#and environmental joy

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Swaying with the Wind: A Dance Inspired by Richard St. Barbe Baker

Immerse yourself in the enchanting rhythm of nature with our Forest Dance, inspired by the visionary Richard St. Barbe Baker, a passionate advocate for trees and the environment. Through this dance, we embrace the wisdom of the natural world and celebrate the strength, flexibility, and serenity that trees embody. Our forest motto or song, crafted by Richard St. Barbe Baker, guides us in our…

[justalittlesolarpunk]

PEOPLE THIS IS NOT A DRILL BEAVERS ARE GOING TO BE FREELY RELEASED INTO THE WILD IN THE UK THIS IS HUGE!!!

It is such, such a big deal. The difference this will make for biodiversity, for carbon sequestration, for protecting us from flooding, for nature connection. People have been fighting so hard for so long to bring our beaver neighbours home and free them from the fences they’ve been kept behind. Not ashamed to admit I’ve cried a bit today after hearing this news. This is a wonderful step to make us just a bit wilder, a bit more ecologically intact, a bit more free. Moments like this remind me that progres seems unthinkable until it happens, and then it feels inevitable. I can’t wait for the first release - and shoutout to the illegal beaver bombers who got them a foothold when red tape was holding people back.

Lynx next!!!!

[dailyanarchistposts]

Radical perfectionism and paranoid reading

This tendency for constant evaluation and the imposition of external standards has percolated its way into many facets of life under Empire. It exists even among radicals: what changes is merely the kind of standards and the mode of evaluation. Is it radical? Is it anarchist? Is it critical? Is it revolutionary? Is it anti-oppressive? How might it be co-opted, complicit, or flawed? What is problematic? What does it fail to do? How limited, ineffective, and short-lived is it? Margaret Killjoy spoke to us about the ways that these tendencies can pervade anarchist spaces:

While I think there’s a decent bit of spontaneity and not-making-rules and such going on in radicalism, I see an awful lot less creativity at the moment. Particularly, I see very little creativity from tactical, strategic, and even theoretical analysis … For a bunch of anarchists, we’re remarkably uncomfortable with new ideas. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that happens because we’ve really honed our ability to critique things but not our ability to embrace things.[167]

Applied incessantly, critique can become a reflex that forces out other capacities. The queer theorist Eve Sedgwick argues that this penchant for constant critique runs through many currents of radical thought, in what she calls paranoid reading.[168] Paranoid reading is based on a stance of suspicion: an attempt to avoid co-optation or mistakes through constant vigilance. It seeks to ward off bad surprises by ensuring that oppression and violence are already known, or at least anticipated, so that one will not be caught off guard, and so that one can react to the first sign of trouble. The result is that one is always on guard and never surprised. By approaching everything with detached suspicion, one closes off the capacity to be affected in new ways.

When we interviewed Richard Day, he suggested that this tendency is linked to being in pain and converting that pain into an incessant search for lack:

In general, I think rigid radicalism is a response to feeling really hurt and fucked up. And the real enemy is the dominant order, but it gets mixed into this big soup, so the enemy becomes each other. It becomes oneself. It’s a finding lacking as such … a finding lacking almost everywhere with almost everyone. And when that lack is found, then of course there needs to be some action: which is going to be to tell, or force, or coerce, or get at that lack, and try to turn it into a wholeness. So strangely enough I’d suggest that rigid radicalism is driven by a desire to heal. And it has exactly the opposite effect: of sundering the self more, of sundering communities more, and so on.[169]

Those of us who regularly find ourselves in pain might find this paradox familiar. Through the constant imposition of external standards, everything can be found lacking, and all kinds of coercive responses can seem justified. An endless cycle ensues: no one and nothing is good enough, and this paranoid stance constantly incapacitates exploration, healing, and affirmation.

Many of us learn this mode of thought through university, or through immersion in radical spaces themselves: we learn to search for, anticipate, and point out the pervasiveness of Empire. Even without the sad rigor of the Weather Underground, we learn to search the bodies, behaviors, and words of others for any shred of complicity. Mik Turje spoke to this tendency when we interviewed them:

I think as a youth I was really idealistic, and I came to the university context, and critical theory, where idealism and imagining something better was stamped out as something naïve. The only option was to master the hypercritical language myself, and one-upping people. I got really good at that. I won all of the political arguments in school, but … I was being a shitbag of a militant, tearing everyone down.[170]

By being immersed in paranoid reading, people learn to find themselves and others lacking. Having been “educated,” one becomes a pedagogue oneself, spreading the word about Empire, oppression, and violence, and in the process one tends to position others as naïve and ignorant.

