talk about this. this is the kind of shit indigenous people and others concerned with the environmental impacts of extractive energy are concerned about.
They’re actually all leftists, and have been brainwashed into believing in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Weirding. Even though the actual science proves it wrong.
Repeat a lie often enough from all the institutions of society and you’re gonna convince everyone who doesn’t know how to investigate opposing claims.
There’s no way your blog isn’t a social experiment
“Catastrophic anthropogenic climate weirding” what you are in catastrophic need of is some bitches
ok so people are making fun of this but adding this with other anti-global warming tactics will work
This isn’t adding ice just for the sake of denial, it’s adding to the Earth’s albedo. This in turn actually makes the Earth’s climate cooler, and then more ice will be produced naturally because of this.
It isn’t a process we need to continue forever, in fact it’s one that needs to be calculated so that we don’t do it TOO MUCH. The only worry would be cooling down too much.
So yes, this is a good idea. It simply isn’t the only thing we should do because we still have gross pollution.
For the love of god do it . anything just do it. Give us hope.
Here’s the thing: Most environmental catastrophes humans have ever or are currently creating can be fixed. It’s not just a matter of “oh no, things are ruined, and maybe we can stop the degradation so that things don’t get any worse, but we’re stuck with how things are.” There are some things we can’t do, like bringing back extinct species. But there are a lot of other things we can definitely do, many of which are being done right now. The problem is that most of our willpower and effort is spent on bullshit tiny things that won’t solve the problem (individual recycling, etc.) and not on the large-scale things that can and will make a large-scale difference.
Ice caps are melting? Guess what! We know how to make ice. It’s not that hard. Designing mostly-automated robot ships to go to the poles and rebuild the ice caps is well within our current technical capabilities. We just need to fund it.
Deforestation on a massive scale? Destruction of other biomes? Guess what! We know how to plant trees. We know how to plant grasslands. We know how to take barren, lifeless land and turn it back into a viable biome. It’s not that hard. In a lot of cases, if there’s neighboring areas where that biome still exists, all you have to do is dump a few tons of biomass (plant clippings, food waste, etc.) on the barren land and stand back and wait. The biomass will provide nutrients and keep the topsoil from blowing away, and the plants and animals from the neighboring biome will move in. In two decades, even if you don’t do anything besides dumping the biomass on it, you won’t be able to tell what was the barren area and what was the still-existing biome.
Coral reefs dying? Now, coral reefs are a bit more fragile than most biomes, but guess what! We still know how to replant/rebuild them, and in fact are working on that in places affected by coral reef die-off! And we’re learning how to do it better every day.
Desertification? Guess what! We know how to turn desert back into green space. They’re doing it on a large scale in China and sub-Saharan Africa. There are several different techniques, none of which are even very technology-intensive. It takes money and time and labor, but it’s perfectly doable. We know this because we’ve done it.
Plastic in the ecosystem, particularly in the ocean? Guess what! There’s a lot of people working on this, both on “how to remove plastic from the ocean” and “how to reuse/recycle it more efficiently.” And the techniques are improving by leaps and bounds every year. This is a solvable problem. These are all solvable problems.
So if you’re crushed by the weight of the coming environmental catastrophe … don’t be. These are all solvable problems! We can stop things from getting worse, and we can fix the things we’ve broken. The issue is political, not practical.
On the political side, of course, is the need to tighten up environmental regulations across the globe. (What’s the statistic, that 90% of pollution is caused by 100 corporations?) And then of course, we need to fund these programs on a large enough scale.
In some ways the political aspect is the hardest, but consider this: we are at a tipping point. Things are changing about the way politicians talk about climate change and ecological degradation. More ordinary people are concerned about this, which means more pressure on politicians. One of the ways that things are changing is that people–even conservatives–are starting to talk about “job opportunities in new green fields” and switching the conversation so that it’s not “rainforest vs. jobs” makes political action a lot more possible. And no, it’s not going to happen on its own, but it can happen.
so I scanned both of these articles simply because I hoped the titles made them look worse than they were [the first one is an absolute shit show btw].
Sarah Jacquette Ray, the first writer, is a white woman who is conflating xenophobia, eugenics, and ecofascism with environmentalism. she consistently mentions that “POC are most affected by climate change but white people are the most vocal about climate anxiety” – which is true – but she doesn’t mention that that’s because POC tend to not have access to resources to talk about it and, when they do, they don’t get the same attention as their white counterparts.
