#hope posting

[reasonsforhope]

The present isn't a dystopia. It's just a complicated, chaotic, sometimes amazing, sometimes brutal world.

The future is, I think, unlikely to become a dystopia in the sense we imagine it. I saw this for two reasons:

1.

First, I say "the sense we imagine it" because dystopias are based on the idea that all hope (for humanity, usually, sometimes all life) has been extinguished forever, and the forces of dystopia shall never be overthrown.

I don't believe that kind of world is possible - a world where there is never more hope. A true end to history. I don't think it's ever possible for all humans to stop fighting, as long as we're here. I have lots of evidence to based this on, much of which is called "all of human history." (And eternal dystopia is especially impossible if you look at deep time - there have been five previous mass extinctions, and life is still here.)

But it will not come to that.

Here's why:

2.

We have already averted truly apocalyptic levels of warming.

Yes, read that again. Let it sink in. This is what the science now says. We have already averted truly apocalyptic global warming.

To quote David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, from his huge feature in the New York Times:

"Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years... The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse." (New York Times, October 22, 2022. Unpaywalled here. Emphasis mine. And yes, this vision of the future is backed up by the current science on the issue, as he explains at length in the article.)

So we've already averted truly apocalyptic warming, and we've already cut expected warming IN HALF in just the past five years.

The pace of technology, of innovation, of prices, of feasibility, of discovery, of organizing, of grassroots movements, of movements in other countries around the world, have all picked up the pace so fast in the last five years.

Renewable technology and capacity are both increasing at an exponential rate. It's all S-curves, ones that look like this:

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024.

How much more will we manage in another five years? Another ten? Another twenty?

I know the US is about to fucking suck about the environment for the next four years. But the momentum of renewable energy is far too much to stop - both in the US (x) and around the world.

(Huge shoutouts to India, China, and Brazil for massive gains for the environment in renewables, and Brazil for massive progress against Amazon deforestation.)

We're going to get there.

Say it with me. We're going to get there.

[userboxesandstuff]

I think it's stupid that people won't believe the "out group" will help them.

Perisex people can be allies to intersex people

Cis people can be allies to trans people

Non queer people can be allies to the queer community

Transmasc and transfems and transneutrals all help each other

Men can be allies to women

White people can be allies to black, brown, hispanic, asian, and native people

Abled bodied people can be allies to physically disabled people

Neurotypicals can be allies to neurodivergent people, whether that's toward intellectual disability, mental health, learning disability, cognitive disability or other stuff

We're all in this fight together: don't forget it. Be an ally to the groups you're not a part of. Help people you see needing help.

[digitalpomegranates]

You know, after the initial shock of everything, I am being so strongly pulled to radical hope

They want to break me, they want to break us. So don't let them. make a cup of hot chocolate. Eat that cookie that's a little *too* sugary. You are a wonderful creature worthy of love and whimsy.

We will get through this. We will persist. This fire cannot be stomped out, not while the flint of human life keeps hitting the steel. Not while people are still being fed to the fire of this world.

Let it be the fire of the hearth, not one of a dumpster.

[leadergorilla]

Just a reminder that someone at trumps age has like a 50% chance of dying and it only gets higher with each year he survives. Also remember that even with the best medical care on the planet at all times that there's only so much modern medicine can do to stop an old man who has lived off mcdonalds bigmacs for 60 years from dying of being fucking old.

[the-goose-caboose]

I could keep going but I’m tired

[thesmegalodon]

so what do you do when you've heard all the helpful lines and sayings and quotes but now its time to actually apply them (cause knowing the answers doesn't mean things just get better) and you're so burnt out that you just can't do anything but become more and more acutely aware of how much work there is to do?

[directactionforhope]

Less technology used for evil, more of this shit

[seiya-starsniper]

One more post before I go to work.

Go and do something selfish for yourself today. Cancel plans, call out of work, delete your social media accounts, spend money on yourself instead of donating it, limit contact with your more conservative family members and friends if possible. Do whatever you need to do to claw back your sense of control and reality.

A lot of people were running on fumes before the election, and and yes, there's still work to do, and yes there are people who still desperately need help. But changing the world is long term, thankless work, and you cannot burn yourself out doing it. Readjust your world view, and take some of yourself back, just for now.

