#Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World

[ashmouthbooks]

EARTH IS MISSING! / EVERYONE'S WORLD IS ENDING ALL THE TIME

this spring I entered the Elizabeth Soutar Bookbinding Competition held by the National Library of Scotland. The theme this year was climate change. I didn't win any of the categories (I certainly didn't think I'd win any of the Craft categories, but I thought I had a decent shot at the Creative categories) but I am very happy with how my binding came out anyway!

under the cut is the details of the binding and the process that went into it, plus a full list of the texts included.

this is a modified 3 piece bradel binding - a 3 piece bradel is usually made with leather spine with the spine attached to the textblock and the front and back covers added on after. there's another variety of a 3 piece bradel case where the spine and boards are assembled with a thin piece of paper to later be covered with a bookcloth. I wanted to use some leftover misprint cardstock I had (the same stuff I'd previously used to make paperbacks) and I wanted to print the titles directly onto the covers and spine (specifically I wanted to overprint the titles to imitate the existing misprint), and in order to fit it through my printer I had to have it in three pieces. so I assembled a bradel case as if it were to be covered with a cloth, only the cardstock I was using to assemble the case would also be the cover material.

everything I used to make this book was recycled or reused, with the exception of the greybeards which were new (I didn't have any rescued book boards from secondhand books at the time). the text paper is recycled eco-craft paper, the endbands are re-used macramé cords wrapped in green wrapping paper that came from a gift bag, and as mentioned, the cover material comes from a misprinted running sheet.

a few process photos of getting the case together:

in terms of content, I took care that not only should the binding fit the theme of climate change - by using recycled and reused materials - but the text inside should also fit the theme. there were a lot of considerations there because I could easily have just bought a copy of something like Greta Thunberg's speeches and rebound them, but I wanted the texts to be something that made sense to me. so I went and looked at the SFF magazines I read for climate fiction and essays, I looked for academic papers, and I looked on Gutenberg for older pulp fiction relating to climate change. once I had a selection of texts I pared them down to two categories, fiction and non-fiction, and decided the most fun way to bind them would be as a tête-bêche with fiction on one side and non-fiction on the other, and this then informed how the binding would physically turn out - the modified 3 piece bradel.

here is the full table of contents for each side of the book:

EVERYONE'S WORLD IS ENDING ALL THE TIME and other writings

A Climate of Competition: Climate Change as Political Economy in Speculative Fiction, 1889–1915 by Steve Asselin Published in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, SF and the Climate Crisis (November 2018), pp. 440-453

A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment by Sherryl Vint Published in the MIT Press Reader, 20th July 2021

The climate is changing. Science fiction is too. by Eliza Levinson Published in The Story, 30th June 2022

’Not to escape the world but to join it’: responding to climate change with imagination not fantasy by Andrew Davison Published in Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 375, No. 2095, Theme issue: Material demand reduction (13 June 2017), pp. 1-13

Science in Fiction: A Brief Look at Communicating Climate Change through the Novel by Eline D. Tabak Published in RCC Perspectives, No. 4, COMMUNICATING THE CLIMATE: From Knowing Change to Changing Knowledge (2019), pp. 97-104

Everyone’s World Is Ending All the Time: notes on becoming a climate resilience planner at the edge of the anthropocene by Arkady Martine Published in Uncanny Magazine issue 28, May 7, 2019

EARTH IS MISSING! and other stories

Earth Is Missing! by Carl Selwyn in Planet Stories (1947)

Climate—Disordered by Carter Sprague in Startling Stories (1948)

Climate—Incorporated by Wesley Long in Thrilling Wonder Stories (1948)

A Being Together Amongst Strangers by Arkady Martine in Uncanny Magazine (2020)

You’re Not The Only One by Octavia Cade in Clarkesworld Magazine (2022)

Why We Bury Our Dead At Sea by Tehnuka in Reckoning Magazine (2023)

[vetteldixon]

Road & Track’s September 2022 piece about Sebastian Vettel. Text below the cut!

‘A’ IS FOR AGITATOR.        SEBASTIAN VETTEL                  Story by Mike Guy                                    Photography by Cayce Clifford        

“WHAT IS AN ACTIVIST?” asks Sebastian Vettel. He’s scratching his scruffy face and grimacing, bristling at the accusation that he has become one. It’s hard to argue against it: Over the past couple of years, even as he’s struggled to find top-10 finishes with the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team, Vettel has become the sport’s loudest voice on topics many racing fans won’t appreciate: civil rights, boycotting Russia, the plight of underprivileged children, the burdens placed on the Global South, and, most significantly, climate change, which he believes is linked to everything.

Certainly, Greta Thunberg is an activist, I propose.

“I don’t know,” he offers. “Is Greta an activist, or is she just a very concerned citizen of our planet?”

We’re sitting in Aston Martin F1’s paddock at the Hungaroring outside Budapest, a few days before the Hungarian Grand Prix. In the history of strange conversations with F1 champions, this is up there with an impromptu exchange I once had with Michael Schumacher in a Monaco alley, about the orange stitching on my brand-new pair of Adidas. (“How very flashy,” Schumacher said, smiling. “Can I buy a pair nearby?”) Except this conversation is deep, elemental. I knew a bit about Thunberg, the young Swedish firebrand who has become one of the world’s foremost advocates of climate-change awareness. But I didn’t anticipate that Vettel would know everything about her.

“Greta has Asperger’s syndrome,” Vettel says. “For her, what’s so confusing—and also so sad—is that I think she’s just very honest about what she feels.” He views it as related to her condition. “For her, our inaction on the climate crisis just doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t make sense. And whereas everybody else is sort of numb to it—we have lives, we have things going on, we have other interests, and all of that—she is just being logical. ‘Why do I need an education when the world is going to be uninhabitable?’”

Strangely, Vettel’s take on Thunberg shows what made him such a special driver. He is absolutely ravenous for information. He is a rabbit-hole specialist. When he has a curiosity, he will not stop until he can see every side of it. The rabbit hole he can’t get out of right now, and that he can’t resolve, is climate change—which, when you think about it, is a terrible irony, given that he is a star figure in a global traveling circus centered  around burning fossil fuels to achieve speed and glory.

This is part of the continuing transformation of Sebastian Vettel. Over his career, he has appeared to fans in many forms: prodigy, brat, champion, jester, provocateur, outsider, mentor, scold, and, finally, agitator. When he gets on a roll talking about e-fuels and carbon credits, he is indistinguishable from crusty protesters marching across Washington Square and shouting doom.