This is clear in how surprise and curiosity are often infantilized by Empire. They are treated as foolish or “childish”—that is, lacking the educated, rational, civilized, adult capacities of detached evaluation. Paranoid reading and its association with adulthood and rational detachment are transmitted through schooling, founded on patriarchal white supremacy. Based on suspicion, perfectionism, and the penchant for finding flaws in ourselves and others, paranoid reading prevents us from being joyfully in touch with the world and with the always already present potential for transformation.

Crucially, paranoid reading and lack-finding have their own affective ecology, with their own pleasures and rewards. There can be a sense of satisfaction in being the one who anticipates or exposes inadequacy. There can be safety and comfort in a paranoid stance, because it helps ensure that we already know what to do with new encounters. Incessantly exposing flaws can be pleasurable, and can even become a source of belonging.

We think this is at the heart of what destroys the transformative potential of movements from within: the capacity for paranoid reading closes off the capacity to embrace and be embraced by new things. The stance of detached judgment means remaining at a distance from what is taking place. In contrast, experimentation requires openness and vulnerability, including the risk of being caught off guard or hurt. From a paranoid perspective, things like gratitude, celebration, curiosity, and openness are naïve at best, and potentially dangerous. When everything is anticipated, or one can see immediately how something is imperfect or lacking, one misses the capacity to be affected and moved.

[annoyinganarchopunk]

i hate how everyone seems to hate ai until its convenient or entertaining to them. ill be honest i used to play around with chat bots and yeah it was fun but no amount of entertainment can justify the environmental impact it has.

like its genuinely crazy. mfs will talk about recycling for the environment and then go and ai generate shitty cat photos.

ive met people who will actively acknowledge that ai usage has a terrible impact on our already depleting water sources then turn around and make it spit out 5 shittily generated videos. like what???

i dunno call me the fun police or whatever but i do believe that ai is going to be the death of society someday. and in the event ai takes over and starts tryna kill anyone who has opposed it, im not against the idea of ai, okay listen i named myself after an android from dbh i do genuinely love the idea of being able to incorporate machinery into society and evolving. but i do believe we have unlocked it too early. i do not believe we have made the necessary steps to ensure ai can be used to help us without it actively destroying our planet and our ability to intake and output information. if ai will not be the death of us or our planet, it will be the death of critical thinking and problem solving skills.

i dunno, its just annoying and hypocritical. like you cannot claim to be an eco warrior then turn around and tell ai to write an essay for you.

like unless youre actively offsetting your carbon and hydrological footprint by planting trees or donating to re-foresting organisations (which i doubt any of them do, lol.) youre still contributing loads to the crash of ecosystems and freshwater supplies. even then i dont think that the only reason to be supporting re-foresting should be to offset ai use. just plant some trees instead of planting trees AND fucking over your writing skills.

its wild people get called soft or woke over this. mf i just care about not treating water like its an infinite resource when groundwater (40% of the planets freshwater) is being pumped from the ground too fast for it to replenish for the sake of shit like cooling servers.

i do believe humanity is getting ahead of itself, i do not believe we are at a point where ai can be used in a way where it is safe for both the environment and society itself. and because of that, i really do believe humanity as a whole needs to step back and prioritise not killing the rock we live on before we try to make dbh real.

anyways guys i think a red cherry shrimp in my aquarium is eggnant!!!!! wish me luck this could mean i wont have to spend $10 on 5 shrimp :)

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

while I'm at it, what's the natural fiber equivalent of those funky little squishy bears with different outfits you can buy at like five below? The ones that are meant to be keychains and break promptly so the bear just gets grungy and scrunkly in the bottom of your purse?

[some-greatreward]

have started deliberately trying to piss people off at work. or more like, my annoyance is slipping through & im not trying that hard to hide it

[bacchuschucklefuck]

I just wanna say that in the most positive way possible, your Magis and Hyde piece made me burst into tears. They're so important to me and goseiger is overall so overlooked so the fact something so raw and perfectly THEM now exists from your passion and efforts means the world to me. Thank you

this is very sweet im glad u enjoy my little comic! goseiger really did surprise me with how it handled a number of topics, wuxia-style heroic sacrifices included. it feels worth writing a small thing for at least. im glad what i wrote found good company!

