For The Sake of All That Is Good & Green @goodandgreen - Tumblr Blog

Designing with vines - passive cooling with plants

Okay I wrote a big thing, based on a conversation started by @socalledunitedstates that was followed up on by some esteemed members of #plantblr such as my colleague @plantanarchy. It was a well-intentioned piece but encouraged the use of English Ivy. Apparently it was all deleted, which is too bad - these are all learning experiences y’all! Anyway, here is my response:

We’ve been battling English Ivy for 5 years on this property. It is choking out some cool native species here in Western NC. Please don’t plant it anywhere but indoors unless you’re in England. It’s a great indoor plant though! You want the right plant in the right place.

Hedera helix / English Ivy - A great indoor plant! Excellent for beginners and just busy people in general. Please keep it indoors though.

In the spirit of OP’s attempt to be helpful though, here’s some ideas:

Let me preface by saying that you have to be careful with vines. Even if they aren’t on invasive species list… sometimes they ought to be, and just haven’t quite made it there yet. As OP did mention, do your research before planting anything. These suggestions are based on my experience as growing them in the American Southeast. YMMV.

Actinidia arguta / Hardy kiwi vine - Delicious edible perennial. Can be eaten fresh, right off the vine, like a grape. USDA hardiness zones 3-8. This is definitely invasive in some places.

Vitis / grapes - Delicious edible perennial. Growing zone depends on the type of grape involved. Some require processing to be used, others are for eating fresh off the vine (aka “table grapes”).

Lonicera sempervirens / coral honeysucke - this is native to the US Southeast. Vigorous, gorgeous, wildlife (esp hummingbirds) will fucking love you if you plant it. Long bloom period. Once planted, you may never get rid of it. Z 4-9

Clematis - short bloom period, though there are some rebloomers out there. Stunning while in bloom, meh the rest of the time. There’s tons of different varieties. Hardiness zones vary.

Gelsemium sempervirens / Carolina Jessamin - Beautiful and fragrant. Like Clematis, short bloom period but a showstopper when it does its thing.Toxic as hell but pollinators love it. Foliage is evergreenish. Zones 7-10.

I’m growing all of these currently (except Gelsemium), and they are the most well behaved vines in our garden. Vines have a well-deserved reputation for getting unruly, though of course this depends upon where you are in the world. Vines can be great fun, but it’s good to grow native and/or non-aggressive ones.

Honorable mentions: Ipomoea alba / Moonflower and Lablab purpureus / Hyacinth Bean Vine. Both are well behaved annual vines in my biome and what we use on our home - to cool the Solarium. This is been an amazing year for the moonflowers.

(please ignore how neglected and ragged my plants look in the Deck Bed - it’s been crazy hot, crazy dry, and I’ve been insanely busy but I wanted to show how we’re actually using them to cool the house.) And yes they actually legitimately cool the house in summer, we’ve been able to tell via thermometers and energy bills in summer. It’s a THING.

Here’s a nice photo of a moonflower I found on the internet. They’re simply gorgeous, and excellent for moon gardens and witchery generally.

plantanarchy

Nice, this is a great post!

I hope I didn’t come off as overly harsh on the original post with @socalledunitedstates I just… reallly…. really… hate english ivy.

In my climate for the potential purpose of cooling your house and aesthetics, I’d really prefer annual vines to perennial ones, because a lot of perennial vines look just plain ugly in winter. But just because it’s an annual doesn’t mean it can’t spread like hell. For example, morning glories lol you will never get rid of them if you plant a normal ole morning glory. They will eat your garden and spread easily from seed. I mean, I love morning glories but damn.