“You look like a hippie to me,” I tell him. His long, stringy hair is just a few hours short of greasy. He’s pushing it out of his eyes as he talks, though careful not to push it too far. “I have a lot of hair, yes,” he says wistfully, then gestures to his receding hairline. “But in significant ways, I don’t have a lot of hair. It’s a privilege of aging.”

Just minutes before this conversation (one of many we would have), with no warning to just about anyone, Vettel announced his retirement. He told his Aston Martin F1 bosses, as well as his assistant, Britta Roeske, who, though not surprised, was a bit shocked that it happened on this day. He leans in and whispers to me, “Do you know I’ve just announced my retirement? Your timing is perfect.” While we are chatting, his retirement video—a stark, honest, and completely unvarnished appreciation of the sport as well as a call to action—is playing out like a grenade blast on his Instagram account.

He’s right; the timing is perfect to reconsider the life and times of a champion. Now 35, a happily married father of three, Vettel is at the end of his F1 career. At his peak, he was as untouchable as any driver in any era of any series. Love him or hate him, and there are millions who go both ways, he will go down in history among a class of drivers so elite, they have names like Schumacher, Hamilton, and Prost—and, arguably, no one else.

VETTEL CAME FROM a middle-class German suburb whose name doesn’t register unless you’re from there. His father, Norbert, was a carpenter and a kart-racing hobbyist, though he never pushed Vettel to be anything other than his own person.

“I didn’t understand at the time how lucky I was,” Vettel recalls. “I mean, compared to many other drivers, I am an exception. I had a normal childhood. I raced, and I was gone every weekend, but when I wasn’t gone, I was at home. I went to school, I finished school, I finished high school. I did karting, and I think I was as professional about it as a child can be. But the moment I got out of the go-kart, I was in the dirt, I was in the forest.”

Red Bull Racing talent scout Helmut Marko compares Vettel’s upbringing with Max Verstappen’s as a study in contrasts that led to similar results. Max’s father, F1 vet Jos Verstappen, was notoriously cruel to Max as a kid, forcing him to race in conditions that a 10-year-old should probably not have to endure. Vettel was allowed to come in out of the rain.

“What do we think makes someone more resilient?” Vettel wonders, as he ponders Max’s extremely promising career. “I didn’t get beaten up. But if you do get beaten up your whole life, does that work? Or does it work to be loved and explained the ways of how the world works? If you compare the two, who is more resilient? Is resilience fighting back—like somebody hits you, you hit back? Or is resilience strength in understanding what just happened, reflecting and taking things on from there?”

Though he’s making a rhetorical point about a racing driver, he’s much more interested in how resilience applies to his own life after retirement. “Being a father myself, obviously I have these challenges every day,” he says. “And if you say, okay, my children are allowed to talk back, well, then you also need to face the fact that they are talking back. So I think it is fascinating, because it’s so much of who we are later on and how we manage situations. And I’m not talking about how many races we might win. Our childhood is fundamental. So much can be done right, and so much can be done wrong.”

Vettel never expected to be an F1 driver. He was contemplating university after he got his high-school degree. It was the normal thing to do. “I finished my A levels and literally two weeks later got the phone call: You are our reserve driver; we need you at the race,” he says. “I was shocked.” He got a development seat with BMW and built his legacy, one turn at a time.

Now? He is not old. By the standards of Formula 1 set by guys like Kimi Räikkönen, who retired at age 42, and Michael Schumacher, who finished his last race when he was 43, Vettel could have another decade in F1 if he wants. Where the younger guys are even smaller, spindly from the shoulder down, conditioned to perfection, Vettel’s form is more functional, with burly forearms, a stout neck, and just a hint of padding over the six-pack. He doesn’t obsess over conditioning the way the younger guys do. He’s comfortable with his body.

You will never know where Vettel is on race weekends. He usually doesn’t stay in the fancy hotels with the other drivers. He prefers to rent a house far from the track, often accompanied by his family. He doesn’t have a business manager and negotiated his own contracts. He bridles against authority. More than most, he does things his own way.

There was no particular moment when Vettel decided to care about the climate crisis or even use the word “crisis.” But it formed in the midst of his career, race by race.

“I think I’ve always seen things,” he says. “I remember in Malaysia, where, the year before when we raced there, there was forest, and the year after, we went past and it was all palm trees…. For sure, I look back at some things now, and I wonder, why did I not maybe put one and one together earlier? Or why did I do certain things like flying around the world, like using private jets? This is stuff you have to decide for yourself now.”

Vettel will talk about almost anything. He doesn’t keep secrets, refuses to conceal his beliefs, and is openly emotional—much more than you’d expect from a German man, at least. Though he is beholden to a patchwork of sponsors that pay him and Aston Martin millions of dollars, there is no effort to protect them from his opinions. Boy, does he have opinions. And he always backs them up with facts.

FOR MUCH OF HIS F1 CAREER, the Vettel haters around the world were legion. They hated him because he drove for Red Bull, which, when it arrived on the scene, was considered a clownish host of parties in the adventure-sports world. How could they possibly compete on the same level as Ferrari or McLaren? For the naysayers, Vettel became the evil posterboy, one of Dr. Marko’s creations.

Then Vettel beat Ferrari and McLaren. It was the car, not the driver, the haters said. Like every racer on a winning streak, he complained a lot and was accused of being unsportsmanlike (everyone remembers the Multi 21 scandal with always-a-bridesmaid teammate Mark Webber).

But what makes a great racing driver? This conversation’s as old as the chariot races at Circus Maximus. Is it the number of wins? Championships? Podiums? By those measurements, Vettel has few peers. He has four World Championships, tied with Alain Prost and bested only by Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton (and, from the pre-F1 grand prix era, Juan Manuel Fangio).

From a championships perspective, there are 30 lesser drivers who will remain far beneath him on the list of greats: Senna, Lauda, Clark, Alonso, Villeneuve, and on and on. (The jury is still out on Verstappen, who possesses apparently limitless ability, though his only championship came from a deeply flawed decision by a racing director who was shown the door shortly afterward.)

           “There are more important things. Eventually, I’ll find my way to those.”                        —Sebastian Vettel          

Vettel was at Red Bull for just six years, during which he won his championships—serious ROI for Dr. Marko, who plucked Vettel from a choir of F1 contenders young and old. Before his 150th F1 start, Vettel earned 41 wins, 73 podiums, 45 pole positions, and those four titles—stunning stats that cast a shadow over his contemporaries (in the same first 149, Lewis Hamilton, with 34 wins and two championships, comes closest; Alonso and Verstappen lag far behind). Beyond the raw stats, extraordinary work ethic, and preternatural talent, the greatest drivers integrate an uncommon set of qualities: aptitude, intuition, the most cohesive team, the deepest-pocketed sponsors, the canniest team principals. It’s a sort of witchcraft with a whiff of luck.

