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A candidate for office in my county posted about how fed-up he is with the clearcutting of forests for development: “I stopped at 6 different developments yesterday in our county, and each one was totally Clear Cut, meaning complete devastation of nature that was living and thriving there before … not a single tree or blade of original grass left, no wildlife. So Sad!”

I responded: The clearcutting is bad enough, AND furthermore, the “landscaping” they replace it with is a second assault on the eye and the environment. Turfgrass, waxy cartoonish nonnative plants. Shaved, barren ponds.

I get sick of hearing people who recognize the value of trees being ridiculed as “tree-huggers.” When developers replace trees with gross, out-of-place manicured landscaping, maybe we should call them “GRASS-kissers”!

There’s no reason why developers can’t do more natural landscaping. Native plants & trees double as green infrastructure.

We can encourage the grass-kisser developers to embrace a more natural, beautiful, and less resource-hogging approach.

There are many local resources available to help us with native landscaping, green stormwater infrastructure, edible landscaping (food forests etc.)

“Be really careful” “It’s easy for a car [driver] to miss seeing you” “Glad at least you wear a helmet” — I know that most of you people saying these things probably mean well but please don’t talk down to me or other cyclists or pedestrians. I have not lived to be 60 years old by having my head up my a**.

I am working thru various channels (civic activism etc.) to make the roads safer for ALL users including cyclists, pedestrians, and wheelchair users. If you genuinely care about people’s safety, rather than tell cyclists and pedestrians to “be careful,” I urge you and all other car drivers to focus on being careful yourselves. We cyclists and pedestrians ARE careful, because we know we are often inches from death.

You can kill someone with that large tanklike vessel. Especially an SUV!! (And yes, I have owned cars at different phases of my life, and was always very aware that I was operating potentially deadly machinery.)

Motorists! BE CAREFUL DRIVING. Oh, and any motorist who is having trouble seeing cyclists and pedestrians, please 1) check the speed limit — you might need to slow down; and 2) get your eyes examined regularly; eye health is important and it’s something we should all be doing regardless.

P.S. Yes, mansplainers can be female too. Check into internalized patriarchy; explains a lot!

This YouTube video I did awhile back, on cleaning a Ziploc bag for reuse, actually has multiple purposes:

1) show a way to reuse Ziploc and other sturdy plastic bags, a thing that can be hard to reuse because they are hard to clean if they’ve contained greasy foods;

2) show an economical and eco-friendly method to clean ANY dish or eating utensil in a way that needs minimal water and little or no soap. The second purpose might be most important as water-supply issues are on the rise.

Regarding food containers and dishware, here is a hierarchy of materials, from “harder to clean” to “easier to clean”:

Plastic bags are by far the hardest. Then come plastic plates & silverware, Tupperware containers etc. (The plastics tend to retain grease, for which the conventional cleaning approach uses a lot of hot water and a lot of soap).

Easiest in terms of cleaning are stainless steel and china; it’s easier to get them grease-free. My cleaning method shown in this video makes it easier and less resource-intensive to clean any food container or eating vessel, including a plastic bag.

Note: I do not buy plastic bags. But they often come with the territory of a food purchase even at the farmer’s market. For my own sanity I needed to find a way to reuse them without using tons of dish liquid and needing hot water. The “desert scrub” approach using dried grass, caliche soil (back when I lived in central Texas), or sand (with caution as it will leave scratches which can then harbor grease and dirt), broken-down oak leaves or pine needles, can save a lot of water and soap.

It has long been known that rich nations contribute disproportionately to climate change, while many poorer nations disproportionately suffer the consequences. Now a new study has begun to quantify the inequality, and gets specific about which nations are being harmed and who is doing the harming.

“For example, the data shows that the top carbon emitter over time, the United States, has caused more than $1.9 trillion in climate damage to other countries from 1990 to 2014, including $310billion in damage to Brazil, $257billion in damage to India, $124 billion to Indonesia, $104 billion to Venezuela and $74 billion to Nigeria.