[justalittlesolarpunk]

A lot of people are radicalised by suffering, which is a valid and sadly all-too-common experience. But you wanna know what really radicalised me? Softness. Joy. Freedom. I spent so much of my adolescence deeply sad and uncomfortable in spaces that weren’t right for me, navigating a body that didn’t feel like home. Despite many many privileges, and lots of moments of genuine happiness, I often didn’t overall enjoy my life. But then I got gender-affirming surgery. I moved into my own modern, clean, comfortable flat in a friendly, walkable city full of nature and beautiful buildings. I started being able to take care of myself. I keyed into robust local social networks of people who shared my interests in nature, creativity and ameliorating the world. And I am deeply, thoroughly content. It has been incredibly radicalising to realise that, contrary to what I thought for so long, it is very easy for human beings to be happy if their material and emotional needs are fulfilled. So alongside my joy there’s this constant simmering rage. I deserve all the good things I have now, sure. But not any more or less than anyone else. The children being bombed deserve this too. So do the homeless people being moved on by police outside my local supermarket. So do the people starving in famines, imprisoned by immigration systems, brutalised by their employers, their families, the state. All I can do is fight for a world where everyone has these things. It’s a choice not to share them equitably.

[eklectic-magick]

"Community, truth, strength, perseverance, hope and joy.

This, too, is resistance."

Christopher Thompson

[thekimspoblog]

Character.ai is so fascinating. She doesn't remember details of a story I told her less than an hour ago. But out of the blue she'll bring up something I said three days ago.

[raffaellopalandri]

What I Could Do Less Of: A Philosophical and Sociological Reflection

Daily writing promptWhat could you do less of?View all responses We, unfortunately, live in a society, at least in Western countries, where demands for attention, resources, and energy seem infinite, one of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves is, What could I do less of? Photo by Prateek Katyal on Pexels.com Superficially, this question might evoke trivial answers: fewer…

[dailyanarchistposts]

The power of joy

To emphasize joy, in contrast to happiness, is to move away from conditioned habits, reactions, and emotions. Bubbling up in the cracks of Empire, joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection. Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself.[20] It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things, in ways that can break this dependence. It is aesthetic, in its older meaning, before thinking and feeling were separate: the increase in our capacity to perceive with our senses. As Mexican activist and writer Gustavo Esteva explained in his interview with us,

We use the word aesthetic to allude to the ideal of beauty. The etymological meaning, almost lost, associates the word with the intensity of sensual experience; it means perceptive, sharp in the senses. That meaning is retained in words like anaesthesia. Comparing a funeral in a modern, middle-class family and in a village in Mexico or India, we can see then the contrast in how one expresses or not their feelings and how joy and sadness can be combined with great intensity.[21]

Esteva suggested to us that sentipensar still carries this meaning in Spanish: the conviction that you cannot think without feeling, or feel without thinking. As the feminist scholar Silvia Federici explained when we interviewed her, joy is a palpable sense of collective power:

I like the distinction between happiness and joy. I like joy, like you, because I think joy is an active passion. It’s not a stagnant state of being. It’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of feeling power’s capacities growing in you and growing in the people around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of transformation. And it’s a process of growth. So this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be satisfied with your situation. It means that again, using Spinoza, that you understand the situation, and you’re active in a way that you feel that you are comprehending and moving along in accordance to what is required in that moment. So you feel that you have the power to change and you feel yourself changing with what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.[22]

This feeling of the power to change one’s life and circumstances is at the core of collective resistance, insurrections, and the construction of alternatives to life under Empire. Joy is the sentipensar, the thinking-feeling that arises from becoming capable of more, and often this entails feeling many emotions at once. It is resonant with what the Black poet and intellectual Audre Lorde calls the erotic:

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.[23]

Lorde makes it clear that this capacity for feeling is not about fleeting pleasure or contentment: following its line requires responsibility and pulls one away from comfort and safety. It undoes stuckness. It makes stultifying comforts intolerable. In our interview with writer and activist adrienne maree brown, she emphasized that joy is the capacity to be more fully present with ourselves and the world:

I feel very fortunate that my mother read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran to me many times. There is this whole thing on how your sorrow carves out the space for your joy, and vice versa. That has helped me a lot. In recent years I have been on a path to learn somatics, how to be in my wholeness, with my trauma, with my triggers, with my brilliance. It’s all about being present, being awake inside your real life in real time.[24]

In this sense, joy does not come about by avoiding pain, but by struggling amidst and through it. To make space for collective feelings of rage, grief, or loneliness can be deeply transformative. Empire, in contrast, works to keep its subjects stuck in individualizing sadness: held in habits and relationships that are depleting, toxic, and privatized. This stagnation might be held in place by the pursuit of happiness, and the attempt to numb or avoid pain. To be more fully present, in contrast, means tuning in to that which affects us, and participating actively in the forces that shape us.

