FRIENDSHIP > LOVE

"See the light in others and treat them as if that is all you see" - Wayne Dyer

[protobacillus]

[weltenwellen]

Emily Brontë, from “Stanzas”, Poems of Emily Brontë

[mephistophelia]

Mary Jane Newill, Bedcover, ca. 1908, linen embroidered with colored wools

[you-are-another-me]

[esdnz]

[definitelydope]

[finrays]

Unpopular opinion, maybe, but the narrative of “Here’s what you can do as an individual to fight climate change” isn’t useless.

It has its place, and that’s mainly in the mental health realm. I’m a super anxious person. I get depressed easily. Articles talking about little steps I can take to reduce my carbon footprint give me tangible ways I can contribute to the solution, and help give me a sense of control over the whole mess, however illusionary it may be.

The framing of the narrative is the problem, not the narrative itself; guilt-tripping people never works. Pointing out “if you’re feeling scared, here’s some steps you can take to be part of the process” is way, WAY better. And the more steps you include, the more myriad ways you can take some ownership of the process and go “I am NOT powerless you motherfuck,” the better. Not everyone can take all of the listed steps and that’s COMPLETELY understandable. You gotta take care of you, first. But the more we list, the more accessible ways we come up with to give climate change the finger in our everyday lives, and to refuse to let the fear win.

By all means, go after the corporations. They’re the big fuckers here and I am totally on board with that. But if you’re feeling helpless and hopeless? Maybe take a look at one of those “how can I help” articles and pick a few little things to implement.

It’s all about taking care of your mental health!

[cazort]

Also, if you’re creative, you can make a big impact.

Here are some things I’ve done:

I periodically drop by home depot and other box stores, and if I see a big sale on LED lights I buy a ton of them. I have installed LED’s at dozens of people’s homes, probably saving collectively thousands of dollars. I also approached my apartment complex and replaced incandescent bulbs both in their office and their laundry room with LED’s…the laundry room lights are on nearly 24/7 and it’s a big space, and this has probably saved them around $300 annually for something that cost me around $20. And now the apartment complex really appreciates this so they’ve been very accomodating when I ask for things like doing non-essential improvements or upgrades in my apartment.

There is a wild area behind my apartment complex and it’s part owned by the complex and part owned by the city. A large area of it was completely overgrown with invasive plants. I pulled a lot of them out and added a lot of seeds of locally native plants, and the plant growth now is MUCH more lush…there is much more biomass and also much more biodiversity. Some trees have sprung up that are now 9 feet tall and growing raipdly during the growing season. This stuff is all gonna sequester a lot of carbon. I also have planted previously barren areas of mulch flower beds densely with native flowers. These also sequester carbon and also contribute to biodiversity. The habitat created by all this work will also help insects and other species that are having their ranges altered by climate change, to adapt, by giving them more habitat.

I chose to live in a place where I don’t need to use my car very much. I went from driving my car around 10,000 miles a year to driving it under 5,000 miles a year. This has saved me a ton of money (not just gas, but also maintenance, tolls, parking, and much lower insurance) and also improved my quality of life.

I make periodic posts and videos about the things I’m doing, and I talk to friends. I also talk to businesses and mention energy-efficient things in reviews of businesses I write on Yelp. For example, if I notice a restaurant uses LED lighting I note that in the review and say I appreciate it, or the same for supermarkets like ALDI that make greater use of enclosed refridgerator cases.

I and my brother continually pressed my parents until they did an energy audit of their home. We got them to buy a new furnace, add some insulation, fix some areas where air was leaking out, and get heat-insulating shades on some rooms with drafty windows, and we also tweaked the baseboard system. The house is now much more pleasant and even in temperature, and we’ve saved them thousands of dollars in heating costs that were associated with unnecessary fossil fuel use.

You may have different things you can do, but the point is, you can do big, substantial things. It’s not just personal choices, you can offer to help other people. You can research things, get good at doing certain things, and then share that knowledge with others.

You can save people money, hundreds or thousands of dollars. And people will appreciate that, like my apartment complex really likes me as a tenant and I see it in how they treat me, they’ve let me do A LOT of things that I asked like having a garden and planting things in vacant flower beds and upgrading things in my unit. And my parents really appreciate the work my brother and I did in the house and the things we convinced them to do cause they’re saving a ton of money already and the house is more comfy.

You might think up completely different things from these that I haven’t even thought of!