This year, my mom planted a bunch of annual vines in the garden that I posted about the other day, including:

Cardinal Climber (Ipomea sloteri)

Love-In-A-Puff (Cardiospermum)

Firecracker Vine (Ipomea lobata)

So those are some more potential climbing options.

anarchopuppy

Just for the record, I never explicitly said English ivy (I didn’t explicitly say not English ivy either, though, because some people do live in England lol), but I included a link to research what is/isn’t good to plant in your area. I understand people’s aversion to it though - I’d definitely be hesitant too if I saw someone suggesting kudzu as a ground cover, for instance Thank you for the more extensive post! I also mentioned in the original that, if you are able to safely plant climbers on a significant portion of your walls, it can help with insulation as well - and, provided your walls weren’t already damaged (don’t plant climbers on damaged walls, they can reach into cracks and widen them), might even help prevent damage

rewind-on-purpose

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-22/food-plant-solutions-malnutrition-farming-edible-plants/12580732

https://fms.cmsvr.com/fmi/webd/Food_Plants_World

This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.

The database is a little clunky to use (especially on a phone), but still loads of excellent information.

plantyhamchuk

Here’s their website - Food Plant Solutions - and they can use volunteers! And $ of course. What they really need help with is connecting with NGOs/groups on the ground already working in countries, to get them access to the database. They also need help from formally trained agronomists, people good with website stuff, and people good at marketing / getting the word out about their project.

curiousbotanicals

A vertical forest is expected to be completed this year in Milan. There are two tower apartment complexes which contain a total of 400 residential units. The facade of the buildings will be covered with 730 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 perennial plants. It is expected to have the same ecological impact as 10,000 square meters of forest.

Aside from fighting smog and producing oxygen, the foliage is expected to provide insulation to the residential units.

elfgrove

It’ll be really cool to see how these trees grow in order to maximize access to sun, water, and nutrients. Also, a step towards a sci-fi solar punk future – I’m in.

patrickat

I sure hope the structural engineers planned for the buildings to increase in mass as the trees grow.

animatedamerican

Well, or else for maintenance labor to keep the trees rigorously trimmed to prevent too much increase in mass. Or both? (The wikipedia article says the engineering team consulted botanists and horticulturists in planning how much weight the buildings could bear, so it seems likely that the fact that trees grow would have come up.)

This is a pretty cool idea regardless and I hope they get it right. I wonder if anyone will do anything like this in New York.

speciesofleastconcern

This falls in the “I really hope they do it but I’ll believe it when I see it” category for me.

paintmeahero

It’s been up for 2 years, inaugurated in October 2014, and still going strong. It’s won multiple awards.

Here they are building it.

Bosco Gardeners hang around outside the building.

Change of Seasons…

And a view from the place itself.

solarpunk-aesthetic

It’s funny, I first made that original post on my other blog back in 2013. Amongst the comments were several talking about how people had tried and failed at this before, how they were skeptical, and how they’d believe it if they ever saw it.. At least a couple of comments were people “explaining” why it couldn’t be done.

And now, just look!

Just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be. It just means you have a chance to be the first to do it.

Remember that. 💚

iknowuthink-blog

Expanded Consciousness

moniquill

Growing food instead of laws is good, but can we PLEASE stop with the condescending bullshit that implies that people who choose to grow lawns must only being doing it for shallow ‘sheepish’ reasons?

Maybe instead of snidely saying ‘trying to impress your neighbors?’ give people instructions on how to work with and/or fight their home owner’s association, how to appeal to a landlord, how to address local ordinances, and how to grow stealth food crops as ornamental plants in areas where food gardening is banned. Seriously, they will come bulldoze your shit and then bill you for it.

We need more posts instructing people how to guerrilla garden and found community gardens, and fewer posts saying ‘You only have a lawn because you’re shallow and vain and stupid!’

violetsandshrikes

So as of July 9th, the Trump Administration has overturned environmental protection laws in Alaskan reserves, which includes allowing:

use bait including donuts and grease-soaked bread to draw in and kill brown bears;

use artificial lights to enter dens and kill black bears, including females and their cubs;

shoot caribou while they are swimming; and

trap and kill wolves and their pups during denning season

here’s one petition I’ve found about this, and I’ll be looking for more resources. Please circulate this so this information is well-known, because they’ve been sneakily messing with a LOT of environmental laws and practices

shanehollanderss

Recently, he also has opened Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling

violetsandshrikes

Rolling Stone has a really good piece on what the Trump Administration has been doing in Alaska as a whole, but I’ll pick some key points out for everyone:

FOR CONTEXT: In 2001, Canadian mining-exploration company Northern Dynasty Minerals began plans for extracting the Pebble Mine, a massive store of copper, gold, and other minerals that lies underneath two of Bristol Bay’s most productive salmon streams. Following years of fighting led by Lyon and others, the EPA blocked the Pebble Mine in 2014 after scientists found it would result in “complete loss of fish habitat.”

Mid-2019 Trump ordered his administration to remove protections on Bristol Bay, following a meeting with Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Within two months after that, he also ordered protections removed on Tongass National Forest, in southeast Alaska, the largest intact temperate rainforest on the planet, which scientists have called the “lungs of the country.” The Tongass absorbs more carbon than any other national forest, on par with the world’s most-dense terrestrial carbon sinks in Chile and Tasmania.

The government is expected to award a permit for the Pebble Mine any day now, and to lift restrictions on logging the Tongass by late summer or early fall. And this is on top of the move to open up 1.6 million acres of the Coastal Plain in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas development — a plan that was officially approved on Monday.

The construction of Pebble Mine would cross more than 200 streams and the Iliamna Lake headwaters; its dams and embankments would block critical salmon habitats; and it would destroy 81 miles of salmon streams and close to 3,500 acres of existing wetlands, lakes, and ponds.

In 2011, local tribes petitioned the EPA to prohibit large scale mines in the area. As a result, EPA conducted the peer-reviewed studies of Northern Dynasty’s early plans that led to the agency blocking the mine in 2014, citing a provision in the Clean Water Act.

Northern Dynasty sued the EPA, reaching a settlement with the agency in 2017, and applied for a permit to initiate a federal environmental-review process. This time, the company called for a 1.4 billion-ton mine — nearly six times bigger than the 2014 scenario the EPA analyzed. A 2019 report by the Nature Conservancy found habitat losses could exceed the 2014 scenario by as much as 400 percent.

Northern Dynasty argues that the economic opportunity outweighs keeping Bristol Bay pristine.

But according to their own web site, Northern Dynasty promises only 750 to 1,000 direct jobs with the Pebble Mine, while the salmon run generates 14,000 jobs annually in addition to providing subsistence for the tribes.

On June 27th, 2019, the day after Trump and Dunleavy met on Air Force One, the EPA internally informed its staff scientists that the agency would be reversing its protections on Bristol Bay.

That decision was more or less finalized last month, when on July 24th, the Trump administration released its final environmental-impact statement, determining Northern Dynasty’s proposal for a 1.4 billion-ton mine to be the “least environmentally damaging” option for moving forward. All that’s left is for the EPA to publish the decision, which is set to happen by mid-August, and the mine will officially be greenlighted.

After his June 26th meeting, the president ordered the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), to wipe all roadless protections from the Tongass forest: a green light to begin logging its old growth again. (A recent report from the Center for Sustainable Economy documented taxpayer losses of nearly $2 billion a year from federal logging programs, largely due to the fact that demand for timber has been flagging nationally.)

On July 21st, nine southeast Alaska tribes submitted a petition to the Department of Agriculture to create a first-of-its-kind Traditional Homelands Conservation Rule “to save their ancestral lands in the Tongass National Forest from destruction at the hands of the agency itself.”