Championships are not “just the car,” but great cars can get you close. During his four-year title run, Vettel had the benefit of driving Adrian Newey’s aerodynamic masterpieces, the RB6, RB7, RB8, and RB9, which, among other prestidigitations, deployed a blown diffuser that the competition never countered. And yet, perhaps only a professional driver can fathom the level of unrelenting focus required to maintain that level of mastery against Lewis, Fernando, Kimi, Webber, et al. Not just anyone can sit in the fastest car and win four consecutive championships.

Consider how Vettel earned the Red Bull seat in the first place. When he showed an abnormal skill in karting, his father began budgeting closely, saving here and there to fund a modest campaign. After a development gig at BMW, Vettel worked his way into a seat at Toro Rosso, a Red Bull junior team in F1 that used the previous year’s chassis with a Ferrari engine instead of the more dominant Renault mill. At the 2008 Italian Grand Prix, in the little Toro Rosso, Vettel won from pole on a grid that included a dominant McLaren/Hamilton combination and two Ferraris that filled the front of the field. Vettel’s performance was career defining, and it secured his seat at Red Bull.

Once there, Vettel locked eyes with the engineers. He talked through the car’s every component, its every weakness and nuance. He probably knew as much about Newey’s wondrous cars as his engineers. So Vettel won over the team and quickly became its natural focus. Vettel’s team-mate, Mark Webber, one of the most talented wheelmen in the world, didn’t stand a chance. The same curiosity that led Vettel to discover how a disappearing forest in Malaysia is a bad sign for the climate, or how Greta Thunberg’s Asperger’s syndrome is a sign of her honest commitment to the cause, led him to become a virtuoso in a strong car.

The rest is history: In 2010, Sebastian Vettel became the youngest driver to win an F1 World Championship, at age 23 and 133 days.

Today, as a very long retirement looms over the rest of the races this season, he has no idea what he’ll do next. But what motivates him is that the fate of the planet looms over the horizon.

“I have three children and a wife I love very much,” he says. “I’m going to be very busy. Everything you think you might be doing or want to do, I don’t know if it’s going to be satisfying. Because I don’t know any different than this. But I do think there are more important things. Eventually, I’ll find my way to those.”

[msmysticfail]

You put in your Astro observations post that Pluto in Aquarius is going to go crazy for Aquarius placements for the next 20 years. I have Aquarius Mars, Uranus, Jupiter, and MC. Am I doomed? 😭

Gurrllll, look, as an astrologer my job is to be extremely cautious with the things I say, so I'm going to answer you the following: yes and no. When Pluto starts to move "freely" through Aquarius, it will activate your Mars, Uranus, Jupiter and Midheaven. I can already tell you that there are big changes coming to your life, if you already work then maybe you will reconsider your career somewhere in the future. Just as you can gain recognition through what you do (Midheaven, Mars). Pay attention to the degrees in which your planets are, depending on the degree you have, you may only feel these large and intense movements when Pluto is 5 degrees forward and backward from where the degrees of your planets are. 

Now I'll give you an example ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°):

Pluto in Capricorn affected a lot, a huge lot, people who have important placements in Capricorn, these people went through gigantic changes, gained power, lost power, got married, had children, lost things, gained a lot of money.

Greta Thunberg, for example, has her Sun in Capricorn (12 degrees), Pluto went there and passed right over her Sun, making her awaken to structural problems that society ignores. It was by seeing and understanding a series of drastic problems that she used her personal power to bring social awareness to a large number of people and Pluto gave this power to her, giving her strength to face what needs to be faced.

Kylie Jenner, ascendant in Capricorn, Neptune in Capricorn in the 1st house, Kylie underwent gigantic transformations in her 1st house, the ascendant, literally changing the shape of her body through surgeries and aesthetic procedures. Not only that, she needed to mature, go through transformations that required a lot of her, but that also gave her the power she has today. Pluto shone on Kylie Jenner and she, with 8th house energy, knew how to use it.

Pitbull, another Capricorn, he literally gained international fame, Pluto made him gain power over the masses, and elevated him to another world, gave him the chance to put his person and his music in the world in a huge way, his fame was gigantic, during 2008-2014 he was at his peak. Pluto gives power, he takes the person who is fighting to win something and he sees how the person wants something so much, so badly, that he gives the person the opportunity to win what they truly desire.

Timothée Chalamet, had Pluto transit over his 5th house, activating all his stellium in Capricorn, calling him to leave his mark on the world, to be someone of prominence, who stands out for being who he is, creating a renown, a legacy.

Zayn Malik, another example, the singer had his 11th house extremely activated, house of Aquarius, house of the great masses of people. Not only did he become extremely famous doing what he wanted, but he also drastically changed his life, opposite his 5th house, he started a family, had his first child, for example.

See how cool Pluto can be too? With the definitive entry of Pluto into Aquarius, Aquarius themes and people will gain much, much more relevance. There are dramatic things coming too, but that's a topic for another conversation. If you want to know more book a reading with me, I'll be happy to be of your assistance. ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧ (´｡• ◡ •｡`) ♡

[reasonsforhope]

"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.

I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.

In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)

Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”

So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.

But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.

The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.

Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.

The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.

Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever

Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.

In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.

It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.

What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...

Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence.

It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.

Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...

The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.

Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World

The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.

Vanishing Autocracies

In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.

One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...

Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...

Expanding Human Rights

All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.

Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.

But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.

These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.

Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind

The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.

We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...

Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.

But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.

And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"

-via Vox, 3/20/23

Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it.

[wallisninety-six]

For better *and* worse- 2022 was the year of “I didn’t think it would actually happen” like I didn’t think...

That Russia would actually full-on invade Ukraine

That SCOTUS would be stupid enough to actually fully strike down Roe v. Wade

That after so many false hopes that a Climate Change bill would actually pass in hellhole America

That nuclear fusion would finally be achieved

That Alex Jones would be forced to pay a billion dollars and now potentially go bankrupt after his lawyer accidentally texted out incriminating information to his opposing attorney

That Shinzo Abe would be legit assassinated in broad daylight with a homemade camera gun

That Liz Truss would fucking *tank* the British economy after *days* on the job and then leave as quickly as she destroyed everything

That Russia would be crazy enough to annex territories of Ukraine that they barely control

That Elon Musk, richest person in the world an actual real-life evil cartoon villain, would buy Twitter and absolutely destroy it and his reputation

That FTX would completely collapse in the most stupid fashion worse than Enron

That Artemis 1 actually launched and interplanetary space travel is happening

That Republicans would actually fuck up so badly and lose a midterm election they would have easily won

That Andrew Tate got ratio’d hard by Greta Thunberg an his cringey reply vid may have tipped him off to authorities because of a Romanian pizza box, confirming his location and getting him arrested

[aurora-daily]

A Creative Flight: AURORA Interviewed

An interview with AURORA by Susan Hansen for the Clash Magazine (June 24th, 2024)

An emotional meeting with the Norwegian star...