[aturinfortheworse]

I think what’s especially helpful to keep in mind, which the second comment sorta implies, is that it’s not just solely about fixing the big underlying causes of climate change. Climate change harms people and the environment, and you can probably do more to fix that harm than you can to stop it.

So even if planting more wildflowers doesn’t stop climate change, it means that the individual animals in your area have more places to eat and hide. You might be able to help people stay warm or stay cool as seasons change. That tangible change is so reassuring, so healing, and might help you feel empowered to do harder, scarier things. Even if you cannot stop climate change, it is a wondrous feeling to know that there are lizards in your garden where last year there were none. That’s an entire lizard living in the world that might not have been without you. 

[scottishwobbly]

But you can do community activism to help which DOES directly contribute to stopping climate change, rather than just focus on the personal. The way capitalism is designed encourages competition and isolation, it raises individualism above all else, and so it’s only natural that when people are looking for a way to feel like they’re helping, they go to focus on aspects of their personal life. But we’ve been given a report from the UN committee on climate change which has outlined the massive social changes that will be necessary if we are to avert disaster, and they all rely on economic democracy & community empowerment. So you want to attack the unsustainable agricultural industry and help build a community based alternative? Food Not Lawns. You want to attack the supermarkets and help show that scarcity is manufactured? Food Not Bombs. You want to help in the struggle for democracy in the workplace? Industrial Workers of the World. You want to undermine dependence on capitalism in your community? The Buy Nothing Project. There are so many more ways you can help than by just focusing on your personal waste/energy consumption - not to say that you shouldn’t cut down on that too, but that we are encouraged to focus on such things to draw attention away from the radical solutions that might actually work. Finally get involved in the Earth Strike, because if we do not force them to, big business will not care.

So, if you’re feeling scared, you really can help in ways that will do more than just put your mind at ease.

[noahkalina]

20181017

[thewanderingandwild-blog]

Alebrijes in the streets of Mexico City

[goldfarts]

Alebrijes 

[mayra-veliz]

Los alebrijes de Oaxaca están hechos con madera de copal ya que esta es una madera fácil de manipular. Son tallados y pintados a mano y ninguno es igual a otro. 

Alebrijes de Mitla, Oaxaca, Abril 2018.

[buffysummers]

When will I begin to live again?

[lonnie11941-blog]

[escuyer]

[connerys]

Charade (1963) dir. Stanley Donen

[feral-crow]

it makes me so mad that people aren’t taught that you can just... clone plants.

[fuzzylizardman]

W h at

[feral-crow]

yeah!! it takes like, five minutes and costs nothing/next to nothing (depending on what plant it is). which is why im especially mad that literally no one talks about it except for like, exclusive gardening circles :/

each plant has different cloning techniques but here are the ones i remember;

basil/peppermint/tomato/most leafy greens with a stem; cut a piece off your main plant about the size of your hand. trim all the bottom leaves, cut stem diagonally, put in jar of water. when roots are about the size of the stem, plant in garden.

onion/garlic; the easiest. just leave whole onion or a garlic clove in a nice sunny area. eventually it will sprout. plant in garden.

pineapple; takes a long time. take spiky leafy part, trim off the bottom leaves, put in water about as deep as the leafless part. wait. a. long. time. (mine took two weeks to root.) when roots are big, plant in garden.

flowers, bushes, trees; get your hands on some rooting hormone (or willow tree branches). cut stems the same way as the leafy greens above, make sure to cut stems diagonally (greater chance of rooting.) dip in water, dip in rooting hormone, shake off excess, and place in water/dirt. these are pretty hard to get to root, especially if you don’t have rooting hormone. 

some plants won’t ever root because of gmos (some companies create sterile plants and when they’re cloned they just die off) but generally any plant you get at a garden store you can clone. 

[roguetatertot]

This is called propagation!!! And it’s awesome!!!

Water propagation comes with some caution tho! While it’s a great way to watch the roots grow and ensure it’s actually propagating, it can shock the plant to remove it from water and suddenly plant it in soil. Water contain no nutrients, so to go from surviving on no nutrients to an abundance of nutrients in soil can potentially shock the wee baby.

Also, unless the water is changed out every day or every other, the oxygen in the water gets used up. Make sure to replace the water often so there’s a constant supply of oxygen.