Donate to protect Bristol Bay

Petition to elected officials to prevent Pebble Mine

Natural Resources Defense Council Petition Against Pebble Mine

Wild Salmon Center Petition Against Pebble Mine

Donate to the United Tribes of Bristol Bay

Donate to the Alaska Conservation Foundation

Tongass Defense Fund

Sitka Conservation Society Tongass Donations

Alaskan Bears and Wolves Protection Restored Petition

Donate to the Alaska Wildlife Alliance

mdwolf

if you love fat bear week and seeing before and after salmon run pictures of Otis and Holly and Beadnose and other Brooks Falls Bears every season you should care about Pebble Mine. It’s construction (and inevitable waste failure) will destroy one of the LAST healthy salmon run areas in the world and THAT will kill the bears and wolves and the countless other species that depend on the salmon run to survive from year to year. Not to mention the THOUSANDS of jobs alaskans have sustainably fishing the area are at risk if Pebble Mine pollutes the river. We had a record breaking salmon run this year (over 4 million fish!!!!!! For comparison Maine’s atlantic salmon run only had about 1500 when it historically used to have half a million run the river). It’s a lot easier to preserve a healthy river/salmon run than to try to rehabilitate it after damaging the river.

fungusqueen

Me and @beautifultrees07 are plotting to do a secret guerilla pumpkin patch in a neglected waste patch by a local freeway. It’s gonna look cute!

fungusqueen

Update! We cleared this area of invasive (and abrasive!) weeds, hoed the rocky and barren soils, amended the earth (with a layer of straw for drainage and to hold moisture/encourage mycelium), created 18 pumpkin mounds of different varieties (Atlantic Giant, Jarrahdale, Lumina, Cinderella, Jack O’ Lantern, Musquee de Provence, and Red Warty Thing) in 96 degree weather so like, don’t even question our love for pumpkins and soil restoration! We added flowers for beautification and to attract pollinators. We moved discarded mattresses, furniture pieces, and removed bags of trash, glass, and dog poop. The pumpkin vines will reach maturity in October and we’re looking forward to the growth!

fungusqueen

Update! Remember her??? Be careful who you call ugly!! Our guerilla garden/secret pumpkin patch is really shaping up! Pumpkin vines are growing strong and healthy, cucumber plants are producing, and corn stalks are growing taller! This lot used to be filled with dog poop, mattresses, and discarded furniture! Hopefully we’ll have pumpkins soon. Me and my two sisters laid all the groundwork for this garden and it’s being maintained mostly by one of my sisters and other volunteers. We love to restore the soil, revive barren land, and coax pumpkins from the earth just in time for Hallow’s Eve ~

fungusqueen

Another update from August 5:

Foliage is thick and lush and baby pumpkins are forming! We’re excited for the turn of the season and to have a little pumpkin patch ready for Halloween

probablyasocialecologist

From traditional fishing technologies to bringing back the bison, Indigenous ecological practices are our best bet to save the planet – and ourselves

The destruction wrought by colonization cannot be undone, but we can recover from it. Tiffany explains that one must “be strong enough to let the land govern you.” In this sense, “Land Back” is not just the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of First Nations, but a reminder that “the land is sovereign and the land is what you should obey,” she says. It is a call for us all to take responsibility in maintaining a meaningful relationship of reciprocity with the land.

We could use our technological advancements and industrial scale, guided by Indigenous knowledge, to reintroduce the bison herds onto the Prairies at the same time that we install wind turbines to power the cultivation of food that nourishes people with minimal land use or waste. We can rapidly reforest areas that were clear cut for industrial agriculture or pipelines, and revive animal populations in traditional food forests. We can use low-carbon infrastructure to cultivate mollusks that clean polluted waters, feed people, and create habitat for other species all at the same time. We can create new social norms and cultural institutions that centre children, the elderly, and our interdependence with life on Earth.