Alternative pop singer AURORA is a creative and political lead, an artist who shines a bright, much needed light on the world. 

A tour de force, Aurora Aksnes’ ambitious new LP is cause to celebrate, even if the state of the world fails to match. The distinguished musician is unafraid to share understanding and insights gained in the past few years, where much time was spent reading, studying and acquiring knowledge.  

The Norwegian singer-songwriter is on a composite journey that involves, but is not limited to, absorbing information, examining creativity and political activism. There is a strong conviction and the commitment shown is unwavering. 

Creativity first, however. A meeting with the singer is arranged, the location is central London, and Clash meets her on a cloudy afternoon in May. “I bought a notebook in the airport,” she tells us. What initially is at risk of seeming like a mundane snippet of information gains in significance, fairly rapidly. 

Her way of observing the clouds is anything but casual, it seems. A painter too, looking at them inspires something else; “I understand why we painted these clouds in the ancient days,” the singer considers. “They were so gorgeous. I was flying through them, looking at them, it was magical. I wrote down what I was seeing, it became a creative flight. It was spiritual.”

One of several core themes, spirituality is a recurring thread in AURORA’s body of work. Then there is a need to make a difference, to help instigate change, have an impact on the outside world, this might explain why she has more to offer than a hit-upon-hit chart artist, which is just how she likes it. Not feeling right about topics such as love, heart aches and revenge is one thing, her agenda is substantial.

“I rant about something that I feel is needed for the world,” she reflects. “It’s hard work to tune in on other things in our daily lives, when there’s so much going wrong outside of us, outside of our families. We’re all brought up to care about our inner circle. All the politics, all these things that we are so scared of outside our inner circle, I write about the outer circles, far away from people in our circles.”

Continuing to discuss, essentially arguing that things in the outer circle are a lot less distant than we think, saying that they actually have a profound effect on us. “I believe that those things far away really affect the things in here, without us being aware of it. I keep that in mind when I write.” 

Unsurprisingly, writing is the backbone, and so much has been achieved, racking up billions of streams, world tours, her book, The Gods We Can Touch published in 2022, selling 14,000 copies, the recent vocal contribution on ‘liMOusIne’ with alt icons Bring Me the Horizon, the list goes on. 

She is the first to admit that things can become too personal and overwhelming, simply be too open to cope with. A decade can go quickly, she knew it was time to do things differently. “It’s very heart on sleeve,” she admits. “It can seem very personal. This album is the first time in my career, where it’s more personal. I was going through something for a long time, something that pulled me so far down that I actually needed music for myself.”

Fair point. But there is AURORA, the activist and environmental campaigner. A Greta Thunberg of music and art, where a dedicated, compassionate approach is demonstrated, an engagement of long-term commitment. What can seem fairly abstract about her work becomes more and more tangible as our conversation progresses. “It’s easier to call it activism. I just always loved nature, I want people to love her too. We need her and indigenous people are connected to that. To me everything comes back to nature, I’ve been very aware of it for years.” 

Honest, direct engagement is priority. Through The Rainforest Alliance contact with some groups was established, including conversations with three female tribe leaders in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. “They remember a lot of things that we need to remember,” she states with a hint of frustration in her voice. “I cannot believe that we are attacking the very groups, who are protecting what’s left of the world and actually have so much to teach us. That’s a big thing for me.”

She maintains that it makes little sense to “attack the people who are connected to something, it’s like we want the world to forget. Taking the women who are the source of life, taking the children out who are the source of the future, those who are the connection to the past. We are killing everything.”

Viewing herself as a person whose role it is to influence and spread such words, makes arguing the opposite impossible and irrelevant. To her, listening goes beyond anything else, it’s about great listening skills, as is the quality to talk as a friend, as opposed to someone who lectures or patronises. The ability to talk as a friend combined with an urge to learn, educate and let oneself be educated along the way. 

The discovery of a passion for speaking about the environment started early on, even if she didn’t associate it with activism or identify it as such back then, she has been active since the age of sixteen. Her statement “art without politics is boring” is a huge part of who she is. The early realisation that she could use her voice, be someone who expresses ideas, opinions and perspectives was a conscious choice, it made her seek out the political path, which makes more sense now than ever before.   

There are situations where only a friend can help express the most uncomfortable facts, when things have gone too far. So often a friend can help provide what’s needed, and this is the type of voice AURORA aims to be and the voice she shares with others. It’s how she likes to communicate about important topics. 

The connection to nature and earth feeds right into album title ‘What Happened To the Heart?’ If the earth is the basis of everything the world should hold on to, then why is so little care shown, how did we become so far removed from it? “The situation in Palestine shows how willing we are to let unfair things happen, if it’s far away from us. It makes me ask the question now more than ever, what happened to the heart of human kind?” 

The prospect of seeing a colourful world, earth and nature turn into “grey nothingness” is less than favourable. The singer insists that “Mother Earth is the same, she doesn’t scream to us with words that we understand. She speaks to us in her own language, and many of us have forgotten that language completely.” 

What remains immensely positive is seeing how the urgency of this topic is dealt with so skilfully on the record. A concoction of style, a lofty effort, it doesn’t fail to thrill or educate. With its cathartic core it offers a spectrum of emotion, thought and sound palette. From electro-pop song ‘Some Type of Skin’, there are pulsating techno vibes as heard on ‘Starvation’, the more synth led ‘My Body Is Not Mine’ stands out, as does the more instinctive ‘My Name’. It’s an album of unlimited scope and invention. 

It has been an rewarding experience, which according to the singer offered numerous standalone moments. She worked closely with collaborators she knows well (Ane Brun and Matias Tellez), the record also captures fresh openings, new adventures that continue to invigorate. A meeting with a Chinese Pipa player (a string instrument similar to a lute) became the source of an enthralling collaboration. Impressing when she played one of the tracks, the singer just knew the player had to be involved. “I sent her the song. She came back to me the day after, it was amazing. What a woman, I loved the work and kept everything.”

It’s a busy year that continues to get even busier. With festival appearances in the diary, splendid events are in store this summer and include a return to Glastonbury and Roskilde. These are more than just cultural events, they involve engagement with different crowds, they are opportunities to engage with individuals. Each affair is different, people need different things every year, because the world keeps changing. 

