#climate book

[balkanradfem]

One of the points of Greta Thunberg's book about the Climate, was about female land ownership, and how we need an increase of it. That actually surprised me, not that I didn't think of it before, but because it was presented as one of the solutions.

Greta actually looked at what happens to the land when women reign over it, or when women even just have access to it and are allowed to work on it, and noticed that women almost always, naturally, regenerated the land. Women will go and plant trees on their land immediately, and feed their families with the produce it makes. Women will not even stop at planting trees on their land, they'll go and re-forest the surrounding areas too, sharing secrets of the trees with others who can benefit from the extra free food. Women will plant native species, bushes, flowers, gardens, revitalize the soil, add life to the dirt and the sand, and this is something that is recorded consistently and long term with the female land ownership, land is not only regenerated, but used for immediate benefit of all life on it. That includes humans, animals, bugs, bacteria, plants and the local environment in general.

Greta also points out that most of the land that women are working on, is currently not their own. They're most often lending their hands to the land owned by their husbands, brothers, uncles, relatives or landlords, and these m*n will sometimes decide to undo all that work, and build something environmentally destructive on it in order to make a personal profit.

This is why Greta implores that is important that women own more land, personally and with full power over what happens to it. Women having full control over land is nature's way of regeneration and prevention of climate change. Give land to the women to fight climate change.

[atompowers]

This Is The Best Book I’ve Ever Read to Empower Anyone with Real Climate Hope

READ MY REVIEW👉 Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Hope

"To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable." —Rebecca Solnit

What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.” —Rebecca Solnit

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Hope

[mysharona1987]

[justalittlesolarpunk]

I’ve teased it. You’ve waited. I’ve procrastinated. You’ve probably forgotten all about it.

But now, finally, I’m here with my solarpunk resources masterpost!

YouTube Channels:

Andrewism

The Solarpunk Scene

Solarpunk Life

Solarpunk Station

Our Changing Climate

Podcasts:

The Joy Report

How To Save A Planet

Demand Utopia

Solarpunk Presents

Outrage and Optimisim

From What If To What Next

Solarpunk Now

Idealistically

The Extinction Rebellion Podcast

The Landworkers' Radio

Wilder

What Could Possibly Go Right?

Frontiers of Commoning

The War on Cars

The Rewild Podcast

Solacene

Imagining Tomorrow

Books (Fiction):

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness The Dispossessed The Word for World is Forest

Becky Chambers: A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Phoebe Wagner: When We Hold Each Other Up

Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

Brenda J. Pierson: Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

Justine Norton-Kertson: Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology

Sim Kern: The Free People’s Village

Ruthanna Emrys: A Half-Built Garden

Sarina Ulibarri: Glass & Gardens

Books (Non-fiction):

Murray Bookchin: The Ecology of Freedom

George Monbiot: Feral

Miles Olson: Unlearn, Rewild

Mark Shepard: Restoration Agriculture

Kristin Ohlson: The Soil Will Save Us

Rowan Hooper: How To Spend A Trillion Dollars

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom At The End of The World

Kimberly Nicholas: Under The Sky We Make

Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass

David Miller: Solved

Ayana Johnson, Katharine Wilkinson: All We Can Save

Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are The Weather

Colin Tudge: Six Steps Back To The Land

Edward Wilson: Half-Earth

Natalie Fee: How To Save The World For Free

Kaden Hogan: Humans of Climate Change

Rebecca Huntley: How To Talk About Climate Change In A Way That Makes A Difference

Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Future We Choose

Jonathon Porritt: Hope In Hell

Paul Hawken: Regeneration

Mark Maslin: How To Save Our Planet

Katherine Hayhoe: Saving Us

Jimmy Dunson: Building Power While The Lights Are Out

Paul Raekstad, Sofa Saio Gradin: Prefigurative Politics

Andreas Malm: How To Blow Up A Pipeline

Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Almanac For The Anthropocene

Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

William MacAskill: What We Owe To The Future

Mikaela Loach: It's Not That Radical

Miles Richardson: Reconnection

David Harvey: Spaces of Hope Rebel Cities

Eric Holthaus: The Future Earth

Zahra Biabani: Climate Optimism

David Ehrenfeld: Becoming Good Ancestors

Stephen Gliessman: Agroecology

Chris Carlsson: Nowtopia

Jon Alexander: Citizens

Leah Thomas: The Intersectional Environmentalist

Greta Thunberg: The Climate Book

Jen Bendell, Rupert Read: Deep Adaptation

Seth Godin: The Carbon Almanac

Jane Goodall: The Book of Hope

Vandana Shiva: Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture

Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement

Minouche Shafik: What We Owe To Each Other

Dieter Helm: Net Zero

Chris Goodall: What We Need To Do Now

Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stephanie Foote: The Cambridge Companion To The Environmental Humanities

Bella Lack: The Children of The Anthropocene

Hannah Ritchie: Not The End of The World

Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

Kim Stanley Robinson: Ministry For The Future

Fiona Mathews, Tim Kendall: Black Ops & Beaver Bombing

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

Lynne Jones: Sorry For The Inconvenience But This Is An Emergency

Helen Crist: Abundant Earth

Sam Bentley: Good News, Planet Earth!

Timothy Beal: When Time Is Short

Andrew Boyd: I Want A Better Catastrophe

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Everyday Utopia

Elizabeth Cripps: What Climate Justice Means & Why We Should Care

Kylie Flanagan: Climate Resilience

Chris Johnstone, Joanna Macy: Active Hope

Mark Engler: This is an Uprising

Anne Therese Gennari: The Climate Optimist Handbook

Magazines:

Solarpunk Magazine

Positive News

Resurgence & Ecologist

Ethical Consumer

Films (Fiction):

How To Blow Up A Pipeline

The End We Start From

Woman At War

Black Panther

Star Trek

Tomorrowland

Films (Documentary):

2040: How We Can Save The Planet

The People vs Big Oil

Wild Isles

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

Generation Green New Deal

Planet Earth III

Video Games:

Terra Nil

Animal Crossing

Gilded Shadows

Anno 2070

Stardew Valley

RPGs:

Solarpunk Futures

Perfect Storm

Advocacy Groups:

A22 Network

Extinction Rebellion

Greenpeace

Friends of The Earth

Green New Deal Rising

Apps:

Ethy

Sojo

BackMarket

Depop

Vinted

Olio

Buy Nothing

Too Good To Go

Websites:

European Co-housing

UK Co-housing

US Co-housing

Brought By Bike (connects you with zero-carbon delivery goods)

ClimateBase (find a sustainable career)

Environmentjob (ditto)

Businesses (🤢):

Ethical Superstore

Hodmedods

Fairtransport/Sail Cargo Alliance

Let me know if you think there’s anything I’ve missed!

[itscolossal]

George Steinmetz Journeys Around the World to Illuminate Where Food Comes From

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Christopher Brown’s ‘A Natural History of Empty Lots’

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Christopher Brown is an accomplished post-cyberpunk sf writer, a tech lawyer with a sideline in public interest environmental law, the proud owner of one of the most striking homes I have ever seen, and an urban pastoralist who writes about wildlife in ways I've never seen and can't get enough of:

https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/

All of these facets of Brown's identity come together today with the launch of A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and other Wild Places:

https://christopherbrown.com/a-natural-history-of-empty-lots/

This is a frustratingly hard to summarize book, because it requires a lot of backstory and explanation, and one of the things that makes this book so! fucking! great! is how skillfully Brown weaves all that stuff into his telling. Which makes me feel self-conscious as I try to summarize things, because there's no way I'll do this as well as he did, but whatever, here goes.

Brown is a transplant from rural Iowa to Austin, where he set out to start a family, practice tech law during the dotcom boom, and write science fiction, as part of a circle of writers loosely associated with cyberpunk icon @brucesterling. After both the economy and his marriage collapsed, Brown started his restless perambulations around Austin's abandoned places, sacrifice zones, the bones of failed housing starts and abandoned dot-crash office parks.