Our current problems are the result of a number of historical conditions being realized, and are not a fundamental manifestation of our nature, evolutionary trajectory, or destiny. Designing a society that makes happy humans with healthy bodies and minds in resilient ecosystems does not involve “going back” to any ideal period of history, but it does require us recognizing that Indigenous knowledge and ecological stewardship are and will continue to be successful; that ecosystems have regulating functions that are better at preventing pandemics and responding to climate change than present human technology; and that the legacy of industrial agriculture, capitalism, and its exploitation of people and the planet should no longer be the standard that shapes our vision of progress.

ed-longshanks

important psa

soundlessdragon

Awh, I always thought they were so pretty and had no idea they could be harmful

christianmarvel

Can someone transcribe this? The water is really loud.

petit-bon-homme

“Hey everybody! Here we are in the southern Appalachian mountains. We have a pristine Montane stream ecosystem, as you can see all around us here. I thought I’d make an educational video this morning. It involves this practice right here [gestures to rock pile]. As our national parks and national forests fall victim to human pressure, more than ever, this is something we’re seeing more and more of. Hopefully we can make this video go viral. This stream, as you can see around us right here, is a breeding ground for North America’s largest salamander, the Eastern hellbender. They can get up to 2.5-3 feet long. It’s part of our natural heritage in the eastern United States. When people do this right here - what they consider to be art - they’re actually destroying the breeding ground for the Eastern hellbender salamander. The Eastern hellbender will use flat rocks such as these to make nesting sites in these streams. So here’s what I would like everybody to do. If you care about our Montane stream freshwater ecosystems like this one around us here, when you see something like this, this is what I recommend doing: [kicks down rock pile]. Take the rocks, throw them back into the stream. The Eastern hellbender utilizes rocks like this. It actually feels pretty good to do this! [walks to other pile] This is not actually art, okay? This is destruction of our freshwater ecosystems. So I would like to encourage everyone: when you see this [gestures to second rock pile], do this! [kicks pile] I’d like to return our streams to their natural state for the organisms that live here. Thanks, and have a good day.”

cassiefisherdrake

PSA from a forest ranger who is instructed to knock these down:

Not only are they harmful for river/stream habits, they can cause hikers to get lost! Cairns are meant to represent the correct path for a trail. We’ve had hikers get lost by following incorrect paths marked by cairns people set up “for fun/art.” Not only do we want hikers to get lost, we want them to stay on the correct path for erosion control and ecosystem protection. Cairn-building “for fun/art” has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, so we keep finding more and more to knock over.

If you want to set up a cairn “for fun/art,” do it in a dry, very rocky area. Don’t take rocks from rivers or streams! But when it’s a bedrock site and there’s lots of rocks sitting around? Sure, fine, whatever. But please please PLEASE knock them down after! Don’t be the reason we have to deploy Search & Rescue for a lost hiker!

starfoozle

Agriculture officials raise concern after residents report receiving unsolicited shipments, apparently from China

“At this point in time, we don’t have enough information to know if this is a hoax, a prank, an internet scam or an act of agricultural bio-terrorism,” Quarles added. “Unsolicited seeds could be invasive and introduce unknown diseases to local plants, harm livestock or threaten our environment.”

....well, this is odd. My first instinct is to contact your local Extension office (or APHIS, as this piece recommends) if you receive these: I’m extremely curious as to what these plants could be!

glumshoe

Probably another manifestation of the online product review rigging scheme that’s been going around—companies will create fake accounts with real addresses, purchase their own product, and then ship off some empty box or nearly-worthless item to a random destination. When the tracking system recognizes it as delivered, they leave the product a 5-star review without losing any inventory, while Jane Doe in Oklahoma gets a package of packing materials or mustard seeds from China without explanation.

mothwick

What’s particularly curious is that people in dozens of states are receiving these. Pics in my seed groups show that the seeds are all pretty different -- from citrus shown in The Guardian article above to something like cabbage seeds or mustard, and others. It’s an odd way to do bio-terrorism, but the sudden push for online product review is odd too.

civilizationkills

maybe its bc i live in a place where forestry is one of the dominant industries but like tree planting rly isnt good. like the majority of the time its done by forestry companies to “offset” what they’ve cut down, and they almost always just plant fir & spruce monocrops and then they prevent the rest of the forest from naturally regenerating by spraying glyphosate, because they want to kill off the hardwoods that grow back since softwoods are worth more to the pulp industry… anything a company does that is supposedly “green” never is.