“I’m excited to see how the youth inspires me, it makes me hopeful for the future. I want to see them be very much alive and well, which I hope and believe will happen. I’m excited to see the energies amongst people now, you get to see crowds and you realise what the audiences are like right now.”

The prospect of a world tour scheduled to begin later this year is massive, one of unmitigated excitement. “I’m very happy that I’m going out there. It’s beautiful that people accept me all over the place.” 

It’s hard to imagine a place or a country where AURORA isn’t accepted, given the amount of thought and consideration she puts into everything. It’s such a beautiful thing…

[idkwhatiwantinlife]

all jokes aside i think this is proof that young people can run the world better. a gen z clapback from a teenage activist shuts down a human trafficker.

and i know she didn’t know that they were looking for him but that’s not the point. the point is that gen z has the ability to hit them where it hurts and to never back down from a fight.

greta thunberg got attention not by lobbying but by skipping school to sit in front of the parliament.

little miss flint wrote a letter to the president at 11 years old instead of waiting for the adults to do something.

dylan mulvaney changed the way trans people are viewed (and destroying caitlin jenner) and got the attention of the president just by documenting every day of her transition on tiktok.

[peachfuzznygma]

some positive and negative thoughts i have on this last day of pride month:

the positive parts of pride made my heart feel warm. it was so amazing marching with the queers for palestine parade block (greta thunberg was marching with us too!!!). the actual protest part (holding up signs, shouting slogans loudly, showing solidarity) is what i live for. i feel like i’m part of something bigger. i feel like i can truly make a change. my feet hurt and i’m dizzy from the heat but i’ve never felt more powerful. also seeing all the other amazing blocks (dykes on bikes, leather gays, puppies, bears, russian queer immigrants etc etc) made me feel so happy.

but i’m so tired of cis gays during pride (and all year around tbh). i’m so tired of making identities, protests and activism palatable. pride has always been and should be and is still a protest. i don’t really know what the pride parades are like in other countries/cities but here in finland we have the big parade/protest that leads us to a big park where is the “park celebration”. it finally clicked why every year after pride i feel so disappointed/angry/sad. it’s the park celebration that ruins it for me. we have such a big drinking culture here in finland that every chance we get we will drink. the park celebration has just become an excuse for people to come and drink and hang out with friends. and yeahhh ofc this is what we are fighting for!!! for us to celebrate!!! but have you seen the world we are in. of course i would love to celebrate but holy shit i want to fight even more. people even do the whole “i won’t come to the parade but let’s meet up at the park”. I’M SO FUCKING TIRED!!!!!!!! FUCKING DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!!! PUT YOUR DRINKS DOWN AND ACT THE FUCK UP!!!!!! and let me tell you these folks are almost always cis (white) gays. like i said, i’m so tired of cis gays. like i feel like they never get it. they don’t honor pride like pride should be honored (also if you’re gay and cis and you are doing the work this isn’t about you. move along and let me be angry)

on top of this there are these homophobic christians that drive around finland with these big ass homophobic signs. there was a skateboard event on saturday and they absolutely destroyed those signs (hell yeahhhh this is what i want to see). and one of my cis gay friends sent it to me with her basically saying “yeah i’m against them too but violence is never the option”. yeah fuck off. bring back violence at this point. bring back being angry and fighting back. stop being a fucking pussy

anywayyyyy my pride month ended with me sitting on the back of a bus on my way back home and next to me were three other trans people and it made me really happy. i feel like a dog seeing another dog in public everytime i see trans people. it just felt like a good end to this month. we didn’t say anything to each other but it made me feel safe and fuzzy inside (i really wanted to smile at them but i didn’t want to be weird)

[realbeijinger]

A semi-coherent rant on climate change, the value of idealism, and a criticism of TGCF (But also not really because I haven’t finished it yet and also I love MXTX…)

I’m in the middle of Book 3 of Tian Guan Ci Fu, and it is legit making me depressed. Like really, unnecessarily sad. I know I should probably wait until the end to write up my thoughts since I don’t know how things will ultimately turn out, but I feel like I need to process. And so, here we go…

First of all, I am sooo Xie Lian. I feel like this story gets me down so much because it hits too close to home. When I was little, I was super idealistic—I used to go around telling people that love was the most important thing in the world, and that civilization was wrong, because we were destroying the environment, and so we should all go back to living in harmony with nature. I was like a crazy, radical five year old, but also somehow mature-sounding and nauseatingly sweet. Grownups loved me and assumed I would grow up to do something big. But… I haven’t really. Instead I am just a normal person and realized that the world is actually super complicated—like I said, sooo Xie Lian. Except I never became a god or saved even one person…    

Anyways, it’s not like I disagree with MXTX’s criticism of blind idealism. She hit the nail on the head—crushingly well. But I guess, like Xie Lian, I am still clinging to that last bit of hope I haven’t let go of yet.

In TGCF and Mo Dao Zu Shi, things are never black and white, and she criticizes those characters who act with a blind sense of righteousness. She believes in nuance. And yet, in our current moment, we are headed toward a climate catastrophe, and it feels like we are all just sitting back, trying to carefully weigh the ideal course of action—the pros and cons, scared of being too rash, too impulsive—while the world burns.

When I first started watching the Untamed (which is where my MXTX journey started), I was initially drawn in by this extremely beautiful man who was willing to sacrifice so much to do what was right. I loved how he refused to compromise with this screwed up society. Because, I am so frustrated with myself for always compromising. For being part of this system that’s horrible and destroying the world and personally doing very little to stop it. And I wanted to be inspired—and for a minute I was by Wei Wuxian.  

And then, of course, it turns out that the real message was the complete opposite of that, and having dogmatic, uncompromising morals is not something to be applauded. In the eyes of MXTX, it’s very dangerous.

