Environmental Esotericism @elsquibbonator - Tumblr Blog

cherryhatter-deactivated2015072

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

drtanner

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

tyrannoninja

I've seen a lot of recent discourse on social media calling out people of East Asian descent perpetuating anti-Black racism over the past week. Partly this is due to Rick Chow getting acquitted for murdering Cyrus Carmack-Belton, and partly this is due to a recent spate of short videos showing people in China abusing a Black doll they have there called "Natasha". Both of these are sickening.

As someone who spent a large proportion of his formative years overseas in Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which have predominantly Han Chinese populations, I can't say I've observed a lot of interpersonal interactions in which the locals were racist toward Black people. But I do remember that, almost every time we went to the movies in Hong Kong, they would show these commercials for skin-bleaching creams before the movie started. The message was that women would become more desirable to men if they lightened their skin. Even as a White male teenager, I found that messaging racist and abhorrent.

I also remember finding a golliwog doll on display in a Hong Kong marketplace (a golliwog is basically a blackface minstrel caricature in doll form, if you don't know). At the time, I laughed it off for how brazenly ignorant it was to have that out in public, but now I wonder how a Black person who stumbled upon that would feel.

While the roots of this anti-Black sentiment in East Asia must lie in the global exportation of Western colonial prejudices, I believe what keeps it alive is a desire on the part of Asian people to distance themselves from Blackness and then place themselves as close in proximity to Whiteness as they can. They perceive Black people as the bottom of this racial hierarchy and White people as the top, and they'd rather be associated with Whiteness than Blackness. I have also observed this to be true for Arabs and other Middle Easterners, South Asians, Mediterranean people, and really anyone else whom we would racialize as neither Black nor White.

Even Black Africans aren't immune to this bullshit. If you've ever seen a Northeast African person (e.g. Somali, Ethiopian, or northern Sudanese) insist they're not really Black and hype up whatever Arabian or other Eurasian ancestry they may have, you know what I mean. I've even seen a Hausa dude on Twitter insist he was somehow less Black than other West Africans, even though your average Hausa does not look visibly different from other Sahelian Africans.

It all goes to show how globalized anti-Blackness (or melanophobia as I like to call it) has become.

bogleech

We should fix this and start saying "stupible"

catboybiologist

Imagine if a like 8 foot tall guy that looked kinda like an alien species just kinda showed up at the house you rent a room in and crashed on the couch and at first everyone hated him but you kinda just accepted this weird massive kinda-human alien species thing as a part of your group even though he's like twice the size of everyone else there

catboybiologist

Cuz that's literally happening to sea lions in San Francisco right now

catboybiologist

So there's two species of sea lion in North America: the California sea lion, ranging along California (including Baja) but not ranging into the north coast or into oregon

And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska

A male Stellars sea lion showed up in SF like a month ago and just kinda. Didn't know what to do, and joined a colony of California sea lions, and is just kinda chilling there now.

catboybiologist

Weird vagrant species happen from time to time, but this is just a particularly funny instance of a highly social species getting very lost, and just trying to blend in with its closest nearby relatives

elsquibbonator

Please, refer to him by his proper name: CHONKERS!

Eco-Tainment: The Earth Day Special

Back in the day, when broadcast TV was the primary mass medium people relied on for their news and entertainment, it was easy to get a lot of people's attention through a single well-promoted TV special. And in 1990, on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, the ABC network decided to do exactly that. The Earth Day Special is not exactly thick on plot. The story, such as it is, revolves around Mother Nature-- represented as a woman with flowers for hair and a dress displaying a map of the world-- suddenly falling out of the sky, deathly ill. She is rushed to the hospital, where she is placed under the care of Doogie Howser. Meanwhile, various guest characters, ranging from the Golden Girls to the cast of Cheers to Bugs Bunny to Kermit the Frog, discuss what is making her sick and what can be done about it. If this setup sounds familiar, it should. It's more or less a retread of the same year's infamous Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue, an anti-drug PSA featuring various popular cartoon characters lecturing a boy about the dangers of drugs.