[miskiart]

⛈️🌈 Brainstorm☔️

[kafus]

i'm going to finally talk about The Buizel that i keep mentioning but then neglecting to elaborate on. just for the sake of personal documentation honestly. because she means everything to me

warning for discussion of SA! (nothing graphic but it's relevant to the story of this buizel)

this is Hope. she's a buizel. she looks unassuming with nothing particularly special about her other than being a pretty high level for an unevolved buizel. but she is one of the most important pokemon i own, if not the most important.

i've been into pokemon games since i was a really little kid, starting in 2004. my first game was leafgreen, but the sinnoh games have a very important and special place in my heart. by the time DP came out in 2007 in the US, i was a little bit older, 7 years old to be precise, and was able to enjoy the games on a deeper level than before due to an increase in reading comprehension and pokemon knowledge. when i think of "my childhood generation", it is definitely gen 4. when i think of 2007, i think of my excitement for diamond and pearl, begging my parents to get it for me for my birthday/christmas that year, watching the anime on the TV in eager anticipation for hopefully getting the games as a gift.

unfortunately when i think of 2007, i also think of an extreme traumatic event that happened that year. i was being sexually abused by my grandfather from a young age and this was ongoing in that year. in a fit of rage or god knows what, his level of violence increased all of a sudden in the summer, while i was left alone at my grandparents' house for multiple weeks at a time without my parents. i was brutally injured and could have died - my grandfather nearly killed me. i promise this is relevant to the story of this buizel so bear with me.

by the time i was home, my injuries had healed enough that despite coming extremely close to being examined by a doctor, ultimately no one ever found out, and i never told because of memory loss/repression. suffice to say we kept visiting my grandparents for the holidays. in particular, we took the small roadtrip to their house again for thanksgiving, and unexpectedly my grandma wanted me to open her birthday gift for me early since i was there in person, and i excitedly tore open the package to find pokemon pearl inside.

i did eventually get other pokemon games, gens 3, 4, and 5, but this pearl file remains the only childhood file i have that i didn't overwrite or lose the cartridge for. it's been very lightly played since childhood but it mostly remains in the same state it was whenever i last picked it up as a kid, including the over 200 hours of gameplay. considering i spent similar amounts of time in diamond which i got for christmas that year, suffice to say i played a lot as a kid! thanksgiving in 2007 was on november 22nd so the "adventure started" date lines up perfectly with the trip i was on to my grandparents' house.

i've peeked around this file multiple times and was happy to have some remnants of my childhood, but was also disappointed to find that most of the pokemon i was attached to and used had mysteriously vanished from the save file. my best guess is that i traded them to my copy of diamond which i was using in tandem with pokemon battle revolution on the wii, of which i unfortunately lost at some point along the line.

for instance, i peeked into my hall of fame data - i had beaten the league 9 times on this file and my first hall of fame entry, AKA when i beat the game for the first time, was from january 26th 2008 and had my original team, consisting of lucario, palkia, torterra, staraptor, and amusingly, an unevolved pikachu and an unevolved buizel, both at stupidly high levels for being unevolved pokemon. i was humored seeing this a couple years ago when i first looked through this file because it was so like me to have unevolved pokemon on my team, and in particular i was obsessed with pikachu and buizel at the time, so like... of course.

at first, i looked through the PC (and the daycare!) for any traces of any of these guys... nothing. they were all gone. after checking out other stuff like my underground base or whatever else, i shelved my copy of pearl again, only taking it back out of my box of DS games when i occasionally needed it for version exclusives or multiplayer battle tower shenanigans.

you may see where this is going.

this year i booted up pearl again because i wanted to ribbon master a pokemon from my childhood with my actual OT on it, AKA get all the ribbons possible on a pokemon. if you aren't familiar with the "ribbon master" challenge, don't worry about it, it's just a (very time consuming) hobby i have and i like doing it with pokemon that are meaningful to me.