And I mean, she’s not wrong. But I can’t help but think maybe we still need heroes like that. I really admire Greta Thunberg who refuses to fly in planes, buy anything new, doesn’t eat meat. Before anyone joined her protests, she was ditching school every day, literally sitting all by herself in front of Swedish parliament with one pathetic-looking sign. I mean that kind of commitment takes HUGE resolve. It has to come from a total sense of self-righteousness, from a complete unwillingness to compromise or back down—a refusal to listen to her parents, or her teachers, or the large numbers of people around her who were definitely telling her she was nuts. I mean, I try to go veg, and my mother-in-law hands me one homemade meat dish and I instantly fold…

In interviews, Greta often talks about how being on the autism spectrum causes her to view the world in very black and white terms—with good and evil being clearly defined. She often refers to the older generation as “evil” for their role in the climate crisis—a word MXTX would probably not approve of. Normally, I don’t think black and white thinking is good. I also believe in nuance. But when it comes to something like climate, it’s incredibly complicated but also incredibly simple. We have to stop burning fossil fuels. We have to do it now. If we want humanity to survive, we don’t have a choice. We gotta pull out all the stops. We can’t hesitate. And if we do, we’ll lose everything. Any drawbacks that may come from us not using fossil fuels are completely outweighed if the climate goes to shit. There’s no real nuance in that. And to get people to make that sort of change, you need passion. You need motivation. You need feeling. Basically, you need blind idealism. We are soooo screwed, and really, blind idealism is all we have left.     

And I want to have that. Part of me wants to get back to that idealism I lost. But like Xie Lian, I don’t know how…

I dunno. There are always reasons not to do anything. Most of us know life is complicated—our limitations are usually way too obvious. But, I think, sometimes we still should take the single log bridge into darkness. And maybe we need some dumb, cliché hero story to give us the motivation to do it…

Of course, saving the world is not easy. Especially when it comes to large scale national or international politics, the situation in Xianle demonstrates very clearly how easy it is to create unintended consequences. Everything is so complex. There are so many factors, so many competing interests to consider. I do not envy political leaders.

But most of us are not political leaders. Most of us are just ordinary people who want to make the world a little better. We have the capacity to be activists, but that’s it. We don’t have the power to make detailed policy decisions anyway. And so, to some extent, I don’t think we need to worry so much about all that. We just have to push politicians in the right direction.

Even at that high leadership level, though, I do think it’s possible to make better choices—ones that create less harm. And I do think we have an obligation to try and find those. I don’t agree with what the State Preceptor said (and what I think MXTX actually believes), that “Assigning fault is meaningless.” To me, that’s akin to giving up on morality altogether.

A lot of this is a matter of perspective. Yes, if you zoom out far enough, assigning fault is meaningless. But then, if you zoom out far enough, everything is meaningless. Everything we love and care about will one day be gone. Our battles for justice, for equality, for the people we love, will all be entirely pointless once our current society goes the way of the Aztecs, once humanity disappears, once the earth gets swallowed by the sun.

Again, if we zoom far enough out, climate change is not really a problem. According to that wise state preceptor, “In this world, fortune—good or bad—is predetermined.” MXTX believes there is only so much good fortune in the world. If we somehow manage to take too much of it, we will eventually pay the price. Balance will be restored.  

Which is exactly what is happening in this era of climate catastrophe. In the past 200 years since the industrial revolution, humanity has taken a lot of fortune. For the first time in history, we don’t worry every day about finding food. We’ve conquered a whole host of deadly diseases, have greatly reduced our need for manual labor, and can spend our days in mental pursuits, making art, or writing self-indulgent essays about Chinese web novels.

All of this, I would argue, is not really because of human ingenuity, but because we happened to find an incredibly powerful energy source—fossil fuels—which have given us the illusion of “human progress.” Let’s remember that this “progress” has only lasted for about 200 years, a small dot on the graph of human existence (300,000 years), and that for most of that time, people viewed history as a cycle, with inevitable ups and downs, rather than a continuous march upward.

In other words, in the past 200 years, we’ve taken too much fortune. But nature will correct the balance. I don’t think climate change will destroy life on earth. Even if the worst happens and humanity bites the dust, other species will most likely persist, evolving into creatures completely new—a rebirth, of sorts. Looking at it from that far-off, disinterested perspective, it’s not really a problem. It’s just what nature does. New species follow each other, one after the next—like passing seasons.

But, even if all this is true, I don’t think we can be so detached. I don’t think we can live our lives believing that morality is pointless, not trying to do the right thing, or not worrying about how our actions affect others. If we approach life with such indifference, what’s to stop us from completely giving up?

One of my favorite TV shows is this old drama called Dead Like Me, where a wise, older character (a state preceptor, of sorts), says to the main character, “If you stand too close to a painting — all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.” In other words, when it comes to life, you need to stand the right distance away. Personally, I think MXTX is standing too far back. It’s true, there is so much we can’t control. Though we may be able to make things better for a bit, we cannot alter the basic cycle of life. Life is suffering. It was true when Buddha said it, and it’s true now. And if we try to “attempt the impossible,” as the Jiang motto says, and radically change that dynamic, we will fail.

But unlike in MXTX’s universe, fate doesn’t really screw us at every turn. Every day there are small victories. I used to do social work, which really was an exercise in the futility of trying to fix deeply rooted problems with insufficient tools, but I still remember those few times when I did do something right: the old man with dementia I got to take his meds, the guy who found his family on Facebook.

Even just writing a stupid email to Biden telling him to stop the drilling… we have to value those actions. We have to be invested. Sure, the universe doesn’t care. But I think we should still care. We can’t just throw up our hands and say the world is fucked. Because if everyone did that, the world really would be fucked. Even more so than it already is.  

Again, I realize I don’t entirely know where she’s going with all this. It’s very possible there’s going to be more to it than just criticizing idealism. Despite all the depressing stuff, I see crumbs of hope in how Hua Cheng loves Xie Lian, and values his attempts to help others. The line, “Although foolish, it is brave,” just floored me. I loved it so much. Honestly, I’d probably be happy if she leaves open any hope for idealism at all.   

But also, I have to prepare myself for the possibility that I will not totally agree with what she has to say. Which should be fine. I mean, in real life, I’m pretty good at interacting with people I fundamentally disagree with. But… in the hands of an author like MXTX, I feel like my emotions are like putty. I’m completely at her mercy. And partially, I don’t want to fight that. I want to give myself to the story, and lose myself in it completely. That’s a great feeling, but also, kind of… vulnerable? And then, when so emotionally invested, to suddenly realize that what the author’s saying bothers me…

Of course, I’ll get over it. I always do. Usually I write meta or fanfic as a way to process—to get out of someone else’s story, out of their head, and back into my own.

Anyways, we’ll see. Don’t tell me what happens!! I am trusting YOU, strangers on the internet!

If that’s not blind idealism, I don’t know what is…

[kp777]

By Olivia Rosane

Common Dreams

Dec. 19, 2023

"This COP has once again proven that the COP processes are not working in our favor," the climate activist said.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg called the outcome of the 28th United Change Climate Conference—which agreed to "transitioning away from fossil fuels" but stopped short of the phaseout demanded by civil society and climate-vulnerable nations—a "betrayal and a stab in the back."