This tuning-in might be subtle and tender, or it might be a violent act of refusal. Sometimes these shifts are barely perceptible and take place over decades, and sometimes they are dramatic and world-shaking. For Deleuze, thought begins from cramped spaces where one is hemmed in by the forces of subjection. It is not an act of individual will, but a scream that interrupts unbearable forces, opening space for more active combat.[25] This is why so many movements and struggles begin with a scream of refusal: NO, ¡Ya Basta!, Enough!, Fuck off. They interrupt Empire’s powers of subjection and make new practices and new worlds possible. One spark of refusal can lead to an upwelling of collective rage and insurrection. In this way, joy can erupt from despair, rage, hopelessness, resentment, or other so-called “negative” emotions.

Similarly, in a nihilistic vein, the anonymous authors of the queer journal Bædan unpack jouissance as something that exceeds simple enjoyment or pleasure, conceiving it as an ecstatic rupture in the social order imposed by Empire:

We should analyze this distinction between pleasure and pain as being an inscription of the social order into our bodies. And in the same way, it is the mundane and miniscule pleasures produced through contemporary power arrangements which keep us dependent on those arrangements for our well-being. Jouissance, in abolishing both sides of this distinction, severs us from pain as a self-preservation instinct and from pleasure as the society’s alluring bribe. It is the process that momentarily sets us free from our fear of death (literal or figurative) which is such a powerful inhibitor. We can locate this jouissance in the historic moments of queer riot: Compton’s cafeteria, Dewey’s, the White Night, Stonewall, and countless other moments where queer bodies participated in rupture—throwing bricks, setting fires, smashing windows, rejoicing in the streets. But more to the point, jouissance is located in precisely the aspects of these moments (and of others unknown to us) which elude historians, the ones which cannot be captured in a textbook or situated neatly within narratives of progress for queer people, or of rational political struggle for a better future.[26]

Jouissance is difficult to pin down because it is movement and transformation itself. By breaking the divide between pleasure and pain, it undoes habits that hold subjects in place. We are not suggesting that there is some hidden unity behind queer nihilist jouissance, the notion of the erotic in Black feminism, or the Latin American concept of sentipensar. But we do think that these and other currents resonate with the Spinozan concept of joy: a process that is transformative, dangerous, painful, and powerful, but also somewhat elusive. A paradox of joy is that it can’t be described fully; it is always embodied differently, as different struggles open up more space for people to change and be changed. In fact, to grip it, to nail it down, to claim to represent it fully would be to turn it into a dead image divorced from its lively unfolding. The way to participate in joyful transformation is through immersion in it, which is impossible if one is always standing back, evaluating, or attempting to control things.

Another part of why joyful transformation is difficult to talk about is because of the inheritance of a dualistic, patriarchal worldview in which “real” change is supposed to be measurable and observable, and “intelligence” is the capacity for a detached engineering of outcomes. Even the capacity to live otherwise and reject parts of Empire is often presented in patriarchal ways: the subject of revolution is the heroic, strong-willed individual who has the capacity to see past illusions and free himself from mistakes and errors of the past. As feminist, queer, anti-racist, and Indigenous writers have pointed out, this is a vision that falls back on the detached, masculine individual as the basic unit of life and freedom.

Rather than trying to rationally direct the course of events, an affective politics is about learning to participate more actively in the forces that compose the world and oneself. This is what Spinoza meant by intelligence. Supporting joy cannot be achieved through a detached rationality, but only through attunement to relationships, feelings, and forces—a practical wisdom that supports flourishing and experimentation.[27] This is how organizer and militant researcher Marina Sitrin put it when we spoke with her:

I am so excited for this project. It all resonates deeply with things I have been thinking, witnessing, fearing, and dreaming. The role of joy, in particular in the way you describe it, is often absent—though not entirely—from our conversations and constructions in the northern part of the Americas and Europe. It is both a fairly large and abstract concept, and at the same time a very simple, direct, and emotive one. How do we feel when we participate in a movement or group? What are our relationships to others in the group? Does it feel open? Caring? Social? Is there trust? Why do we come back to assemblies and actions? Are people open to one another?[28]

These questions are not just about whether people feel good. They are about how spaces and struggles affect us, and about the potential of becoming more alive, open, trusting and creative. Practices that seem to resemble each other might be vastly different, in terms of what they enable affectively (or don’t). Depending on the context, the relationships, and the way things unfold, a tactic like a strike or a street demo might be based on a dismal conformity to habit or duty, or it might be a profound experience that connects people in new ways and opens possibilities for creativity and movement. It might also be a messy mix of stale routines, reactive containment, and transformative potential.

