Prof Tangang also cautions that thunderstorms will likely get
stronger and more intense. When global temperatures increase, it means
that there will be more heat and moisture in the air, which leads to
triggering more extreme weather.
Dr Renard Siew concurrs and notes that exreme weather is getting more frequent.
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.
Climate change is reshaping our coastlines—and, as it turns out, the forests that live there. A new study published on April 4 in the journal Ecological Applications found that over the last several decades, a sizable portion of the forested wetlands in a coastal wildlife refuge on North Carolina’s Coastal Plain became “ghost forests”—eerily large stands of dead, leafless trees.
A lot of people in the US don’t realize the extent to which Canadian mining interests dominate politics in South America like Canada is a very dangerous imperialist power to mess with and South America is increasingly becoming their fiefdom due to the amount of investment money the pour into the continent. Once you start looking at the activities of Canadian companies in South America closely, it gets very horrifying very quick
More than half the world’s mining companies are based in Toronto alone, “Canada” is a resource extraction conglomerate with global reach
Yes thank you! I didn’t have the sources at hand so thank you for adding so many. Just like the sheer mass of content available about it online always made me wonder why Americans had so little awareness of or interest in Canada’s resource extraction empire. It’s a very under-represented problem in The Discourse I feel like. Like the Canadian state and it’s allies directly intervene in foreign politics to help these mining companies. If I remember correctly the lithium mining company in question in Bolivia was Canadian, no?
I believe the lithium mines were a joint German-Bolivian operation, since Morales had nationalized parts of the mining industries in like 2008 they had majority Bolivian ownership with foreign partnerships in order to learn new techniques. There is still some Canadian gold mining in Bolivia and maybe some other metals, but i dont think the lithium was? I couldnt find any direct connections
Real ads I’ve been getting today in Canada:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again but
Pescetarian as a diet choice makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Like, okay, you think factory farms are bad (they are), you think eating animals is ethically wrong (up for debate, but I’m not going to stop you and will in fact support you in that), you acknowledge that a specific parcel of land can support more herbivores than carnivores or omnivores, but you’re okay with overfishing?
Fish are not less than other animals. If you say “oh well I get my fish ethically”, then why can’t you do the same for our land animal meat sources?
Because the argument can be made for any consumption whatsoever that even if your specific ~thing~, fish, meat, clothing, whatever, comes from a sustainable and ethical source… it’s still kinda.. not helping.
Yes, please tell me more about your ethical fish, but somehow ethical pork or whatever is impossible,
I know nobody (who cares about these issues) is actually saying overfishing is good or okay, but idk how that cognitive dissonance works. Fish are animals capable of the same types of suffering as other sources of animal protein.
And if you’re pescetarian for dietary reasons.. okay? I still don’t understand the strict division between land meat and fish meat? Unless somehow it’s a health diet thing which is fair enough, I get that, but.
I’m an omnivore sure so maybe I have no right to talk about this but it literally makes no sense to me
recent google searches: “how to explain to people that buying plastic bottled drinks is horrible for the environment and should be avoided whenever possible”
The pandemic showed us just how slow the global ruling class to move through the stages of grief, often getting stuck in denial (“this isn’t happening”) and bargaining (“can’t I just reopen one teensy little giant Tesla factory, pretty please?”).
The climate emergency is a sterling example of how “market forces” are incompatible with the continued existence of a human-habitable Earth.
Cons like “carbon offsets” are trivially corruptible and instantly become “markets for lemons,” where the least effective climate measures produce the most profitable (and therefore most common) carbon credits, driving out all the good ones.
Market-based climate measures are where Gresham’s Law (“bad money drives out good”) meets greenwashing. Every promising financial vehicle designed to harness markets to save our species becomes a scam.
Take “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) funds, pitched as a way to save for retirement without annihilating the planet you’re planning to retire on.
These were once so promising that they panicked the finance sector, so much so that the world’s carbon barons convinced Trump to propose a law making it illegal to direct your investment dollars into an ESG.
It didn’t happen, because Trump is administratively incompetent and easily distracted. But carbon criminals are very competent and good at staying on-task. Rather than banning ESGs, they simply corrupted them, turning them into another form of greenwashing.
Writing in USA Today, Tariq Fancy calls ESGs “marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community” – and he should know, he founded and ran the ESG program at Blackrock, the worlds largest asset manager.
The ESGs you’re sold are stuffed full of the world’s worst polluters, from fast fashion companies to (not making this up) giant oil companies. *Oil companies*!
ESGs are blowing up, with sales nearly doubling over the past year.
The SEC’s new Climate and ESG Task Force" will “proactively identify ESG-related misconduct.” If history is any guide, it will fail. The most profitable green investment strategy will always be investing in polluters while pretending otherwise.
As Fancy writes, the solution to the climate emergency isn’t asking the public or business to do capitalism differently. As with the pandemic, the answer is regulatory, coming from democratically accountable states, not the autocratic satrapies of the corporate world.
