Gardeners often don’t realize gardens make for great firefly habitat, helping to replace lost natural habitat. The common firefly — the Big Dipper firefly (Photinus pyralis) — readily takes to an organic habitat. The trick is to make your garden as inviting as possible for fireflies to take up residence....
I live in the US where aging is shameful, grieving is rude, and death is commodified. I don’t think this perspective should be carried over. So, how could solarpunks do things differently?...
Exactly, yes! No stuffiness or stigma. Conversations over hot beverages in a cozy room, during batwatching picnics, or while stargazing.
Searching Death Cafes led to articles about Coffin Clubs, people coming together to build and decorate coffins for themselves and each other. On how the first one got started:
“I gathered some old blokes who were ex-carpenters and builders, and a group of women that would get creative, and we started it up in my garage and carport,” she says.
I’ve too seen many awful nursing homes. Stark, empty places with stretched thin medical staff and sparse activity calendars. Given what’s happening in my neighborhood, setting up sketchy assisted living facilities in rundown homes is the new cash grab.
Years ago, I’d visit clients in nursing homes and rehabs. The buildings were usually surrounded by a large parking lot and manicured lawns. They’d tell me how rare visitors were, no wonder given the vibe of the place. I’d end up talking for hours with them and their friends who gathered at the sound of a new voice. People need medical treatment, but that’s just one sliver of the human experience.
Baltimore City has an adopt-a-lot program, allowing residents to use vacant lots for urban agriculture or community projects. However, as stated in point 3, it can be difficult to keep them going long term:
One farmer, Rich Kolm, said urban farms in Baltimore are playing several critical roles: They are community centers, educational hubs and fresh food producers in food-insecure neighborhoods.
Kolm has overseen three separate farms on adopted land in the city, and now he works as a contractor to those attempting to do the same. Though he commended the city’s low-cost water access service that accompanies lot adoption, he said people may not want to start a farm under the program if the land could be taken away.
“The whole idea of agriculture is that you’re building something,” said Kolm. “The only way to do it well is to make it permanent. But the city’s attitude is that urban agriculture might be a means of raising property values so much so that the agriculture gets kicked off the site.”
How Star Wars can help today’s young rebels bring down empire, defeat the dark side, and save the future - Welcome to the Rebellion explores the radical political roots of Star Wars and shows how the saga continues to inspire a new generation of activists and campaigners today....
I listened to the audiobook and it felt bogged down at times. But the argument for claiming and using fictional stories to promote leftist ideas is interesting, especially framed around such a large pop culture phenomenon.
The blog posts condense Harris’ arguments pretty well. They joke around a lot in the TIR interview, which is how I was introduced to the book.
Adjectives imply something unusual, something different from the standard object the noun refers to. If we say “cheese” for the animal product and “vegan cheese” for the plant product, we implicitly send the message the animal product is normal and the plant product is abnormal....
In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:
“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”
“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”
Honey bees were domesticated, selectively bred like all other livestock, to be more docile and dependent. The relationship you describe was created by humans for the benefit of humans.
Do Artifacts Have Politics? (faculty.cc.gatech.edu)
Lengthy PDF discussing how certain technologies such as nuclear power shape power dynamics around them towards authoritarianism.
North American Plants for Fireflies (www.firefly.org)
Gardeners often don’t realize gardens make for great firefly habitat, helping to replace lost natural habitat. The common firefly — the Big Dipper firefly (Photinus pyralis) — readily takes to an organic habitat. The trick is to make your garden as inviting as possible for fireflies to take up residence....
History 2D: Science, Magic, and Religion | UCLA (www.youtube.com)
Institution: UCLA...
back the blue (slrpnk.net)
In Context: Mutual Aid with Michelle Carrera | VINEsanctuary (www.youtube.com)
Food Empowerment Project’s 2024 Scholarship Contest (foodispower.org)
Apply for Food Empowerment Project’s 2024 Scholarship Contest!...
Ecoregions of North America (interactive map, locator, plant lists and descriptions) (bplant.org)
Wire Sloth (slrpnk.net)
Reed Bmore
Lunarpunk on death rites and rituals (slrpnk.net)
I live in the US where aging is shameful, grieving is rude, and death is commodified. I don’t think this perspective should be carried over. So, how could solarpunks do things differently?...
Moby - Disco Lies (Official Video) (www.youtube.com)
Urban agriculture isn’t as climate-friendly as it seems – but these best practices can transform gardens and city farms (theconversation.com)
Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics (www.drmichaeljharrisbooks.com)
How Star Wars can help today’s young rebels bring down empire, defeat the dark side, and save the future - Welcome to the Rebellion explores the radical political roots of Star Wars and shows how the saga continues to inspire a new generation of activists and campaigners today....
practice linguistic veganism (slrpnk.net)
Adjectives imply something unusual, something different from the standard object the noun refers to. If we say “cheese” for the animal product and “vegan cheese” for the plant product, we implicitly send the message the animal product is normal and the plant product is abnormal....
Earth, Wind & Fire - System of Survival (www.youtube.com)
Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It (sentientmedia.org)
How the world's land is used: total area sizes by type of use and cover (slrpnk.net)
We see that:...
The core of the climate social problem: stubbornness. The mitigating effect of psilocybin is worth a look
Most people are unwilling to change their lifestyle significantly in the face of climate catastrophe. In particular:...
Invasive Species - How to Fight Plants with Plants (www.humanegardener.com)
al-Ma'arri, Arab philosopher and poet (973–1057) (slrpnk.net)
Image text:...