COP28 concluded in the United Arab Emirates on December 13. The outcome, also called the "UAE Consensus," marks the first time that fossil fuels have made it into the final text to emerge from a U.N. climate summit. While some are celebrating this milestone, Thunberg was not impressed.

"The final outcome of COP28 is not a 'historic win,'" she wrote on social media Friday. "It is yet another example of extremely vague and watered down texts full of loopholes that in no way is even close to being sufficient for staying within the 1.5°C limit and ensur[ing] climate justice."

Speaking to Reuters at a protest outside the Swedish parliament on Friday, Thunberg said the agreement was the "bare minimum" and rejected the idea that it was a "first step."

"We've already had first steps and they haven't led us anywhere," Thunberg said. "The emissions are still increasing. We are experiencing record highs."

She also questioned the validity of U.N. climate negotiations.

"This COP has once again proven that the COP processes are not working in our favor," she told Reuters. "They are not designed to solve the climate crisis. They are more working as an alibi for world leaders" to hide behind their signature on a document while continuing to do nothing.

"We need drastic immediate emission cuts and binding commitments from the largest contributors of the climate crisis to finance loss and damages, adaptation, and a just transition in the most affected areas."

Thunberg's remarks build on her criticism of COPs in recent years. She stopped attending the gatherings beginning with last year's COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, which she called an opportunity for "greenwashing, lying, and cheating," according to Euronews Green.

This year, she particularly criticized the fact that members of small island states were not in the room when the final deal was adopted.

Thunberg said this was "undemocratic" and "completely unacceptable."

"We cannot talk about climate justice when without having the most affected in the room," she told Reuters.

On her Friday social media thread, Thunberg outlined what she thought successful climate action would look like.

"We need drastic immediate emission cuts and binding commitments from the largest contributors of the climate crisis to finance loss and damages, adaptation, and a just transition in the most affected areas," she said.

Thunberg's remarks add to those of many other climate activists and scientists who have criticized the deal for falling short of ensuring the 1.5°C target, inadequately funding the renewable energy transition in the Global South, and allowing dangerous loopholes such as carbon capture and storage technology promoted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to keep pumping while promising to "abate" their emissions.

"Although the text mentions a transition away from fossil fuel energy systems in a just and equitable manner, the text is full of loopholes and false solutions on unproven and expensive technology like nuclear, abatement, carbon capture and storage, transitional fuels, etc.," Philippines climate activist Mitzi Jonelle Tan said, as Euronews Green reported.

The group Scientist Rebellion put out a statement Friday calling for a global movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

"The United Nations climate summit, hijacked by the fossil fuel cartel, has gifted a blank check to rich countries and Big Oil to kill one billion people and force billions more to flee their homes by 2100," the group wrote. "The so-called 'historic' outcome of COP28 fails to deliver the most basic and necessary measures which would have prevented societal and 'Earth systems' collapse, as outlined by the IPCC: eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and halt all new gas and oil projects."

Their statement concluded: "It is time to listen to the scientists, hundreds of whom have been driven out of their labs and into the streets to engage in civil disobedience: If we want to avoid condemning both this generation and all that follow to the worst outcomes of the climate crisis, we must all rise together in order to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The time is now."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[womeninfictionandirl]

Greta Thunberg by Allison Adams

“We can't save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change - and it has to start today.”

Greta Thunberg (born 2003) is a climate activist from Sweden. As a school girl with autism, standing at less than 5ft, she started the ‘School Strike for Climate’ protests. Over the past year, she has become a global superstar of the climate change movement, promoting #fridaysforfuture alongside millions of school children (and now adults) across the globe to demand politicians, governments, and corporations take action on climate change.On Friday, August 20th, 2018, Greta began to sit outside the Parliament building in Stockholm every day during school time with a sign that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet’ (School Strike for Climate) demanding the country reduce carbon emissions. She quickly gained media coverage and the support of students and activists all over the world, who joined her voice in their own school strikes, demanding adults and lawmakers to take climate crisis and the future of the planet seriously.

[scotianostra]

Happy Birthday, Scottish pop and folk singer-songwriter Donovan.

Born Donovan Philips Leitch, 10th May 1946 in Glasgow, he spent his early years in Maryhill before the family moved to Hatfeild in Hertfordshire when he was 10, the eclectic folk-rock singer-songwriter became an overnight success at 18 after appearing on the ATV Friday night show Ready Steady Go in 1965. He went on to have international hits with Catch the Wind, Colours, Universal Soldier, Sunshine Superman and Hurdy Gurdy Man and was hailed as our answer to Bob Dylan.

Where the thrust of Dylan’s music remains its bleak introspection and bitter realism, Donovan fully embraced the wide-eyed optimism of the flower-power movement, and his recordings perfectly capture the peace-and-love idealism of their time.

By the 70’s the hits began to dry up, but Donovan continued to make music and just this year has released his 26th album, albeit and collection of, as he says “21 Climate Change songs” re-recorded with his wife, as a tribute to Greta Thunberg and the millions of students around the world who call for action by the governments of the world to halt Climate Change.

But Donovan was doing all this well before the current generation, you only have to look at one of the songs he wrote in 1969, Riki Tiki Tavi….

Better get into what you gotta get into Better get into it now, no slacking please United Nations ain't really united And the organisations ain't really organised

[rjzimmerman]

Ending growth won’t save the planet. (Washington Post Op-Ed)

Ever since Thomas Malthus argued just over 200 years ago that population growth would outstrip “the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,” there has been a continuous parade of Cassandras fretting that humanity is about to exhaust the planet’s carrying capacity.

Neo-Malthusian thinking inspired such 20th-century writings as Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” and the Club of Rome’s 1972 “The Limits to Growth,” which predicted civilization would end “sometime within the next one hundred years.” In “Toward a Steady-State Economy,” published in 1973, economist Herman Daly argued that economic growth should be resisted for the sake of the environment.

Climate change is drawing out such sentiments again. Yet the prescription — that economic growth must stop — is as wrong as it was when the grim Rev. Malthus predicted that a growing population would outstrip the Earth’s capacity to produce food, requiring famine, war and pestilence to bring humanity’s numbers back to a sustainable level.

“Degrowth” — the brand name for neo-Malthusianism — ignores how ingenuity and innovation have repeatedly empowered humanity to overcome ecological constraints identified by Malthus, Ehrlich, et al. Degrowthers ignore basic lessons of history: The world experienced no growth for hundreds of years. Getting ahead economically during certain periods of the Middle Ages, for example, required plundering one’s neighbor. Transactions were zero-sum. The outcome was centuries of conquest and subjugation.

