwhile. Sort of.

#internet #resources #useful links #masterlist

[themonsterunderthebed]

thinking about the woman i talked to last semester who works in herbicide development

lovely and very knowledgeable woman. you can tell she has a passion for what she does. i asked her where she sees the future of her field, with herbicide resistance on the rise and the herbicide industry's failure to keep up. and she said, "i just hope we make it long enough for me to do this job i enjoy until i retire"

and i think about that sort of benign-seeming short-sightedness a lot. she doesn't want anything special. she just wants to live her life and do her job. she's middle-aged and not looking to figure out a new career path. it's all so understandable.

and yet her job is not only doomed, but dooming the rest of us with it. reliance on herbicides not only harms the environment but is simply not a feasible long-term plan. the plants are smarter than us, full stop. if we don't figure out large-scale ways to manage weeds without exclusively relying on pesticides, we're fucked. that's it. we aren't discovering new modes of action, and the number of weeds with resistance to multiple known modes of action is only increasing. holding out hope for a new herbicide to appear on the scene and magically make all our problems go away is foolish and dangerous, even if you ignore the ecological effects of herbicide use.

she's smart. this is not esoteric knowledge. she knows this. when asked, she didn't say "that's an exaggeration of the situation we're in." she said, "i just hope we can make it another couple decades." and i wonder how many people in this industry and others like it are motivated not by passion or willful ignorance or evil greed but by the simple human desire to be able to stay where you're comfortable and happy. and what does it take to move someone with that kind of inertia?

i don't know. i think about it a lot, though. people are people and if we're going to talk to productively about things we disagree on, we need to humanize the other side in our own minds first.

#themonster #herbicides #sustainable agriculture #i don't remember if i have another ag tag #environmentalism #rotating this interaction and others like it in my mind on the back burner at all times #something about shortsightedness

[mostlysignssomeportents]

All the books I reviewed in 2022 (Part III: Nonfiction part 1)

I. Electrify by Saul Griffith

The MacArthur prizewinning engineer offers a detailed, optimistic and urgent roadmap for a climate-respecting energy transition that we can actually accomplish in 10–15 years. The US’s energy budget has been wildly overstated. About half of the energy that the US consumes is actually the energy we need to dig, process, transport, store and use fossil fuels.

Renewables have these costs, too, but nothing near the costs of using fossil fuels. An all-electric nation is about twice as efficient as a fossil fuel nation. That means that the problem of electrifying America is only half as hard as we’ve been told it was. A just energy transition isn’t a transition to ecology austerity — you can have better, cheaper versions of the stuff you love.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

II. The Right to Repair by Aaron Perzanowski

In a series of short, punchy chapters, Perzanowski lays out the ancient, noble and necessary case for repair — a practice as old as the first resharpened stone axe — and proceeds to dissect each of the idiotic pretenses used to block it. From IP law to trade law, from consumer protection to consumer safety, from cybersecurity to unfair competition, Perzanowski demolishes the corporate argument for filling our planet up with immortal garbage in the name of consumerism.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#r2r

III. Woody Guthrie, Songs and Art * Words and Wisdom by Nora Guthrie and Robert Santelli

332 pages of reproductions of Guthrie’s art, songs and journals, as well as essays by notables who were influenced by Guthrie, as well as two of his kids: Arlo and Nora Guthrie. Guthrie’s journals and essays chart the development of a full-fledged philosophy of art and aesthetics.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/this-land-is-your-land/#this-machine-kills-fascists

IV. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

The most important book I read in 2022. Its core argument: that the shape of societies — hierarchical or non, authoritarian or free — is not foreordained by our technology or living arrangements. We are free to choose who we want to be: equal or unequal, coercive or free, warlike or peaceful. A dizzying, thorough, beautifully told series of histories of ancient civilizations, many of which have only come into focus thanks to recent advances in archaeological technology. They show that every conceivable variation on centralization, coercion, hierarchy, violence, agriculture and urbanism has existed, in multiple places, for hundreds or thousands of years at a time.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism

V. How to Take Over the World by Ryan North

A popular science book that tours a wide-ranging set of technological ideas by means of explaining how to realize the supervillain plots so beloved of Marvel comics. It’s full of extremely funny, extremely informative riffs that make for an engrossing frame for very deep dives into knowledge that are esoteric, interdisciplinary, and damned interesting.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/16/they-laughed-at-me-in-vienna/#ill-show-them-all

VI. The High Sierra by Kim Stanley Robinson

A unique and profound piece of western literature. The key is in that subtitle: “A Love Story.” It’s a memoir, of how Robinson came to be a Sierra person, starting with a reckless adventure in the mountains while tripping on LSD, wildly unprepared but young and vigorous and lucky. It’s a story about the physical being of the Sierra. The Sierra is revealed as the source of Robinson’s novelistic pastoralism — the vividness of the Martian hills, of space station interiors, of Antarctica. All of those descriptions are thinly veiled Sierras, like a set of stock characters in a novelist’s ensemble cast who are stand-ins for the people in his life.

It’s a story about the problems of the Sierras. The colonialism. The genocide. The place-names honoring the monsters of history, butted up against names commemorating heroes and lovers of the place, some settler colonialists, some First Nations. The ecocide, going back to the drowning of the Hetch Hetchy basin, not just to create a reservoir but to demoralize the advocates for nature and wilderness, scatter them so powerful men could continue to seize and destroy wild places.