When he did, something changed in him. Slowly, his eyes learned to see things that they had just skipped over. Plants, animals, and spoor and carapaces and dens of all description, all around him, a secret world. These were not pockets of "wilderness" in the city, but they were pockets of wildness. Birds' nests woven with plastic fibers scavenged from nearby industrial dumpsters; trees taking root in half-submerged tires rolled into a creekbed, foxes and rodents playing out a real-life version of the classic ecosystem simulation exercise on the edge of an elevated highway that fills the same function as the edge of a woodland where predator and prey meet.

As Brown fell in love again – with the artist and architect Agustina Rodriguez – he conceived of a genuinely weird and amazing plan to build a house. A very weird house, in a very weird place. He bought a plot of wasteland that had once housed the head-end of an oil pipeline (connected to a nearby oil-storage facility that poisoned the people who lived near it, in an act of wanton environmental racism) and had been used as a construction-waste dump for years.

After securing an extremely unlikely loan, Brown remediated the plot, excavating the oil pipeline, then building the most striking home you have ever seen in the resulting trench. Brown is a pal of mine, and this is where I stay when I'm in Austin, and I can promise you, the pictures don't do it justice:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/style/christopher-brown-edgeland-house-austin/

Formally, A Natural History of Empty Lots is a memoir that explains all of this. But not really. Like I say, this is just the back story. What Natural History really is, is a series of loosely connected essays that explains how everything fits together: colonial conquest, Brown's failed marriage, his experience as a lawyer learning property law, what he learned by mobilizing that learning to help his neighbors defend the pockets of wildness that refuse to budge.

It's an erudite book, skipping back through millennia of history, sidewise through the ecology of Texas, all while somehow serving as a kind of spotter's guide to the wild things you can see in Austin – and maybe, in your town – if you know how to look. It's a book about how people change the land, and how the land changes people. It is filled with pastoral writing that summons Kim Stanley Robinson by way of Thoreau, and it sometimes frames its philosophical points the way a cyberpunk writer would – like Neal Stephenson writing a cyberpunk trilogy that is also the story of Leibniz and Newton fighting over credit for inventing calculus:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/11/20/neal-stephensons-system-of-the-world-concludes-the-baroque-trilogy/

Brown is a stupendous post-cyberpunk writer, and also a post-cyberpunk person, which I've known for sure since I happened upon him one morning, thoughtfully mowing his roof with a scythe:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/46433979075/

You can get a sense of what that means in this lockdown-era joint presentation that Chris, Bruce Sterling and I did on "cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk":

https://archive.org/details/asl-cyberpunk

Brown is a spectacular novelist. His ecofascist civil war trilogy that opens with Tropic of Kansas got so much right about the politics of American demagoguery and was perfectly timed with the Trump presidency:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/07/11/tropic-of-kansas-making-america-great-again-considered-harmful/

The sequel, Rule of Capture, uses the device of courtroom drama in a way that comes uncomfortably close to the Orwell/Kafka mashup that the authorities have created to deal with environmental protesters:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/12/rule-of-capture-inside-the-martial-law-tribunals-that-will-come-when-climate-deniers-become-climate-looters-and-start-rendering-environmentalists-for-offshore-torture/

And the final volume, Failed State, is one of the most complicated complicated utopias you could ask for. This is what people mean by "thrilling conclusion":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#chris-brown

As brilliant as Brown is in fiction mode, his nonfiction is unclassifiably, unforgettably brilliant. A Natural History of Empty Lots is the kind of book that challenges how you feel about the crossroads we're at, the place you live, and the place you want to be.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/17/cyberpunk-pastoralism/#time-to-mow-the-roof

[stevelieber]

Everyone at @stopproject2025comic knows how hard it is to get people to read anything heavy, so we made a bunch of comics that you can share to get the word out.

Complete alt-text and image description at the site. More comics too. Spread them far and wide because this stuff is important.

