It’s the end of Pride Month, have a Bee to help you cope! 🐝 🧡💖🩵 🐝
hello beloveds ☺️
"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.
Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.
We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.
Oh no, you must've misheard me. I never said morally GRAY, I said morally GAY. As in he takes a certain homosexual approach to dealing with ethical dilemmas. Also he's killed 200 people
padeko asked:
Please tell us about the desert.
magicalgirlmindcrank answered:
So like. The desert is freezing at night and boiling at day. The elements are just about as savage as they can be and as a result it looks like a whole lot of nothing but dead, unforgiving, hostile emptiness. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, deserts have a biodiversity matched only by rainforests and much like rainforest most of it is unique to that specific desert. Most deserts formed from ancient lakes or oceans that dried out, leaving the remaining creatures to adapt to a rapidly changing and ever more hostile environment. It’s similar to those endothermic vents miles under the water any niche you can fill or make in a desert is extremely valuable but you can like, realistically go there. A desert is so very alive, despite looking as it does, despite everyone thinking otherwise. If you have never heard all the calls and sounds fill the cooling air as the sun sets as if to say ‘I’m here, despite everything, I’m still here and I’m alive’ it’s an S tier experience.
Oh, also if youve never seen the way the desert blooms at even light rain it is absolutely life changing
“Is it possible to turn things around by 2050? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.
Many scientists have been telling us how the world will look like, if we don’t act now. However, others, like Chan, are tracking what success might look like.
They are not simply day-dreamers either. They aren’t being too optimistic. They are putting together road maps for how to safely get to the planet envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where temperatures hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before we started burning fossil fuels, this article from July states.
“Three decades is enough to do a lot of important things. In the next few years—if we get started on them—they will pay dividends in the coming decades,” says Chan, the lead author of the chapter on achieving a sustainable future in a recent UN report that predicted the possible extinction of a million species.
Making these changes won’t mean years of being poor, cold and hungry before things get comfortable again, the scientists insist. They say that if we start acting seriously NOW, we stand a decent chance of transforming society without huge disruption.
No doubt, it will take a massive switch in society’s energy use. But without us noticing, that’s already happening. Not fast enough, maybe, but it is. Solar panels and offshore wind power plummet in price. Iceland and Paraguay have stripped the carbon from their grids, according to a new energy outlook report from Bloomberg. Europe is on track to be 90 per cent carbon-free by 2040. And Ottawa says that Canada is already at 81 per cent, thanks to hydro, nuclear, wind and solar.
Decarbonizing the whole economy is within grasp. We can do this.
“If we have five years of really sustained efforts, making sure we reorient our businesses and our governments toward sustainability, then from that point on, this transition will seem quite seamless. Because it will just be this gradual reshaping of options,” Chan says, adding: “All these things seem very natural when the system is changing around you.”
Hoping people with more relevant knowledge and science parsing skills than I do might comment on this …
I think it is absolutely vital that people be able to picture The Healed World. Honestly I think it’s one of the most important things we can do.
Look at how many different apocalypses people can visualise. Our brains can freely feast on unlimited scenes of scarcity, competition and fear. Everywhere we turn we can consume endless content about killing our neighbors for scraps, about hurting children, about bleak planets and extinction, and lots and lots of guns. It is easy, accessible and cheap. Our minds gobble up as much of this content as the market generates and the market gleefully generates more. We feed and feed upon a future of suffering and loss. We feast on images of brown children being hurt, unnecessarily, and say smugly that “that’s just what humanity is like.” Our brains are programmed away from the natural human responses to crises (fix it, help each other, rebuild and hope) and TOWARDS the mindsets of fictional apocalypse (cause it, turn on each other [it’s just what humans do! We’ve all seen the same stories!], collapse, fight each other for crumbs, the world is doomed anyway.)
It’s pretty unnecessary. And frankly pretty cringe. Imagine being part of some of the most prosperous, empowered, educated, connected group of humans to ever exist, and having a brain that can only picture the future as apocalypse-movie.
And where is the food of abundance, equality, beauty, hope, diversity? Where is the actual food of the future? Oh. It’s in, like, three solarpunk anthologies, huh?
Huh.
Anyway not to get all Amitav Ghosh on main but we have GOT to address this unnecessary and EMBARRASSING failure of imagination. Because we are the generation currently failing in our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth, because of this deranged inability to picture the world as being a real place, and the future being a place where people will live.
So, basically, yes, let’s just say it and start saying it regularly. The work is now and we have to do it. It isn’t impossible. Yes there is hope. Yes it can all be done. Yes there is a future for fucksake. It’s within our grasp. that is what futures are.
👆 Not sure if I’ve already reblogged this, but @elodieunderglass is 100% right here. We find it so easy to picture doom, but we find it so hard to picture healing.
Also, giving up on a future that is still possible means not only giving up on your own life, but the lives of your loved ones, on the poor and disadvantaged people who will face the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and giving up on nature itself.
For some people, climate disaster is already here. There are millions of people already fighting for survival. They don’t have the privilege of sitting back, giving up, and waiting for the apocalypse to come.
They don’t have the privilege of saying “Oh well, the world’s doomed anyway so why should we bother?” And neither should anyone else.
Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.
Word for today: wisdom of repugnance
The logical fallacy that because something disgusts you it must be bad
Ohhh yes. Love learning a new logical fallacy or cognitive bias to file away.