It’s a story about living with the Sierras. Robinson recounts the history of the summer settlements — the places where First Nations people would come, year after year, for centuries, for fellowship and interchange and ritual. He tells the tale of the Sierra Club, the men — and especially the women — who loved the Sierras and whom the Sierra loved back.

Robinson made me fall in love with a place I’ve never been, and miss it even though I’ve never known it.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/25/the-wild-places/#sierra-people

VII. Ways of Being by James Bridle

A big, lyrical, strange and inspiring book about the “more than human world” — a world that encompasses the worldview of animals, ecosystems, and software. “Inanimate” objects — a homebrew self-driving car and a recommendation algorithm — both have distinct worldviews (umwelts). Our own umwelt and desires impact these inanimate objects, too; we are inextricably tangled up with them. Their actions result from our actions, and our actions result from theirs.

The whole world — from microscopic organisms that are neither animals nor plants to birds to primates, to plants and the fungi that interpenetrate and coexist with their root cells — is part of this phenomenon. Indeed, the interconnectedness of everything is so profound and so undeniable that any close examination of any phenomenon, being, or object leads to the inescapable conclusion that it can’t be understood as a separate, standalone thing, separate from everything else.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt

Next up: more nonfiction!

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/702452399863889921/all-the-books-i-reviewed-in-2022-part-iv

Image: Matthew Petroff https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George-peabody-library.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Interior of the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.

#pluralistic #book reviews of 2022

[river-in-the-woods]

End of Year Review 2022

In many ways, I feel like this is the year that my practice truly began to take form. In previous years I was wandering, exploring, but aimless and didn’t haven’t any real direction. I knew that I wanted to pursue spirituality and magic with a genuine devotion and purpose, but I mostly I had no idea what for. I knew plenty about how magic and spirit work was done, but my practice was seriously congested by not knowing how it needed to work for me. I also suffered incredibly from apathy and inertia, as I have for the majority of my life. In terms of my craft it meant I couldn’t find anything that enflamed my passions enough for me to pursue it. I was also exhausted by academia which, towards the end, began to ruin my health. This was the context that I began the year with.

2022 had two very distinct halves for me. The first 6 months were the culmination of my final year at university, the last 6 months saw my entry into full time work and Buddhism.

Interestingly, at university I had plenty of time but little energy, while in full time work I now have little time but more energy. University drained me because there was never a point I could truly stop thinking about work, but with my job, once I left the workplace I was done with it for the day. I would say this greatly influenced my receptivity to the teachings of my gods and spirits, to have hours in the day that truly belonged to me.

Following a few quiet months after graduation and then some more to settle into my new job, I started to devotedly pursue Buddhist cultivation, which brought me a sense of stability and certainty that I hadn’t found in other traditions I tried to explore. However I also found that Buddhism was no freer of dogmatism than any other religion, even in its esoteric aspects.

There were solid reasons for its rules, however. One should not attempt to overrule the masters of a living tradition anymore than a layperson should show up at a scientific conference and start preaching to the experts. For me, the strength of Buddhism’s ability to provide a clear cosmology and framework for spiritual cultivation was also its weakness, as there is very little room for discussion on how things can be done on a macro level. The gods, spirits and teachers will liberate you, make you stronger and wiser, help you perform miracles – but they will do so on their terms, not yours*. This can sometimes feel suffocating and greatly stifling to personal self expression.

*To be honest, I see this even in the stories of seasoned practitioners of witchcraft – a path which emphasises personal freedom and subversion of authority. I think in any tradition led by gods and spirits, if you walk far enough, you will inevitably have to start compromising your wishes with their demands, entering pacts and oaths before you attain greater benefits. And sometimes you can find a balance, other times you will not.

Many times, I felt at odds with my teachers because there was a clear hierarchy, and I was both culturally and spiritually obliged to defer to my seniors. This is not an objection to spiritual authority – which plays a necessary niche within the spiritual ecology, even where it is flawed – only a reflection on my aversion to it.

In the midst of all this, a number of my familiars came forward to begin their work with me. They had been with me all my life and were carved from my own psyche, and we began to chip away at the mental obstacles that were keeping me from truly enjoying my life. One of these familiars was a personification of my Intuition.

As I progressed in my cultivation, I began to hear her with greater frequency, assisting me with more detailed and accurate divinations which were verified by my peers. She began to reveal to me a series of visions concerning magical spells, rituals and ingredients. I am still in the beginning stage of following her guidance, as she is very particular about the components of these workings. In tandem, I feel as though that I, on a deep and personal level, cannot or will not perform magic that is not approved by her first. Nonetheless, this is the first time that I feel I am truly pursuing my own brand of magic and it has given me the freedom of self-expression I have been looking for.

Currently, I am still in the meditative stages of acquiring further gnosis to flesh out my practice. I feel encouraged to dip back into Druidry to find more down-to-earth means of cultivation. There were certain Bardic practices that I didn’t enjoy or didn’t have the discipline for previously, but my Voice of Intuition has revealed new ways to engage with them in a way that aligns with my needs. Perhaps, once I follow through with these practices, she may tell me to progress to the Ovate stage. Not because it would teach me any new skills, but to reap the benefits of engaging with a community. I feel like we are playing the long game, planting seeds that will only bear fruit years down the line.

I should also mention that I feel like the Buddhas have been supporting me in the ways that I need, channeling their strength and inspiration according to my own disposition. There will always be issues and friction between human communities for one reason or another, but I can say that I have genuine faith in the gods of the Buddhist pantheon. There is no doubt in my mind that I am safe in their refuge, and that my cultivation is in good hands.

#journal #my practice #end of year review