Ray could’ve written an amazing article about how even in activist spaces, racism seeps in through the cracks and how we as white people should still be working on dismantling our biases even when we’re activists and uplifting marginalized voices. But she didn’t; she instead theorizes that climate anxiety is a coverup for xenophobia and fascism and white people by and large don’t actually care about the climate, they’re just racist.
She also consistently promotes her own books about climate anxiety, which seems shady as fuck, but that’s a personal gripe.
the second article is my Karin Louise Hermes, a Filipino-German woman, who was discussing her personal experiences with being tokenized, looked down upon, and treated as lesser than by her white counterparts. She was only apart of the conversation in order to add diversity or commercialize her trauma. At the end of the article, she even discusses how there’s a growing BIPOC Environmental & Climate Justice Collective in Berlin that she’s apart of and now she’s an activist on her own terms and with a group of people who see her as a human and respect her boundaries. She still advocates for environmentalist ideals, it’s just now on her own terms and actually addressing all the forms of bigotry and opression that go hand in hand with climate change.
There’s nothing wrong with her article, not in my opinion at least, VICE just promoted it shittily and I’m sure some random motherfucker is going to not actually read the article and twist Hermes’s words and make it seem like environmentalism is a white people thing and therefore invalid.
So TL;DR: the first one is a white woman coming off very white savior esque and conflating environmentalism with ecofascism and xenophobia without offering any real solution. the second one is a woman of color speaking about her experiences and discussing why she left the mainstream environmentalist party in germany to prioritize her own mental health. VICE should’ve promoted it better.
[also obligatory “there’s a chance I completely misinterpreted either article, or my own biases skewed my opinion. I am not claiming to be an unbiased source, and I encourage you to read the articles yourself if you want to because sometimes you need to read something yourself to form your own opinion and that’s okay”]
[[also I’m sorry for the slight rambling]]
Thank you!
Focusing on racism and whiteness in climate movements (plural) is important and that second article sounds very worth reading.
I also feel like it’s worth shining the spotlight on the media platforming these two articles. They are the ones who have decided which part of ‘the climate movement’ to consistently give media attention: the white part.
And after having ignored climate activists of color (which is most climate activists around the world tbh) and giving white activists the media spotlight for years now, they then prop up the hot take that ‘the climate movement’ is white? Like, the part of the movements that media outlets have celebrated certainly is. Maybe that says something about those media?
And like, how many movements have we seen where most of the hard work
was done by POC, while the media spotlight went to white people, only for
the same media to then publish articles about how white the movement
was? The LGBT movement comes to mind pretty much immediately.
This very much so brings to mind an article I read years ago. It was written by a woman of color talking about her life as a polyamorous person and how frustrating it can be to try to find polyamorous spaces that aren’t dominated by white people and to deal with the elevation of white poly voices over POC. This is a conversation very worth having about the intersection of race and relationship orientation, but instead the article chose to twist it to call polyamory a “privilege”, to insinuate through its presentation of an article written by a polyamorous woman of color that polyamory is a yucky white people thing for yucky privileged white people.
This was the first run in with this kind of article, but as the rest of the post shows it’s far from the last. Any time someone tries to say something is just “a white people thing” it is ALWAYS worth examining why.
While the news that Ted Cruz decided to take his family on a vacation in Cancun during the worst climate disaster Texas has seen…in a while is not SURPRISING, it does illustrate an important point.
Climate disasters will not affect us all equally. Climate change will hurt the global poor first and worst. While floods and droughts and heat waves and ice storms will ravage the world, the richest and most powerful will still be able to hop on a plane to whatever corner of the planet is still habitable, or go off in their space arc, or hide away on their Mars colony run by Indentured servants.
Do not forget this. Those in power have so much less to lose by doing nothing about climate change. They can afford to let us burn and freeze and drown if it saves them some pennies along the way.
I’m ✨back on my bullshit✨, and that “bullshit” is constantly contacting people in power because I am so far beyond angry
Instead of endless wastelands of mowed grass lawns, consider:
True! Unless you can find an economical way to irrigate, more appropriate lawn alternatives in hotter, more arid places might lean more to prairie meadows using local grasses and wildflowers:
Or, they might mean doing classic landscaping, but with rocks and xeriscape plants:
Or having a cactus garden:
There are lots of exciting possibilities once you throw the classic turf lawn out the window!
these are all so beautiful and all I can think is ‘that stone arc isn’t a stargate and I’m sad about it’
ifesbob 