daggers-drawn

They aren’t actually replanting the forest, they’re building lumber farms in the middle of it and trying to pass them off as the same thing to people who think a forest is just trees because they live in a world mediated by images and have never been in an actual forest long enough to be able to tell healthy diverse growth from a struggling monocrop.

ecohygge

You can now support EIC on PATREON Mother Nature has been growing plants for 460 million years and trees for 370 million years. According

“Martin Crawford, a forest gardening pioneer, based in the UK, explains in a short film by Thomas Regnault, ’What we think of as normal, in terms of food production is actually not normal at all. Annual plants are very rare in nature, yet most of our agricultural fields are filled with annual plants. It’s not normal. What’s normal is a more forested or semi-forested system.’

Forest gardens mimic natural ecosystems by using perennial plants and trees, which live for a long time and/or reseed themselves. The garden would have various vertical levels of growth such as tall canopy trees, shorter trees, shrubs and bushes, vines, consists of various vertical levels of growth, from canopy trees to shorter trees, to shrubs and bushes, vines, herbs, ground cover and roots. The levels work together, offering shade, wind protection, support and nutrition. Starting a forest garden from scratch will take time, work and money but once done, it will basically take care of itself for years with very little maintenance but plenty to harvest.”

mothmanliveshere

This reminds me a lot of this video

I think we’re really ready to enter a new age for gardening and agriculture

galadhir

I’ve just finished reading ‘Rewilding’ by Isabella Tree, which is the story of the project at Knepp. There, they are only focussing on trying to improve exhausted farm land into a state of maximum biodiversity. They’re not trying to grow food, but they’re finding that using animals to control scrub and increase biodiversity has automatically lead to them having high-quality pasture-fed meat to sell. So that’s more of a by-product of a nature-reserve rather than a serious attempt to produce food.

As far as food goes, though, I am currently reading ‘Restoration Agriculture’ by Mark Shepard who is working on permanent agriculture in Wisconsin, similar to what Martin Crawford is doing up there but on a farm-size scale and focussed on growing staple food crops in a perennial, sustainable way by creating edible eco-systems.

And yeah, the take-away is that nature is perfectly capable of recovering its complexity and diversity AND feeding us, and it will be capable of doing it without fossil fuel inputs, but we will have to start growing our food crops in a very different way.

justnoodlefishthings

I wish there was less of a push for organic animal products and more of a push for humanely raised

justnoodlefishthings

like I could care less if the animal had to have antibiotics at some point

I care more if chickens had access to pasture and if a cow had access to enrichment

justnoodlefishthings

celepeace

Hi, I understand why caring about whether a farm animal had antibiotics might seem arbitrary, but it's actually a real issue.

See, a lot of large scale farms (mostly ones in countries like India and China, actually) don't just use antibiotics when an animal is sick. If that were the case, it wouldn't be a problem at all. The problem comes from the fact that a lot of these farms use extremely high strength antibiotics indiscriminately and as a preventative for infection. This means bacteria that naturally occur in farm animals and have the potential to infect humans, like salmonella, become resistant to these antibiotics. And because the antibiotics used are often high strength, last-line antibiotics, the bacteria specifically become resistant to things hospitals would use to save your life in the event of a large-scale systemic infection. This, for obvious reasons, is really bad.

So, if you live in India, for instance, and happened to get really unlucky and acquire a systemic salmonella infection from contaminated eggs, and they happened to be from a farm using mass antibiotic distribution, you're SOL. And you know who's exposed to those animals on a daily basis in intimate quarters? That's right: farm workers, who often have no choice in whether the farm they work for uses these medicines.

Here's some articles on this.

I understand to the ignorant why this may seem like a non-issue when you look at food labels and wonder why anyone would care if a dairy farm used antibiotics. It seems like something stupid that essential oil freaks might lose their shit over because "artificial medicine scary!!!" But it's a very real concern.