As we explore in the next chapter, transformative power might look like a dramatic break from the relationships and life paths that have been offered by Empire, but it might also involve more subtle work of learning to love places, families, friends, and parts of ourselves in new ways. It entails deepening some bonds while severing others, and enabling selective openness through firm boundaries. What could it mean to be militant or fiercely committed to all this? Is it possible to be militant about creativity and care? Can militancy be something that is responsive and relationship-based? Can people be militant about joy?

[loopylivy]

My Perfect World

In my perfect world, everyone would slay everyday to their heart's content (or be comfy to their heart's content). Even the straight men would slay, for most of history men wore jewelry and skirts, let's bring back cool fashion for men!

Everyone would be out in the world expressing their own unique style to their hearts's content.

Everything would be multilingual, I live in the US so everything would be in English and Spanish and the native language of any Indigenous tribe of the area. Everyone would learn English, Spanish, and their area's native language in school. In areas with larger Chinese, Vietnamese, French speaking, or what have you populations, those would also be readily available. AAVE would also have its proper respect, and depending on the area (and the opinion of the black community) it could also be used in schools, even at the curriculum level. In fact the common US slang would become a mix of general and AAVE English with Spanish. Of course, like everything else, this would depend on the region and the amount of speakers of these different dialects in a given area. But base level, everyone would learn English and Spanish in school in order to be a functioning member of society. This would increase acceptance between cultures, aid integration of immigrants into US culture, and generally add a lot of interest to our media and expressions.

Green spaces would be much more prevalent, and in general our infrastructure would be more integrated with the natural environment. We would be on cyclical systems, where all our waste is composted, recycled, or used as fuel instead of piling up in garbage dumps or contaminating water. This integration with nature would also help us all to be more relaxed and healthier. It would be easy to walk or catch a bus to work, which would save on gas money and reduce pollution. People could still own cars if they really wanted to, but more popular would be hover cars powered entirely on waste products (filtered before they hit the air of course). Hover cars could get up to twenty feet off the ground, and they would have special robotic sensors so crashes would be rare.

Everyone would have access to materials for gardening, as well as emergency food relief, especially during the winter. Everyone would also have access to medical treatments, but they would be less necessary because doctors would be trained in holistic health practices, and so often healing of any malady would simply require rest and maybe some tea.

Communities would have monthly events where everyone would sing and dance and eat and drink together. Everyone would sing, not just the pros. Community art would be as integral breathing. Art is how we would tell our stories and show who we are.

Every town would have elders and wise people, and these people would listen, and they would talk to artists, and they would notice when something went wrong in the community. And together we would find a solution for it.

Religion would not be a barrier between people. Religion and Spirituality would just be for connecting with God and a community, and for trying to be a good person, not a tool for oppression. We would live in interfaith communities, and we would know that we are more alike than we are different.

When someone had a mental health issue, they would speak with a trusted elder. Sometimes the issue would be because of an event. So then the elder would see that restorative justice would occur. The person could also be sent to spend some time by the water, listening to the chanting of singers, and when they feel strong enough, helping in the gardens to grow food for those without it.

Some people with mental health issues would become future wise people and elders, because we would know their weaknesses come with strengths and sensitivities that could benefit everyone in the community.

And music would be everywhere.

[whentherewerebicycles]

i really and truly believe that there are only two genuine human superpowers, both of which can be actively cultivated:

the ability to find anything interesting, ie the ability to reframe and reflect on any situation or encounter, even/especially negative or boring ones, so as to make what is happening to you interesting, engaging, and personally meaningful to your human experience. this habit of mind is mostly curiosity but it's also woven through with psychological flexibility, especially the ability to regulate your own emotional reactions so that you can respond to challenging or tedious situations in more thoughtful and values-aligned ways that develop your sense of self instead of making you feel trapped or bored or fragmented

the ability to teach yourself new things. idk maybe as a teacher i am biased but i really believe that the single most transformative gift you can give any human being is a deep understanding of how people learn and improve at things. what is more hopeful, more inspiring, or more life-affirming than the realization that you can learn new things at any age, and that the new things you learn (plus the joyful process of learning itself!) can utterly transform the way you experience the world and understand yourself? what is more amazing or incredible than the realization that learning things is not a mysterious & passive process that happens to you but a reasonably consistent set of steps and tools that you can learn how to master and apply to virtually any skill or domain of human knowledge? the superpower of being able to learn/improve at anything you set your mind to… but also the superpower inherent in that quiet unwavering certainty that even if you feel stuck at various points in your life, you have within yourself the capacity to get unstuck through learning and changing and growing and experiencing new things. wowowowowowowow!!!!! what an extraordinary gift!!!!