Effervescent moments

Meliorists believe there are ripe moments in time when our efforts become transformative. Conclusions are not foregone. Outcomes are not preset. Odell, Klein, and Solnit are meliorists.

"In the conclusion of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein writes honestly about her own fear regarding the future and motions toward kairos as it relates to action. She recognizes "upwellings" and "effervescent moment[ s]" in which "societies become consumed with the demand for transformational change." These moments often come as a surprise, even to longtime organizers—the surprise that "we are so much more than we have been told we are—that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined." She adds that "no one knows when the next such effervescent moment will open."

I reread these words in 2020, in the weeks following George Floyd's murder, which were full of such upwellings. For me, this time was an unforgettable illustration of the relationship among kairos, action, and surprise. Time took on new topographies, and the author Herman Gray contrasted "the slow time of COVID and the hot time of the streets." In a July 2021 podcast, Birdsong suggested that the pandemic had invited some amount of culture shift simply by exposing how connected people were to those they'd never thought about, like farmworkers and nurses. It changed how the world and the people in it looked, and it was in this opening that Floyd's death and the uprisings occurred. She suggested that here, in this specific moment, "there was a greater sense of connection… from people who hadn't previously felt any connection to black people being murdered." It was a reminder of what Rebecca Solnit repeats several times in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster: "Beliefs matter."

In the midst of calls to "get back to normal," this book was written in kairos for kairos—for a vanishing window in which the time is ripe. In any moment, we can choose whom and what we perceive as existing in time, just as we can choose to believe that time is the site of unpredictability and potential rather than inevitability and helplessness. In that sense, changing how we think about time is more than a means for confronting personal despair in a catastrophic meantime. It can also be a call to action in a world whose current state can't be taken for granted any more than its actors can remain unnamed, exploited, or abandoned. I believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its everyday capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion. In that sense, the idea that we could "save" time—by recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us."

— Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell
https://a.co/bdz1gFN

Climate Optimism and Environmental Sustainability

Climate Optimism: Celebrating Systemic Change Around the World https://a.co/d/jiwwNNU

A Guide on Climate Optimism and Environmental Sustainability

Zahra Biabani, a climate activist focused on hope and action, wrote this book to help readers learn why we need to and how we can  stay optimistic in the face of the climate crisis. People are doing good things for our planet all over the world…. it's time we highlight it!

Change the way you think about the future. The fate of humanity can be daunting, but we don't need to live in that space. First, we need to change our attitude in order to implement nature based solutions that help mitigate climate change. Good news: there are numerous encouraging environmental trends that will change the way you think about how we can protect the planet.

Get to know Zahra Biabani, a climate activist, influencer, CEO, and writer. Zahra's content focuses on climate hope, optimism, humor, and doing good things. After unexpectedly establishing a career as an online sustainability educator and influencer her junior year at Vanderbilt University, Zahra decided to jump head first into the waters of entrepreneurship and authorship. Climate Optimism is her way to spread hope in the world.

Inside, you'll find:

• A comprehensive review of the most promising  climate solutions
• Practical advice to change the way you think and feel about climate change
• Two years worth of good news from the "Weekly Earth Wins" series
• Interviews with activists in the Global South working on projects that further environmental sustainability

If you're looking for a sustainable living book or books for activists centered on environmentalism like A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, The Intersectional Environmentalist, or Sustainable Badass, you'll love Climate Optimism. amazon

"Yellowbird Artscape"

Environmental philosopher David Wood's "retreat from civilization" in Woodbury TN, as he described it to me at the party last evening after Carol Gould's Lyceum lecture.

Peter Singer: The Simplest Way to Change the Planet’s Fate

MELBOURNE, Australia — The year of the first Earth Day, 1970, was the year I stopped eating meat. I didn't do it to save the Earth, but because I realized that there is no ethical justification for treating animals like machines for converting feed into meat, milk and eggs. It is wrong to ignore or discount the interests of sentient beings because they are not members of our species.

In the United States and beyond, giant agribusiness corporations continue raising animals in ways that disregard their welfare, never allowing pigs or chickens to walk outside, crowding hens who lay eggs into cages that prevent them from stretching their wings and breeding chickens to grow so fast that their immature leg bones struggle to bear their weight.

Boycotting this monstrous abuse of billions of animals each year is a powerful reason for not eating meat, but the outsize contribution of meat and dairy products to climate change is for me now an equally urgent part of shifting to a plant-based diet. But we need not be hard-line about avoiding all animal products. If everyone chose plant-based foods for just half their meals, we would have fewer animals suffering, and a tremendously better shot at avoiding the most dire consequences of climate change.

Meat and dairy production are major sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculates that releasing into the atmosphere a ton of methane will, over a century, raise the temperature of our planet by 28 times as much as releasing a ton of carbon dioxide. That would be bad enough, but the impact is even more lopsided in the shorter term: Because methane breaks down much more rapidly than carbon dioxide, over 20 years, that ton will warm the planet as much as 84 tons of carbon dioxide...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/opinion/earth-day-climate-change-meat-vegan.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Guest%20Essays

Why it's Not Too Late for Climate - and What to Do

Andy Revkin podcast:
Sustain What? is a series of conversations, seeking solutions where complexity and consequence collide on the sustainability frontier. This program contains audio highlights from hundreds of video webcasts hosted by Andy Revkin, founder of the Columbia Climate School's Initiative for Communication and Sustainability. Dale Willman is the associate director of the initiative. Revkin and Willman believe sustainability has no meaning on its own. The first step toward success is to ask: Sustain what? How? And for whom?

Gardening

"The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… Here is the Amen beyond the prayer."

Visionary artists and writers on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening: https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/gardening-200

https://indieweb.social/@mariapopova/110189190892770917

Berry Center newsletter

Spring '23  

 Scientists discover hyper-intelligent, fast-growing mushroom that could have a major impact on our planet

Story by Jeremiah Budin • Yesterday 7:00 AM

Scientists discover hyper-intelligent, fast-growing mushroom that could have a major impact on our planet (msn.com)

In the hunt for compelling alternatives to plastic, researchers in Finland may have just found a winner — and it’s already growing all over the sides of trees.

The substance in question is a type of mushroom known as Fomes fomentarius. It grows on the rotting bark of trees and has historically been used mainly as a fire starter, lending it the nickname “tinder fungus.” (It has also been called “hoof fungus” because its shape resembles a hoof.)

However, a research team at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland thinks that it could be much more than that. 

“F. fomentarius fruiting bodies are ingeniously lightweight biological designs, simple in composition but efficient in performance,” the team’s study, published recently in Science Advances, said. “Growing the material using simple ingredients is an alternative solution to overcome the cost, time, mass production, and sustainability of how we make and consume materials in the future.”

In short, instead of mass-producing plastic at an enormous cost to our planet, in the future, we could simply grow a mushroom with similar structural integrity to plastic at scale.