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- Companies have not actually reduced emissions.
- Companies pretend to reduce emissions by purchasing carbon offsets.
- Carbon offsets are shown to not be effective in actually reducing emissions.
- Companies say, well, we won’t even pretend anymore and continue making no effort to reduce emissions and also stop purchasing the offsets that weren’t actually working.
Writing for The Conversation, microbiologist Jennifer DeBruyn describes how our microbiome lives on after after we die, becoming a “necrobiome” to recycle our human cells into new life.
I find a kind of deep comfort in knowing that my body is a community of organisms. It is a biological fact that affirms my feeling and understanding of connection to the life around me. It’s not just comfort I feel in knowing these things but a kind of deep connectedness. Biological life is a beautiful continuum. We, in our current human forms and consciousness, only get to glimpse the briefest of moments in that continuum.
From the article:
Each human body contains a complex community of trillions of microorganisms that are important for your health while you’re alive. These microbial symbionts help you digest food, produce essential vitamins, protect you from infection and serve many other critical functions. In turn, the microbes, which are mostly concentrated in your gut, get to live in a relatively stable, warm environment with a steady supply of food.
But what happens to these symbiotic allies after you die?
Well, they flourish of course! I don’t mean to spoil the article and you should read it for the details because it’s fascinating. And though it is an incredibly stinky process it’s fundamental to life, it is life. This is why I don’t fear the “dirt” around me. I don’t use antibacterial soaps or bathe nearly as often as most people and while I keep my tiny house tidy it’s not scrubbed clean. I generally trust that the microbial ecosystem that lives in and on my skin and the rest of my body is doing what needs to be done to keep a balance.
This is also why the land around my tiny cabin is less of a garden and more of a wild space. My porch and cabin is surrounded by river oats, a grass that grows three feet tall and might appear to be “weeds” to someone who hasn’t considered what’s meant to grow in this landscape. Intermixed with it are many other natives that are a food source to insects and other critters. My cabin and I are just one element of this landscape.
This is why I don’t fear or kill spiders or other “creepy crawlies” that I find in and around my cabin. I’m in the woods and I understand that though my cabin has four walls and a roof, the ecosystem includes my cabin. I regularly find spiders inside and I fully understand that they’re not there to do me harm. They’re there because there is food to be had in and around the cabin. I find comfort in their presence and embrace the role they play in our shared lives.
We humans often wage wars against each other and perhaps, without realizing it, we also seem intent on waging war against the planet of which we are a part. Rather than understand ourselves to be of nature we seek to separate ourselves from it. We plow it, pave at and otherwise view nature as that which must be subjugated. This is especially true of the over-developed nations of the Global North where we devote an inordinate amount of effort to seal ourselves off from the natural world.
In the end it is a battle we will always loose. Sure, we have science as a tool and we should use it to improve our quality of life. And I’m not suggesting we not have comfortable homes to live in. Or that we should avoid technology. But, rather, that we would be better off if we spent more time understanding ourselves as natural animals. Yes, we’re very good at creating adaptive technology and complex societies as a result, but in the end, we are complex biological organisms living in complex ecosystems. Our health and our lives would be improved were we to make more effort at understanding the healthy, natural and essential connections that sustain us.
This. Well said.
Ben Werdmuller: “Reeeeeally wish there wasn’t a…” - Werd Social
Reeeeeally wish there wasn’t an American imperialism part to this speech. But it’s too much to ask for there not to be. She is still a universe better than Trump, and than most Democrats. I’d love for America to think of the world in a different way, where America is a participant rather than the enforcer of a Pax Americana.
I do appreciate the applause for the Palestinian people. And I am excited for this vision of the Presidency more than any other official candidate in my lifetime.
Democracy Now reports that during President Biden’s speech on the first night of the DNC, a few delegates were able to briefly unfurl a banner that read Stop Arming Israel.
Other delegates attempted to take the banner which was then taken away by convention staff. The delegates were then forced out.
So, that’s democracy in action huh? Only approved signs and cheerleading? No dissent, not even from delegates?
Got it.
We were there specifically to confront President Joe Biden. He’s the one who can stop this genocide by picking up the phone and making a phone call, and he has chosen not to do that.
Love this post and the whole site. So personal and cozy. TheSmallWay.txt | the library of alexandra
i like “the small way;” it fosters my need and desire to contribute and grow the personal web. i want more people to understand that interacting with other websites doesn’t have to be based on comments or reactions or likes. i like showing folks how to trade pixels with one another, how web cliques work. your website can be a slice of your personality, what you do, what you value about yourself and life in general.
A harrowing recounting of Antifa activists countering fascists and thoughts on the bigger picture of America pre-2024 election.