The Earth Day Special divides its environmental discussion into five main segments-- acid rain, garbage, global warming, the ozone layer and deforestation. This in and of itself is an indicator of the special's age. Some of these, like deforestation and global warming, are still very much causes for concern in today's world, but others, like the ozone layer and acid rain, are not. The Earth Day Special, in other words, is very much a product of its time, and this limits its value as a tool of environmental education today considerably. That being said, there's definitely something admirable about the idea of a TV special watched by millions of Americans that addresses environmental justice in such a direct manner. Today, with the mass media so fragmented and everyone following their own hyper-curated social media feed, that's basically impossible. But perhaps what we need now more than ever, to make people understand how important these issues are, is another Earth Day Special.

fucktoyfelix

Oil's Whale Ends Whale?

When is an endangered species allowed to go extinct? It's a tricky decision, and one we don't make lightly. In theory, all endangered species in the United States are protected under the Endangered Species Act, and while special exemptions may be sought, this rarely happens. But yesterday, President Donald Trump did something completely unprecedented, and declared the entire Gulf of Mexico-- sorry, I mean Gulf of America-- exempt from protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The actual decision to do this was made by the heads of six government departments known as the "God Squad", because it is within their power to decide whether a species lives or dies. If the federal government wants to move forward with a project that will threaten an endangered species, the "God Squad" must decide whether to give them permission. And this time, they give more permission than ever.

While this action will affect all wildlife in the Gulf, the species in the most danger is the Gulf of Mexico whale, a smaller relative of the blue whale and the fin whale. As few as 40 of these whales are believed to exist, and nearly a quarter of the population was killed off in 2010 by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Gulf of Mexico whale was seemingly never common, and it has an unusual lifestyle for a baleen whale. Instead of filter-feeding on swarms of krill in open water, it is a bottom-feeder, making deep dives to forage for abyssal crustaceans and fish. This unfortunately makes it exceptionally prone to taking up pollutants from oil drilling, which build up in deep-sea animals.

With its numbers already so low, every single death of a Gulf of Mexico whale pushes the species closer to extinction-- and with its habitat no longer protected, there's little that can be done about it. We can only hope that the protection is reinstated so the wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico can recover.

Eco-Tainment: Hoppers

BEWARE! SPOILERS BELOW!

I normally don't do Eco-Tainment reviews for movies until they're out of theaters, because I want my readers (however many there are) to experience them the same way I did. But because it's been so long since I did one of these reviews, I'm going to do one for Hoppers, the latest Pixar movie. Spoilers will be marked, but skip this review if you don't want to read them.

Hoppers focuses on a college student named Mabel Tanaka, who has been unsuccessfully protesting to have a highway that threatens the local beaver pond cancelled. During one of her vigils, she stumbles upon a project by her biology professor-- a robotic beaver that humans can transfer their minds into, allowing them to experience nature as an animal. Impulsively, Mabel decides to try this "hopping" technology herself, and ends up in the body of a mechanical beaver.

After integrating herself into beaver society, she is introduced to the Animal Council, the leaders of all the major animal groups. She rallies them to fight off the mayor of her city and stop his plan to build the highway, but the greedy Insect King wishes to destroy all of humanity in revenge for the death of his fellow insects. Realizing their revenge against humans has gotten out of hands, Mabel and the animals decide to stop him, while still convincing the Mayor to change his mind.

It's hard to discuss the environmental values on display in Hoppers without some context. Allegedly this movie was subject to some scrutiny from Disney that shaved off some of its more blatantly anti-capitalist themes. So with that in mind, it's hard to blame Hoppers for presenting something of a "both-sides" narrative, where human destruction of nature is pointed out as being bad, but the real villain is essentially an environmental extremist who hates humans. Hoppers, in other words, is very much a Disney-branded take on environmentalism. I can't fault it for that too much, even if I'm still nostalgic for the days of Pixar making truly thought-provoking movies with status-quo-changing messages. That's hardly a dealbreaker, though, and Hoppers is well worth watching.

pigeon-butch

my professor when trying to describe how to recognize field sparrows was just like Well they look... like they're kind. like they just look nice. and the best part is he's absolutely right

ao3org

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