Please don't trivialize things like this, they can be very dangerous to consumers and farmers.

Also, and this is unrelated and kind of niche, but I know some people like @thebibliosphere rely on organic certified products because artificial pesticides can induce dangerous immune responses. I know that doesn't apply to most people but some chronically ill people really rely on stuff you might think is unrelated!

I don't mean to undermine the point about supporting environmentally friendly food products, though. That's a very admirable goal and I try to go out of my way to purchase things with the rainforest alliance seal when I can.

thebibliosphere

Speaking as the weirdo whose immune system is broken by the modern world, I would also like to see stricter regulations placed on the USDA label when it comes to the farming of organic products and the organic pesticides used, which are actually not as well regulated as the synthetic ones.

Cause that's the thing most people don't realize, organic doesn't mean pesticide-free, it means the don't use synthetic made pesticides-- which is GREAT for me, cause that's what my broken immune system is allergic to-- but they do still use organic pesticides, some of which can actually be more harmful over long term exposure (particularly to workers), and why you absolutely still need wash organic produce you buy from the store.

So yeah, some of us with weird and chronic health issues like MCAS (and there's more of us that you'd think) rely on the USDA label to know we’re not about to be exposed to chemical residue which are specifically dangerous to us— I have a literal prescription from three doctors now, including an ER dr. telling me to eat only organic food as part of managing my condition. But it is absolutely not perfect and needs to be part of a wider movement to make modern farming more ecologically sustainable, fair trade and humane.

starfoozle

Trauma Stewardship is a fantastic resource for anyone struggling to avoid burnout in organizing or advocacy work that involves caring for and bearing witness to the pain of others. I’ve regularly recommended it in the past to my fellow naturalists, science communicators, and educators who are struggling with the enormity of the grief they feel around climate change, mass extinctions, and environmental injustice, but it is incredibly useful for anyone involved in activist movements, particularly in our current political moment — if you feel like you’re running on empty right now, please check it out. The publishers are offering PDF copies of the book for free, and it’s absolutely worth your time.

Berrett-Koehler offers a free download of Trauma Stewardship in hopes that it will help you care for yourself while caring for others.

theoreticalpermaculture

sunkeepersolarpunkmusic

Leaving this for myself if not others because someday I want to be able to grow my own food

botanyshitposts

HELLO??

bluepeets

https://twitter.com/coff33detective/status/1271463582312673281

“make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session.”

luntfontanne

[ID: twitter thread from ‘alex flanigan, anti-fascist’ @/coff33detective dated 6/12/20 that reads:

hi! i work in local government and community management, and i’m here to tell you a secret: it is like, really, really easy to overwhelm the people who work in your local government. especially right now. especially on things they can actionably do or impact.

you may not know this, but i bet your city or town or municipality has a website. i bet that website has some contact forms or email addresses on it. i bet you can use them to put together a message in about 5 minutes! i bet it’s almost as easy as signing a national petition.

which is to say: i’m noticing, like most other people, that the national level discussion on really important and long overdue issues is flagging. but the internet and news cycle is not the only battleground, and you will be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to fight those battles at home, on your own turf, with much more immediate impact, and they are so, so important.

I am begging you: make my job, and the jobs of people like me, difficult right now. flood us with demands. make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session.

/end ID]

there is a level of privilege in activist spaces re: emotional/mental bandwidth, and its really frustrating

like, people DO tend to care, but that does’t mean they have the ability to care every minute of every day and be active in their activism, and part of your activism must include achievable goals and space/action items that are accessible to people who have lives

like I love green causes and I KNOW that people care and want access, but also not everyone has the time, money, space, or mental bandwidth to do what I do, and that’s ok!! that’s the point of being an effective community/cause leader! but I’m on this webinar and this woman is recommending that while we can support legislation to bring back/expand municipal compost, we should also have worm bins at home. the sheer cost and logistics??? who has the time and space?? good god! how is this helpful to the common person?

like I love the idea, but the level of privilege assumed!

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