[maelancoli]

i'm kind of late to this but i just finished reading the scholomance trilogy by naomi novik and i feel like it is such an underrated urban fantasy?? taking the chosen one trope and turning it on its head with a fmc who has been prophesied to bring death and destruction, who is imbued with terrible power, but cannot even properly use said power to solve any of her obstacles because it would obliterate them and her soul. it takes a tired trope and the idea of an 'overpowered mary sue' and throws it back in your face by showing how all the power and destiny in the world is useless against a system filled with corruption that has burdened you with an easy way out (evil/destructive magic) that you can't take so now you have to work twice as hard as everyone else just to do simple, constructive spells instead of flicking your wrist and being done with it.

[lassieposting]

Sauron: [is a decent guy in Valinor, where it is light]

Sauron: [is evil in Angband, where it is dark]

Sauron: [is evil in Forodwaith, where it is dark]

Sauron: [is a decent guy in Numenor, where it is light]

Sauron: [is a decent guy in the Southlands, where it is light]

Sauron: [is a decent guy in Eregion, where it is light]

Sauron: [is evil in Mordor, where it is dark]

Maybe he's evil. Maybe it's seasonal affective disorder and a vitamin d deficiency

[animentality]

[dragons-in-spaceee]

Andy Weir is so so good at making a HUGE impact when a character cries or breaks down. The rest of the novels are usually pretty light hearted and suddenly BAM. TEARS. and it just really gets me. It suddenly reminds me of the massive impact those kinds of situations would actually have because these people are HUMAN. The reality of what they are going through. Amazing 10/10

[mysharona1987]

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Solarpunk Sunday Suggestion:

Get a library card

[kingroan]

finishing a book series with no real online presence in fandom spaces is gonna kill me

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ian McDonald's "The Wilding"

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Ian McDonald is one of those absurdly brilliant novelists that just leave me wondering the actual fuck he manages it. How does he cover so much ground, think up so many compelling characters, find so many gracenotes, conjure up so many complicated emotions?

McDonald burst on the scene in the late 1980s, with the 1988 novel Desolation Road and then his 1989 Out On Blue Six, a slick, stylized cyberpunk-meets-Orwell tale that overflowed with beautiful prose, technomysticism, and sly jokes that hid sneaky truths that hid even more sly jokes:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/01/20/out-on-blue-six-ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-novel-is-back/

By my count, McDonald has now published twenty books – mostly novels, but a couple short story collections (and the most amazingly demented, Tom-Waits-inflected teddybear murder comic imaginable, 1994's Kling Klang Klatch):

https://irishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Kling_Klang_Klatch

McDonald's work is truly globespanning. While he's made his mark on the Martian soil, and overtaken the moon with the Luna trilogy (his definitive rebuttal to Heinlein's Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) he is widely adored and much-awarded for the glittering, futuristic versions of Brazil (Brasyl), Tanzania (the Chaga series), and India (River of Gods).

Indeed, McDonald's imagination has roamed so far over the Earth and the solar system that it's possible to overlook his fantastic reimaginings of Ireland, the land where he was raised. There's his Philip K Dick Award-winning 1991 novel King of Morning, Queen of Day, a swirling, mythopoeic novel of Celtic mysticism:

https://www.baen.com/king-of-morning-queen-of-day.html

And then there's 1992's Hearts, Hands and Voices, which is lowkey one of the best novels I have ever, ever read – a scorching science fictional allegory for The Troubles, but with the gnarliest biotech weirdness you can possibly imagine:

https://archive.org/details/heartshandsvoice0000ianm/mode/2up

McDonald's books cover so much goddamned ground, but one feature they all share is a prose styling wherein every sentence is at least 20% poetry, a fraction that somehow, impossibly, rises to as much as 150% in certain especially shiny passages.

Like this passage, which opens The Wilding, McDonald's new horror novel that marks his first return to Ireland since 1992:

Autumn lay on the great bog in silvers and tans, late purples and duns.

The sun rose above the tall ash saplings and feral sycamore. It called the birds into full voice. Stabbing shrills, tumbles of notes, the flutes of dove-call, frantic ticking hisses, song upon song. In hedgerows and copses, among the pale foliage of the birches, in the weave of deep willow and the bramble fastnesses, each bird called and was heard. In this season the peatland held the day's warmth through the night and on the bright, clear mornings rivers of mist formed, filling the subtle hollow places in the exposed cuttings, the bogs and fields. High sun would dispel it but at this hour half of Lough Carrow lay mist-bound. Each blade of grass hung heavy with dew, the clumps of sedges were already browning, the bracken curling and crisping.