“But at the same time, the United States’ own carbon pollution has economically benefited the U.S. by more than $183 billion, while Canada, Germany and Russia have profited even more from American emissions.

“‘Do all countries look to the United States for restitution? Maybe,’ said study co-author Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College climate scientist. ‘The U.S. has caused a huge amount of economic harm by its emissions, and that’s something that we have the data to show.’ …

“The study also tallies benefits, which are mainly seen in northern countries like Canada and Russia, and rich nations like the U.S. and Germany.

“‘It’s the countries that have emitted the least that are also the ones that tend to be harmed by increases in global warming. …'”

https://daytonanewsjournal-fl-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=0a503b646_134854d

#ClimateInequity #DoubleInequity

In other news, a report sets forth guidelines for assessing the value of nature.

“Countries have approved the first comprehensive guidelines for judging the value of nature following four years of intense debate, officials said Monday.

“The report was endorsed by 139 countries — including the U.S., Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom and Germany — that are members of the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

“IPBES’ authors hope the guide they’ve drawn up with the help of experts from a wide range of disciplines will make it easier for governments to consider more than just the economic benefits of a project when deciding whether and how to go ahead with it.

@That includes figuring out how local communities will gain or lose from a project such as a hydroelectric dam – a situation that has regularly led to friction among businesses, citizens and authorities in the past. Rather than prescribe a set way for governments to estimate these noneconomic benefits, the report provides them with tools for working through the often complex assessment process …”

#ValueOfNature

This one is addressed to my fellow white people who identify as permies or eco activists. (Because I don’t really see these “feeling hopeless” behaviors and mindsets about climate change etc. happening among the Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color who I follow.)

Regarding why so many of us white people (particularly Boomers) fall into feeling hopeless … This is just a list off the top of my head; let me know if you think of anything else.

• We spend far more time & energy trying to memorize mathematical formulas for building swales and catching rainwater, than we do in building bridges to our neighbors.

• We spend too much time & energy trying to control our personal gardens and grow all the possible fruit trees and veggies (and feeling depressed when we fail); and not enough time & energy helping our communities to build local food-supply networks, or strengthen existing networks. Ditto for health care, and any other necessities. We feel hopeless because we persist in trying to secure these things for ourselves, by ourselves — an impossible task.

• We keep thinking money, or any other form of stored material wealth, is going to solve everything; that it’s more important than community.

• We keep thinking of community as being some ideal destination “somewhere else” (out on acreage, somewhere off in the future) as opposed to right in front of us in our own neighborhoods.

• Special one for fellow Boomers: We feel hopeless because for the first time in our lives, we (the almighty “Me Generation”) are feeling what it feels like to have our power threatened. That power was only ever illusory anyway though!

• We feel hopeless because we have never really faced an existential threat before, and now that it has reached our cushy shores we are freaking out. Unlike most of humanity throughout history and across the globe, who have faced and navigated many such crises.

• We keep thinking we are going to fix things by voting for the “right people”; usually this translates to shrill exhortations by my fellow gray-haired liberal-minded white ladies on social media to “Vote Blue!” Voting blue is not going to fix things, because blue is just a thinly disguised flavor of business-as-usual; entrenched oligarchy. Not saying don’t vote; just saying we need to stop thinking any establishment candidate will save us.