Seven years ago, anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally. The organizers of the rally intended to bring together Klansmen, neo-Nazis, far-right militias, and fascists from the so-called “alt-right” to build a unified white supremacist street movement.
This is disgusting. These people are terrorists and racist colonizers. It fits well with the history of genocide and land theft perpetrated by the US. Our support is the US doing what it always has while pretending to advocate democracy.
Israeli Settlers Rampage in West Bank Town, Killing 1 and Setting Houses Aflame | Truthout
Dozens of masked and armed Israeli settlers descended upon the Palestinian town of Jit in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, setting houses aflame and killing at least one Palestinian in what human rights advocates and the president of Israel have labeled as a pogrom.
Never. They won’t ever admit it. On micro.blog and elsewhere there were a few folks insisting Biden was totally fine. It was a very bizarre loyalty play we see with MAGA loyalists. Shut up and get in line, no time or space for disagreement.
They were wrong. It’s a problem of denial of reality that we still see on other issues like the genocide they want to pretend isn’t happening.
When Will the Biden Dead-Enders Admit They Were Wrong? | The Nation
Hey, can we circle back to when many supposedly intelligent people were making one of the most obviously ridiculous political arguments of all time?
To summarize:
Capitalism cannot fix the climate emergency.
Reuters reports that there were more than 47,000 heat caused deaths in Europe in 2023. It was 60,000 in 2022. Deaths would have been significantly higher but were mitigated by a variety of adaptive measures put in place over the past 20 years.
Last year was the world’s hottest on record. As climate change continues to increase temperatures, Europeans live in the world’s fastest-warming continent, facing growing health risks stemming from intense heat.
We’re deliberately burning down our world. Insanity.
Greek officials advise staying in with windows shut due to fires near Athens | Athens | The Guardian
Greek authorities have warned people to stay indoors with their “windows closed” as more than 400 firefighters battled to contain blazes on the outskirts of Athens that were forcing the evacuation of entire communities, including at the historic site of Marathon.
Unprecedented temperatures – June and July were the hottest on record – after the warmest winter ever have turned Greece’s terrain into a tinderbox, environmentalists have said.
Keep in mind the death toll is likely far higher than the 40,000 reported here which does not include all those killed but still buried under the destroyed buildings. According to the recent Lancet report the real number Gaza toll could exceed 186,000.
Israel continues its war crimes with ongoing mass killing of Palestinian civilians and children. In the past 48 hours 142 Palestinians have been killed and 150 others have been injured.
On Monday, the health ministry said 39,897 Palestinians have been killed and 92,152 have been injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October.
I recently discovered David Rogers of The Nice Marmot website via The Blogroll Club. In particular it was his post The price of Risk that I landed on. I emailed him about the post which led to his mentioning the climate and energy site Do the Math. I’ve added both sites to my blog roll and RSS. Good stuff.
Tiny Life Journal - As a freelancer with a very minimal, energy constrained lifestyle, I often have days when I’ve got no paid work. It’s not a problem given my careful, restrained expenses. I try to enjoy or otherwise “make good use of that time” though to be honest, sometimes the best use of time is simply to sit on the porch and listen to the birds. I do no harm when I’m sitting on the porch listening to the birds and my cat likes the fact that my lap provides her a nice place to stretch while also listening to the birds.
Then I have days when my mind will focus on a topic or a task and suddenly there is not enough time in that day to get through what it is I suddenly want to do. And so the past couple days I’ve found myself exploring and searching out new-to-me blogs. It’s something I’ve neglected for too long and now that I’m taking more time to look around it’s a bit overwhelming but in a good way. Woot!!
I’m really enjoying Bear Blog’s Discovery Feed! Also, the Blogroll Club blog directory is proving a lot of fun.
Warning, a bit of Sunday morning ramble ahead but it sort of goes somewhere. It begins with Robert Birming’s post Lost in the Everyday. He writes:
One of the houses I visited at work today had an absolutely stunning view of the sea. I could have easily stayed there all day.
When I mentioned how amazing the location was, the owner of the house replied, “Yeah, but you don’t think about it after a while.”
And concludes:
A tiny bit of awareness is all it takes to start observing and appreciating our surroundings. Let’s remind ourselves of the beauty of the mundane.
It reminds me of a few other recent blog posts like this on from JC Probably that have a similar theme of being in a daily life rut of sorts, of doing the same routine day after day.