A pair of horns lifted above the willow scrub and out-grown ash hedges of the Wilding. Polished tips caught the low sun and kindled as bright and keen as spears.

https://www.gollancz.co.uk/titles/ian-mcdonald/the-wilding/9781399611503/

Oof.

I would drop everything to read Ian McDonald's grocery lists but after that opening, I wasn't going to put this one down, and I didn't, reading the whole thing on yesterday's flight home from my gigs in Atlanta this week.

The Wilding is (I'm pretty sure?) McDonald's first horror novel, and it's fucking terrifying. It's set in a rural Irish peat bog that has been acquired by a conservation authority that is rewilding it after a century of industrial peat mining that stripped it back nearly to the bedrock. This rewilding process has been greatly accelerated by the covid lockdowns, which reduced the human footprint in the conservation area to nearly zero.

The story's protagonist is Lisa, a hard-case Dubliner who came to the bog to do community service after a career as a crime syndicate driver for hire, a woman who never met a car she couldn't boost and pilot in or out of any tight situation. After years in the bog, she's ready to start a new life, studying Yeats at university, indulging a late-discovered love of poetry that has as much to do with her redemption as her years in the wild.

Lisa's last duty before she leaves the bog and goes home to Dublin is leading a school group on a wild campout in one of the bog's deep clearings. It's a routine assignment, and while it's not her favorite duty, it's also not a serious hardship.

But as the group hikes out to the campsite, one of her fellow guides is killed, without warning, by a mysterious beast that moves so quickly they can barely make out its monstrous form. Thus begins a tense, mysterious, spooky as hell story of survival in a haunted woods, written in the kind of poesy that has defined McDonald's career, and which – when deployed in service of terror – has the power to raise literal goosebumps.

There's a lot of fantasy that deals with Celtic mythology, including McDonald's own King of Morning, Queen of Day, but the vibe of that stuff tends to the heroic and romantic – sure, there's the odd banshee, but in the main, it's mischievous wee people, pookas, and leprechauns. More fey than fear.

But Irish mythology in its raw form is terrifying. The monsters of Irish storytelling are grotesque, mean, remorseless, and come in every shape and size. Some authors have done well by going back to the bestiary for the deep cuts. When I was a kid, I must have read John Coyne's Hobgoblin fifty times (mostly because it was about D&D, which I was obsessed with). I haven't read this one since I was about 12, and I have no idea if it'd hold up today, but it left me with a deep appreciation of the spooky multifariousness of monsters who dwell in Ireland's bogs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobgoblin_(novel)

The Wilding is a suspense novel, which means there's no way to really sum up the plot without spoiling a lot of the affect, but suffice to say that McDonald brings large swathes of deep Irish lore to the surface, and it had me reading as fast as I could and wanting to put the book down and hide.

What a writer McDonald is! The fact that this is the same guy who wrote last year's stunning secret-history/solarpunk/uncategorizable wonder that was Hopeland beggars belief:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace

Read you some Ian McDonald novels, is what I'm trying to say. This one is only available in the UK, if that's not where you are, consider mail-ordering it. Looks like they've got stock at Forbidden Planet for £19 plus £18 shipping to the US. Worth every penny:

https://forbiddenplanet.com/424306-the-wilding-hardcover/

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh

[gotyouanyway]

i’m always thinking about arcadia though.. the second major city on gallifrey, the only other named city or one of the very few. and probably the only one that even comes close to matching the capitol in size and (allegedly) importance. and yet we never really hear about it outside the time war (for obvious reasons like it didn’t exist in dw canon until 2013. but still) when it’s the last place standing on the planet. it’s just so strange knowing this entire city exists like a shadow to the capitol we know and love and it only comes into the spotlight when it’s destroyed. gallifrey’s second heart