in the pictures in this post so far, i've blacked out the trainer name on everything because i actually named myself after my legal name back then. i don't identify with that name anymore at all, but i really wanted to honor my childhood self because... sinnoh meant so much to her. this file, this cartridge in particular, was a light in a year that contained unthinkable violence and trauma towards me. a year when i could have died. i first played with this game cart in the building where just some months prior i had been bleeding profusely in the basement at the hands of my relative, a house that has since been sold off and i can no longer return to - this pearl cartridge remains one of the only remnants of that time and place, and it is deeply, deeply important to me. i didn't want 7 year old me's pokemon to rot away forever.

little did i know that apparently when i looked through the PC a couple years prior, i somehow completely missed that one pokemon from that hall of fame entry still existed on the file. just the one. miraculously. and it was the buizel.

genuinely nothing could have prepared me for finding her, i didn't expect it at all. i just started crying. i couldn't believe it.

her met date was november 26th 2007, just a day after i started this save file. i could not believe it either when i tabbed over to the ribbons page and saw the sinnoh champion ribbon, three contest ribbons, a ribbon for talking to the sunyshore NPC on a wednesday, and the footprint ribbon which is received for max friendship from a guy to the east of pastoria. she was by far the most well-loved pokemon still on the file, and maybe the one i wanted to see the most, if i could have any of those 6 pokemon from that hall of fame back.

i haven't mentioned it until now, but that aforementioned extremely violent event is the traumatic memory i have come to un-repress in the most detail out of any of my trauma by far. i still remember what i was thinking at the time to survive it, staring at the ceiling and escaping into my mind to pretend it wasn't happening. first i thought about the usual, my mom, my bedroom back at home, but thinking about those things ended up just making me feel their absence, and so my mind drifted to pokemon diamond and pearl. i didn't even own the games yet, but i played out what i thought they might be like based on that gamestop demo kiosk and commercials and the anime in my mind, and in that daydream, because of the buizel from the diamond & pearl anime, buizel was one of my pokemon, my main pokemon, a pokemon that i could not have yet but that i thought very fondly of and really wanted. and unsurprisingly it ended up as a member of my team once i finally got the games months later.

suffice to say, buizel is a pokemon that meant a lot to me and held a lot of weight and emotion for that 7 year old girl that was me. and so to find my first childhood buizel after all this time after i thought for sure she was gone and to see how much i loved her, i could not stop crying for a good while. and i'm tearing up again just writing all this out frankly

and so i traded her to my platinum and soulsilver saves to play with her, and start getting more ribbons on her like i had set out to do. (for the record, she had been fed horrendous poffins when i was a kid, and the contest ribbons were extremely & excessively difficult to get as a result, but i digress, i'll save talking about that for some other time). but one thing was still bothering me after all of this...

as a kid, i was spotty with naming my pokemon. i kind of had a whole thing where often times their species... felt like their name? so it felt weird to overwrite their species name sometimes. but despite wanting to honor my childhood self's wishes, the one thing i couldn't get past was this buizel lacking a name. i wanted to name her after all this time. but how on earth was i supposed to name a pokemon so meaningful to me after over a decade since she was first caught?

there were so many deepcut references to my childhood i could have made, so many thoughtful names... but i ended up just going with Hope. a simple name for a simple joy in a really complicated time of my life, something i probably would have named a pokemon at that age, and straightforwardly emblematic as to what she represents to me. because she is hope. i survived to catch her for real, not in my dying daydreams, and if i survived that then hope surely exists and i can survive anything.

and so i traded her to pearl one last time to give her her new name.

and this is hope now, in my platinum version:

i hadn't shared her nature until now. i think "brave" is really fitting. and as you can see i've been working really hard on her ribbons. eventually when i have all of them (just a few battle tower ones left to go!) i'll be transferring her up to see other pokemon regions and get all the ribbons she can, but i'll definitely be keeping a copy of her in gen 4 forever as a time capsule.

if you read this far thanks for reading this really overly personal and emotional account about this random buizel i just so happen to have. pokemon continues to surprise me with how much a cluster of 1s and 0s and some pixel art can mean, despite me getting attached to, and sentimental over them, time after time again. though out of all of them, hope has to be one of the most irreplaceable. i'm really, really glad i never traded her to diamond, and i'm glad i still have her around. i want to cherish her for a very long time & as i continue working on the ribboning process i'll post updates about her. just uh. don't expect that to be fast because i am ribboning a lot of pokemon right now lol

[flyin-shark]

[reasonsforhope]

"A Scottish field once home to mono-crop barley has become a pollinator’s paradise after intervention from a local trust saw bumblebee numbers increase 100-fold.