And, well, it’s curious because it’s something that can be thought of in so many ways. It can be viewed as a good thing or a bad. The routine might seem boring. The routine can lead to viewing life as mundane. But isn’t this just the nature of life, of living? For most animals this isn’t a problem. But we humans, more specifically, we modern humans, have created lives rooted in increasingly complex and overlapping cultures. Especially those of us in the “Global North” who have cultures that run on regimented, scheduled industrial capitalism, we seem to forget that we are living in an ongoing experiment. Human civilizations are experiments. We’re making it all up as we go along.
The nuclear family? An experiment. Suburbia? Experiment. Industrial agriculture? Experiment. Cities densely packed with millions of people? Experiment. Mass media, the internet? Experiments. The whole of “modern” civilization is just a constantly evolving experiment of social organization and technology and the rate of change seems to increase year by year.
I’ve only ever lived in the US. My life experience, though somewhat out of the norm, is still rooted in this time and place. But it seems to me that many of the social, ecological and psycological problems of the Global North find their roots in this grand experiment. We’ve built a machine we don’t know how to control. This is to say nothing of the myriad global crises that this uncontrolled machine is also causing as it rumbles along.
When I look around I see people who no longer know how to just be. We swing wildly from being bored to being over-stimulated. When we have moments of calm, of peace, we become unsettled or agitated. We simultaneously crave and fear disruption to the mundane. There seems to be this vague, dream-like idyllic life that many long for, it’s always out there, on the edge, not quite visible or definable. We’ve seen glimpses of it in a movie or on a curated social media feed.
What is it we’re searching for?
Bringing this back around to the initial inspiration for this post, variations of a theme of people posting about feeling stuck in a rut or routine, of daily life experiences being mundane, the contradictions are fascinating. Many are living in the constant hurry of trying to “get ahead”. In the context of the regimentation of 9 to 5 industrial capitalism we are left exhausted but, also, bored. We alternate from describing it as the American Dream to the pursuit of happiness to the “rat race” which would indicate that we are indeed confused about the point of our lives.
Lost in our individual pursuits of atomized happiness and our almost desperate attempts to “succeed”, is that we are ignoring the very challenges that could give our lives renewed purpose. The most obvious, most pressing of these is our climate emergency which, taken alone, is a monumental task but also an opportunity.
The opportunity is that the humans of the Global North will have to make a sharp turn from what they have come to assume to be normal human lives. Our experiment with global, extractive industrial capitalism needs to come to a close and with it our way of life will need to be deeply transformed. Such a transformation will be the work of many generations. Every human alive today and most especially those of the Global North, have much to do to change course. There’s nothing boring or mundane about what lies in front of us.
Thirty years ago I chose to not have kids for these reasons. I’m not sure why governments would want to reverse this trend.
Birthrates are plummeting world wide. Can governments turn the tide? | The Guardian
“Sophia and her partner have been thinking about having children for about five years. They are concerned about humanity’s impact on biodiversity loss and climate change and worried about what the future holds.
“Our conversation has two parts,” says Sophia. “One is: what’s the contribution of a child to the global climate crisis? The second one is about what would their life be like.”
What kind of democracy is this?
A 63-year-old climate activist and professional cellist faces up to seven years in prison after being arrested on Thursday while performing a Bach solo outside the headquarters of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel financier Citibank in downtown New York…
…arrested for criminal contempt in the public park at the bank’s global headquarters as the crackdown against nonviolent climate protesters escalates.
Harris Adviser Says She Opposes Israel Arms Embargo as She Shuts Down Protesters | Truthout
As activists are turning up the heat on the Kamala Harris campaign to come out strongly against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a top Harris adviser said on Thursday that the vice president doesn’t support the idea of an arms embargo on Israel — one of the most crucial and consequential demands of pro-Palestine advocates calling for an end to Israel’s slaughter.
Why is Aipac not required to register as an agent of a foreign government?
Cori Bush warns pro-Israel lobby ‘to be afraid’ after primary loss | The Guardian
“They’re about to see this other Cori, this other side. Aipac, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”
Bush, who will continue to serve in Congress until January, added: “All they did was radicalise me, so now they need to be afraid.”
Excellent post by Ben Werd on the importance of news and quality journalism to a functioning democracy. It should be obvious that an informed citizenry is the foundation of democracy. But we live in a time when the responsibilities of citizenship are barely an afterthought in a culture largely dominated by the trivial.
Every so often, a post goes around in tech circles about how news is bad and we shouldn’t pay attention to it. I think that’s ludicrous.
Today’s was a post from 2022 called The News is Information Junk Food. I think it’s a bad argument that could have poor consequences.
Our relationship to our fellow species is deeply unethical and violent. Not just in terms of the animals that are eaten but in the entirety of our relationship to the natural world.
We think ourselves special but, for the most part, we’re just cruel.
Vox asks:
Why do people go vegan? For some, it’s dissent against animal abuse and cruelty.