If you have a fish tank, that is an excellent place to propagate certain plants! The nutrients the fish leave in the water will help the plant thrive, and ensure less shock when transplanting in soil. Fish might nibble on the roots, but probably not enough to cause any issues. Pothos, philodendrons, and monstera adasonii (vining Swiss cheese) are good ones to propagate this way, as they like the humidity from the tank.

Soil propagation has its own downsides, such as not being able to see if the roots are growing, but you can give the cutting a gentle tug in a few weeks, and if it resists, it has roots!!

And with ANY propagation, there is basically a 50/50 chance it will take, no matter which method you use, no matter how careful and attentive you are to technique and care. So don’t be discouraged if your cutting never roots, or dies. Not all plants can be “cloned” either of these ways, as well. Some need grafting from another plant which fruits or flowers! Some can only grow from seeds. Some cuttings need to scab over before propagation.

So if there’s a plant you really love, just Google how to propagate, and then Google some more. And instead of trying to propagate just a single cutting, try a few at a time, just in case some fail.

Happy planting!!!!!

[rob-boss]

It’s true that it’s difficult to get trees/bushes to grow roots with this method, but there is a pretty cool technique to get around this! It’s called air layering and it won’t work for ALL trees but it does work for many.

What you do instead of cutting off an entire limb and hoping it will root is you select the portion of the tree you want to be your new tree, and at the bottom of it, scrape off all of the bark, at least an inch long. Then you need to put your root hormone around the top of the shaved portion on the space where the tree still has bark. After that you’ll need to pack the area you want the roots to grow with sphagnum moss and wrap it in a plastic bag to keep the moss in place.

Once you have roots growing (could take a couple weeks) you can remove the bag, and cut the limb at the dead barkless section. Now you’ve got a new tree that’s already producing sap and as thick as the limb you’ve chosen! WAY faster than waiting the YEARS it could take to grow a tree to that size from a seed or a sprout.

Planting the new tree in sphagnum moss is a good way to help it grow lots of new roots and make sure it stays healthy before transferring it to a different soil mix or into the ground.

You also want to make sure that you leave probably a couple inches between the part of the branch you shave the bark off of and the main trunk of the tree, because after you cut off the limb, the wood beneath it will die back a bit and you don’t want part of the trunk to start rotting.

[plantanarchy]

This is a good intro post!

It’s a good idea if you want to get propagating to search “[specific plant] propagation”. Every plant has a different method that works best, and there are bound to be loads of articles and videos out there of folks who have propagated that species before. Experimentation can’t hurt either.

Some plants need extra humidity or misting, some do best when trimmed a certain time of year, some grow roots when dry and some need to be wet

The “gmo plants are sterile and don’t root” thing in the OP though is complete horseshit and a misunderstanding of what GMOs are. There are only a handful of approved GMOs in the United States and they are all agricultural crops. I would assume many of them are also not sterile.

However! Many common plants you see in garden centers have either been selectively bred for less seed production because not going to seed = more flowers or they are hybrids (plant mutts) or often both! Hybrid plants CAN produce viable seed but there’s no guarantee that those seeds will “breed true” aka have the same genetics/qualities as the mother plant. If you are looking for veggie plants and see the word, “heirloom”, you know that you can save the seeds from those plants for next year.

Being sterile has NOTHING to do with producing roots or not, it’s about seed production. All sorts of fancy hybrid plants can be propagated via cutting. Fun fact though: many fancy plants are patented so propagation with intent to sell is illegal. Most plant breeders use a method of propagation called tissue culture (test tube babies but for plants) to continue the plant’s genetics into the next generation.

It’s a common misconception that any kind of hybridization or selective breeding = genetic modification, but this isn’t the case in a legal sense. There must be some kind of actual tampering with genes in a labratory, not just old-fashioned plant breeding. A few years ago actually there was a big kerfuffle because a number of fancy petunias were tested and found to have been genetically modified, not registered or labelled as such, and then sold illegally in the US and used in breeding programs. All those petunias had to be pulled and destroyed.

Kinda got off topic here but the illegal gmo petunias story is actually pretty cool. Mostly because it came out because some plant biologist dude saw some orange petunias went “huh petunias don’t come in Orange last time I checked but this reminds me of some GMO plant experiments back in the day” and he tested the plants and discovered they did indeed contain foreign DNA

How the transgenic petunia carnage of 2017 began

Growers destroy plants after biologist spots forgotten flowers

[mellific]

all sorts of echoes in these caverns

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