Malthus made his predictions just as England and the rest of Europe were about to enter a two-century era of unprecedented economic growth, which liberated much of humanity from misery and drastically improved health and well-being. Ehrlich’s prophecies came just as the Green Revolution in agriculture was saving hundreds of millions from hunger.

Growth built a world in which one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss. Consensual politics and democracy wouldn’t have been possible without it. We wonder how Daly or his acolytes would be received in the bustling yet poor megalopolis of Lagos, Nigeria, proclaiming the end of growth (or procreation) to save the planet.

And yet degrowth is coming back in fashion. The ranks of degrowthers include progressive journalist Naomi Klein, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and even Pope Francis. At least one European university is now offering a master’s degree in degrowth.

The truth is that degrowth wouldn’t fix climate change even in the unlikely event it could be imposed. Carbon emissions from economic growth can be understood as the product of four factors: population growth, growth in economic output per person, changes in the amount of energy needed for economic production, and the change in how much carbon dioxide is released when energy is consumed.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates these variables up to 2050. One inescapable conclusion: Zeroing out growth in gross domestic product would do little to reduce emissions. Even if output per person remained stuck at 2023 levels all the way to mid-century, humanity would still miss its 2050 target to reach net-zero emissions — by 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

Halting growth in rich countries alone — allowing poor countries such as Nigeria to keep growing, hopefully to one day attain the economic well-being that affluent nations enjoy today — would do even less for the climate. Under this scenario, the world would miss its mid-century CO2 target by 38 billion tons.

Cutting emissions to safer levels would require epic degrowth. Getting carbon dioxide emissions below 10 billion tons per year in 2050 would demand inducing recessions that would cut world GDP per capita by about 5 percent per year — more than the loss during the 2008-2009 Great Recession.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 20 August 2018, the first day of the school year, 15-year-old autistic school student Greta Thunberg began a solo school strike demanding government action on climate change. Instead of going to class, she printed leaflets declaring "We kids most often don’t do what you tell us to do. We do as you do. And since you grown-ups don’t give a shit about my future, I won’t either. My name is Greta and I’m in ninth grade. And I refuse school for the climate until the Swedish general election." Then she headed to the Swedish parliament building where she protested alone. Within a couple of days a handful of people began to join her, and she gave numerous interviews to journalists, making headlines around the world. Within a few months, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in hundreds of towns and cities around the world organised their own walkouts. While Thunberg as inspired many young people, some commentators have pointed out that she received much more favourable media coverage than Indigenous youth who have been using direct action and fighting police to protect biodiversity and fight climate change for years in places like Standing Rock in the United States. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.1819457841572691/2062088090642997/?type=3

[bunnihearted]

umm no but rlly we are all so fucked. countless scientists and experts are saying that we are so so close to the point of no return regarding the climate crisis. we are extremely close to it and when we reach it we can never turn it back. we can only wait for the apocalypse to fully break out (it has already started). and what do all the men in power do? they relentlessly mock ppl like greta thunberg and decide to put more effort into nuclear power, and make thousands other choices detrimental to the environment. and what do ppl in society do? jack shit. environmental activists who are screaming and pleading for ppl to listen only get ridiculed, physically abused and assaulted, jailed and murdered. ppl dont listen. ppl dont care. ppl dont fucking do ANYTHING.

what we desperately need is eco fascism. the entire world need military rule, the state needs to make laws, forbidding for example the use of gasoline etc etc. we're at the point where fucking fascism is the only thing that can save this planet. bc ppl dont do anything. ppl dont care. they live their stupid fucking lives that are in this state completely insignificant because we dont have a future. in a real way. not like oh yeah in 30 years we will have killed the earth. no. now. we dont have more than a couple of years before everything's fucked. so their silly lives dont even matter. yet they refuse to fucking change. all of society all over the world (rich parts of the western world are the main culprits tho) need radical change. and it's sad but true that we can only do it by force and laws. because people just dont care enough. the sad thing is that the men in power find money in their pockets righ this second more important than our (immediate) future.

it makes no sense bc in all the dystopians i've read, the state always does something to save humanity and stop climate change. but in real life, they dont do anything. thats so crazy to me. also, everyone in the entire fucking world needs to go out there, be on the streets, REFUSE to partake in "normal life". we need to protest and demonstrate and be on strikes. if there are no cogs in the wheel turning the capitalist hell machine then they have to listen and take action. but another sad truth that shows me humanity is garbage is that nobody wants to do that. they wanna continue living their dumb little lives, only valuing their immediate comfort and luxury and privilege. like mention global warming to almost anyone and they'll roll their eyes and scoff and start ranting about how that are just conspiracy theories. we're all fucked.

it's all making me so angry and hopeless and dejected because even if all y'all wanna do is cover your ears and go lalallalala and pretend like nothing's happening, you will die and suffer too soon. no one will be spared if that's what y'all think. it's bad enough that the western world are living far beyond our resources and that other parts of the world such as south america and africa suffer environmental catastrophes bc of it. but nobody cares. bc watching netflix and ordering food and partaking in mass consumerism and working some boring soul sucking job and driving ur car every fkn where is waaaaaay more important than banding together, taking a stand and trying to fight to end our imminent destruction and murder of the planet. god. i think most part of humanity deserves what they get (NOT the ones who fight or who are completely powerless in this) but the thing is the animals and nature dont deserve it. it's all so fucked. why dont anyone wanna fucking do something???? ig all there is to do is to sit and wait and see what part of the armageddon is what kills you.

like im sorry but so many ppl are like lalallala peace on earth we can change this :D ppl are fundamentally good we believe in us lallallala peace and love ppl are so good hihiihihihihi we can still revert it. yet......... no one (besides actual environmental activists) wants to do smth real. no one is willing or prepared to radically and fundamentallty change society and the way we live. bc that will be uncomfortable and difficult but it is absolutely neccesessary. it's not enough to sit there and say that humans are so good and u love humans and there is a way to revert it. u actually have to be willing to do it to. because as it is looking now, most ppl just wanna fkn talk abt for five minutes then that's enough effort for them. if ppl were truly willing to fix this and to fight, we woul be out there together and organizing and doing somthing real, but nobody listens or meets the ppl who reach out halfway. if u even suggest it ppl immeditately shut u down. how the fuck do u radicalize ppl if they dont wanna listen or take u seriously? sigh

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

by Don and Joy Veinot | It is odd but in light of where much of Western culture is today, Wild in the Streets seems almost prophetic. For example, at the age of fifteen, Swedish-born Greta Thunberg took her largely ignorant but passionate narrative concerning “climate change” into politics, attempting to sway the Swedish elections. A year later, she publicly scolded world leaders in her 2019…