“In response to the pandemic, we’ve learned that only top-down government action, such as forcing the closure of high-risk venues and mandating masks indoors, makes a real difference. A ‘free market’ will not correct itself or fix the problem by its own accord.”
The consumer movement was born at a time when competition made companies sensitive to things like boycotts. Consumerists realized that they could skip the tedious, unreliable legislative process (where corporations could always outspend them) and hit companies where it hurt.
That’s not the case any more and it hasn’t been for decades. While consumerists were focused on market pressure, corporations successfully lobbied for new antitrust standards that allowed them to eliminate competition through monopolistic mergers.
Once companies eliminated competition, boycotts stopped working. Every time I post about Amazon’s abuses, someone tweets that we should just spend our money better, voting with our dollars. Which sounds great, until you realize that every tweet generates revenue for Amazon.
By definition, you can’t shop your way out of a monopoly. If you don’t believe me, hit your local grocery aisle, where two companies – Unilever and Procter and Gamble – are responsible for nearly every product on sale.
The “cruelty free” brand is made by the same company as the “maximum cruelty” brand. The “organic” brand is made by the same company as the “Oops! All Additives” brand. The “low packaging” brand is made by the same company as the “padded with spotted owl feathers” brand.
When Procter and Gamble buys up some beloved local organic babyfood brand or a scrappy keto meal startup, they trumpet the acquisition as “giving consumers more choice.”
If Procter and Gamble does something you hate – marketing caged-veal smoothies or whatever – and you protest by buying the “plant-based” I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-veal smoothie, chances are, you’re still buying a P&G product (and if not, it’s probably Unilever’s).
Corporate America was once very afraid of consumer movements, but it’s been decades since boycotts or other spending choices were capable of effecting real change. It’s time to stop thinking of ourselves as ambulatory wallets whose only way of acting is spending.
Structural change comes not from how market actors behave, but how markets are structured. The rules for markets matter more than the decisions we make under those rules. Our consumer power is irrelevant, but our citizen power is essential.
The path to a better future lays through state action, through leaning on your lawmaker (and agitating for electoral and campaign reforms), not through endless agonizing over your joke of a 401k or the things you put in your shopping basket.
since microplastics have now been found in plACENTAS allow me to reiterate:
faux fur is plastic
pleather literally has plastic in the name
synthetic wool is plastic
stop implying that plastic is good for anything.
“Vegan” fabrics? Yeah that shit is just plastic rebranded
not supporting the fur industry – but remember, vintage furs from thrift stores do not contribute to killing animals and are actually better for the environment than faux fur.
You can also buy fur new if you want. That is not a crime unless you are buying endangered animal furs. It’s also not really worse for the environment or the animals than buying regular meat or eggs from the grocery store, because all those animals are factory farmed, whether for fur, meat, or eggs. Factory farming isn’t solely a problem with fur, and anyway if you want to stop it then you’re better off calling or writing your politicians and getting involved with the larger movement that is trying to end big agra monopolies than only shopping at ‘pure’ retailers. You can’t change the world with your pocketbook, that’s a lie capitalism fed us.
The best furs to buy for warmth are coyote and raccoon, anyway, not mink and such. Sheepskin is also good. Stuff like mink, ermine, and sable aren’t actually very useful in terms of keeping you warm. Vintage bear and beaver are also pretty warm. Rabbit is useless, it sheds and goes bare quickly and isn’t very warm at all. Soft though.
Wool is the only fibre in the world that keeps you warm even when the wool is wet, and silk is among the best baselayers for warmth. Linen is the coolest fibre in the world, better than cotton, has been used for centuries and is a lot less costly in effort and water to produce–cotton is only cheaper artificially.
Down is the warmest and most breathable stuffing for blankets and pillows and it lasts a really long time. Cotton or wool stuffing is available also, but it doesn’t get the loft that down does, nor is it as warm (cotton isn’t warm at all). Remember that stuffing is also made of plastic!
Leather is great stuff, if you take care of it properly. It needs regular care and maintaining, but it will last a really long time if you do, and just get softer and softer over the years. And yes, you can clean it! You use something called saddle soap to clean it with. Patent leather has a plastic coating and may not even be leather these days, unfortunately. Deerskin is very nice, very soft but not very warm.
There’s a movement I first heard about in the historical costuming community, from Pinsent Tailoring: Slow Fashion. It’s a response to fast fashion, and the goals are to have a wardrobe that is more about longevity and quality of the clothing, and also about the clothing being made so that in a hundred years, all that would be left are the metal/horn/bone/shell/wood buttons. It’s very hard to do that with modern shoe soles, but if the heel or insole of your shoe is the only plastic you leave, you’re still doing better than an outfit from Target or something. Making your own clothes is actually not extremely difficult, you can start with extremely simple things, including the Bisexual Shirt (poet shirt), a pair of comfy pajama-style pants, and so on.
Make friends with your local vultures, costume historians, and leatherworkers (which are all, sometimes, also cosplayers)! They’re going to have oodles of resources for where to find natural materials.
ifesbob 