• This last one is going to sound harsh. If it doesn’t fit, don’t take it on. But if it resonates at all, I encourage you to squarely face it down and do some reflecting. I think for some people, feeling hopeless is comfortable. Here I’m specifically talking to the subset of fellow white Boomers who are retired or near retirement, have housing security, plenty to eat, access to health care, and other basics (which nobody anywhere ever should have to go without, but all too many people these days are going without). By deciding things are “hopeless,” we get to keep all our stash of material security and not have to question it; whose backs we got it off of. And hey, we’re old, we’re going to die in a few years (even with our fancy insurance policies that buy the best healthcare, the body is mortal after all), so we can just oblivionate off into the sunset in our cushy bubble. Our stock index funds getting 7% a year; us hopping on planes and cruise ships anytime we please, and all that. Whereas if we were to stop indulging in the attitude that things are hopeless, we might have to feel uncomfortable and do something different with all that amassed wealth. (To be clear: I’m not saying people can’t have treats and luxuries in life. And I’m not the “luxury police” trying to tell people how much is too much. That is between each person and their conscience, and I have offered extensive tips and resources in my book and on this blog about how easy it is to “carbon budget” for treats and luxuries.) What I take issue with is the combination of living in this kind of luxury, while claiming to be an environmentalist, and at the same time going around saying things are hopeless. Or my favorite variant: “My generation is no good; we’re counting on you people, the younger generations.” What!? Um, no.

• One more! We feel hopeless because our culture is literally hopeless! Colonizer, consumerist, individualist lone-wolf culture. A hopeless, desolate, dead-end street. Time to discontinue the failed experiment, so that healthy, caring, regenerative culture can thrive.

Homework! Your homework assignment today, should you choose to accept it:

1) Google “decolonize your mind” and do some reading that grabs you. Let me know what you find out! I also suggest lots of material in this blog on a steady basis, but wanted to give you a wider field.

2) And, if you are able to access TikTok, watch this video by mplsadonia. Boost it, and seek out other content like it! “Welcome to the revolution! There’s no place for shame! Decolonize your mind!”

(The TT algorithm can be pretty decent, I’ve found, as long as I am proactively seeking out content by Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color. And LGBTQIA and neurodivergent people as well. )

One request I’ve been hearing often, from Black anti-racism educators to those of us white people who are aspiring to be anti-racist and abolitionist, is “Collect your people.” An expression that means when someone in your group is misbehaving, you have a duty to try to talk sense into them. In this context, when the fellow white people in our lives say and do racist things, we need to call them in. Explain why it’s problematic.

As opposed to huffily writing these people off as “my hopelessly racist friends and relatives.” It all starts with us; we are ground zero for shining a light and calmly but firmly explaining. (As opposed to self-righteously and theatrically “calling-out,” which is a bad approach.) We can’t go saying, about white people behaving badly, “Oh, I don’t claim them! I’m not like that!” Collecting our people is really important and I’m working on getting better at it.

Ally Henny, Portia Noir, White Woman Whisperer, and other antiracist educators I’ve mentioned on this blog are urging us white people to please do this. Go listen to these Black women’s videos, read their writings. They make things make sense, that I’ve never been able to make sense of before about the world of whiteness. And how we can help fix things.

And here’s a bit of reading I just now found by googling “Collect your people.” Hope you find these helpful! Google is our friend!

(What does dismantling systemic racism have to do with the climate crisis and re-greening the planet, you might ask if you are new to this blog? Everything!! Two words for the root problem are: “colonizer culture.”)

• collectyourpeople.com “For my white folks, with love”

• The White Allies’ Guide to Collecting Aunt Linda (medium.com)

A lot of people, and not just people in the Degrowth movement, are saying various versions of this. Here’s one very compelling voice. (And follow her: @theoriginalsilverfoxx on TikTok.) Here’s another. (And follow her too: @arcanecraven on TikTok.)

Mutual aid, grassroots caring is key to all this. White people including myself have been very bad at building community. Not because we’re bad people but because hyper-individualism is a hallmark of our colonizer culture.

We need to get good at being members of community; at not being the center or the boss; at advocating beyond just ourselves and our immediate families. And a really good place to start is listen to Black women. And amplify their voices. I am, every chance I get! If you want to help build a safe, sane society, listen to Black women.

“But wait — I can’t just stop working; can’t just stop spending money.”

I get it, really! Just go listen to the two Black women linked above. Hear what they have to say.