Entitled Rewilding Denmarkfield, and run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, the project has also seen a sharp increase in the number of species passing through the rolling meadows after they were reclaimed by dozens of wildflower species.

The area north of Perth is about 90 acres in size, and surveys of bumblebees before the project began rarely recorded more than 50. But by 2023, just two years of letting “nature take the lead” that number has topped 4,000, with the number of different bee species doubling.

“This superb variety of plants attracts thousands of pollinators. Many of these plants, such as spear thistle and smooth hawk’s beard, are sometimes branded as ‘weeds’. But they are all native species that are benefiting native wildlife in different ways,” Ecologist Ellie Corsie, who has been managing the project since it began in 2021, said.

“Due to intensive arable farming, with decades of plowing, herbicide, and pesticide use, biodiversity was incredibly low when we started. Wildlife had largely been sanitized from the fields. Rewilding the site has had a remarkable benefit.”

Similar increases have been recorded in the populations of butterflies, with a tripling in the number of these insects seen on average during a ramble through the field.

The numbers of both insects are now so high that Rewilding Denmarkfield offers bee and butterfly safaris to visitors.

Local residents told the Scotsman that on spring and summer days, the field is awash with color, and hums with the sounds of bees and birds. Even as multiple housing developments expand around the Denmarkfield area, the field is a haven for wildlife."

-via Good News Network, December 2, 2024

[simplysebby]

I keep thinking about the guy who spent his life bringing a species of butterfly's population back from the brink of extinction. There are so many problems in the world that it seems impossible to fix but you just gotta remember you can't fix everything, but you can find your own butterfly and do something about that. If even 1% of the global population found a butterfly of their own the world would be a much better place pretty quickly, even moreso if we work not as individuals but as a community. 🦋❤️

[solarpunk-nightbird]

For decades we dreamed dystopia, and in March of 2020, when COVID crashed upon U.S. shores, it seemed like we had dreamed it so well we wished it into being. While wealthy reactionaries are building actual bunkers and prepping for environmental collapse, fantasizing about which shade of hopelessness our apocalypse will take is a luxury we can no longer afford. By accepting as inevitable humanity’s demise by its own hand, post-apocalyptic fiction places no responsibility on the living to course correct.

These days, climate change isn’t over the horizon, it’s here. The virus that shuts down the globe? We had that, too. Dystopian fiction? That’s so 2012. It’s time we collectively dream of something else. A better world is possible, but if artists and writers are to contribute to that better world, we’re going to need to balance our splendid hellscapes with gardens of earthly delight. We need to envision futures that are livable and happy, and we need to imagine how we get there from here. What’s more, we need to make those worlds as thrilling and engaging as any post-apocalyptic zombie-strewn nightmare.

Fortunately, we don’t need to invent a new literary genre to show us the way to a better tomorrow. Just as there is a left-wing climate movement demanding humanity break from fossil fuels to create a bright future for life on Earth, so is there a parallel climate fiction that allows us to imagine that better world. In steps solarpunk, left-wing literature’s answer to the dystopian novel. Solarpunk looks towards a post-capitalist future of renewable energy. It rejects climate “doomerism” and shows what our collective future could look like if we heal our relationship with the natural world.

Far from Star Trek’s “full luxury space communism,” where humans race across galaxies via endless sources of energy, the technology in solarpunk is imminently achievable. In the anthology Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, science fiction writer and democratic socialist Kim Stanley Robinson describes this genre as rejecting “the inevitability of the machine future.” Instead it asks, “What is the healthiest way to live? What is the most beautiful?” Rather than Elon Musk’s tent cities on Mars, these fictional worlds “cobble together aspects of the postmodern and the paleolithic, asserting that we might for very good reasons choose to live in ways that resemble in part the ways of our ancestors.” 

-via Current Affairs, March 25, 2024

[unbenchthekench]

Happy Halloween :)