treeroutes:

botanical horror related books that i am absolutely going to read (ie. the tbr list that no one asked for) :

Otto, Eric C. Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. Ohio State University Press, 2012.

Meeker, Natania, and Antónia Szabari. Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction. 1st ed. Fordham University Press, 2020.

Dauncey, E. A., and Sonny Larsson. Plants That Kill: A Natural History of the World’s Most Poisonous Plants, 2018.

Bishop, Katherine E., David Higgins, and Jerry Määttä. Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation. University of Wales Press, 2020.

Tidwell, Christy, and Carter Soles. Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene. AnthropoScene, 2023.

Parker, Elizabeth. The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. Springer Nature, 2020.

fatehbaz:

[E]very [interspecies] meeting in fact reminds us that the being we meet is and always shall be strange to us […]. When beings meet there is a distance between, such that in encountering the slug we also encounter something beyond the slug – a multitude of life we cannot sense. […] So despite shared histories and the close proximity in which slugs and [humans] live, the slug retains a certain darkness as a creature apart; something is held in reserve […]. And so fleeting awareness of the irretrievability of the lives of others intensifies poignancy, such that despite a gulf separating the [human] from other creatures, some connection, however fleeting, is made to something – however strange. Refusing to dismiss the everyday and the banal is an ethical response. […] Slugs are there: sliming, chomping, and oozing around quietly and that should be enough to give them consideration.

[Text by: Franklin Ginn. “Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 39, Issue 4. 2013. Bold emphasis added by me.]

—

So, can an insect speak? And if yes, do we understand it? Wittgenstein maintained that ‘if a lion could speak we would not understand him’, by which he implied that we do not share the ‘form of lion-life’ that would make lion language fully transparent to us […]. A similar insight was […] expressed by […] honeybee researcher Maurice Maeterlinck […]: Beyond the appreciable facts of their life we know but little of the bees. And the closer our acquaintance becomes, the nearer is our ignorance brought to us of the depths of their real existence. But such ignorance is better than the other kind, which is unconscious and satisfied.

[Text by: Eileen Crist. “Can an Insect Speak?: The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language.” Social Studies of Science, Volume 34, Issue 1. 2004.]

—

Animal studies scholarship tends to emphasize animal-human relations, encounters, and similarities. […] Jellyfish and other gelatinous creatures […], however, float at the far reaches of our ability to construct sturdy interspecies connections […]. Uexkull’s theory […] insists upon multiple worlds […], a capacious admission that a multitude of other creatures dwell as part of worlds that humans cannot readily or completely access or grasp. Three-quarters of a century later Terry Tempest Williams wonders what it would be like to be a jellyfish. […] [She] writes: “Perhaps this is what moves me most about jellies – their sensory intelligence […] the great hunger that is sent outward through the feathery reach of their tentacles. Imagine the information sought and returned.”

[Text by: Stacy Alaimo. “Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of the Sensible”. In: Thinking with Water. 2013.]

—

Although we cannot ‘speak’ with nonhumans in any straightforward way, what we can and more importantly do do is become articulate with them in various ways. […] If there is a way out of this historical impasse [alienation, climate crisis, global ecological degradation], [for some] it is not to be found in attributing some of ‘our’ qualities to ‘them’. It “would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals […]. Perhaps the task is not to seek to compare the dance language of bees […] with human language, the ‘intelligence’ […] of Monarch butterflies with human intelligence, […] but rather (or at least in addition) to find a way of thinking about these ‘remarkable things’ that grants them positive ontological difference in their own right. […] [It] is concerned with what is always a multitude of others rather than a singular other […]; and it is radically nonanthropocentric […].

[Text by: Nick Bingham. “Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Volume 38, Issue 3. 2006.]

—

Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention […] shows them [slowly] moving, changing. […] Then there are beings that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can’t know what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. […] [W]e should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled […]. It is not abstract, or empty.

[Text by: Bawaka Country et al. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.]

derinthescarletpescatarian:

cryptotheism:

cryptotheism:

cryptotheism:

Man, the flesh sucks. I’m gonna abandon it for the machine.

Hey was anyone gonna telle that the machine is also subject to change? The nature of my decay is just different now. Shit sucks. I’m gonna abandon the machine for the divine.

Bad news about the divine

Why do you continue to flee change. Decay is eventual death, but a complete lack of it is no life at all.

onemillionwordsofcrap:

thoughtportal:

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

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I appreciate this video a lot–people don’t realize how important it is to start slow if you’re trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!

:

How to Sew Bedside Pockets Organizer - free sewing tutorial

<p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Sew a row of pockets to keep extra things off your nightstand and organize your bedside!</p>

SewCanShe Free Sewing Patterns for Beginners

DIY bedside pockets organiser

If your bedside table’s always overflowing or if you simply don’t have the space for one, check out this bedside pockets organiser tutorial by Sew Can She. It’s a great way to use up scrap fabric and keep your stuff off your floor.

(Image source) [ID: a quilted organiser with five pockets of different sizes hangs from a bed frame. Each pocket is made with a different fabric. A plush rabbit, two books, and a doll with blue hair poke out of the pockets.]

rlyehtaxidermist:

“you sound smart” that’s because i’ve spent years doing academic writing to the point that it’s my default cadence plus or minus the use of profanity as a tone indicator

“you sound stupid” that’s because i’m dumb as fuck

solarpunkcitizen:

sawasawako-archived:

“You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That [Shevek] knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again… so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

grendelsmilf:

shevek in the dispossessed

justalittlesolarpunk:

amemait:

ms-demeanor:

solarpunkwobbly:

mixbagofholding:

my main criticism of solarpunk is why isn’t it happening

it absolutely is and here’s the wiki we’re building

what exists in terms of community developed sustainable technology

but like any revolutionary social movement it requires active involvement to achieve the change you want to see. Here are some handy resources for getting more involved:

Food Not Lawns - project to help communities feed themselves without capitalism

Food Not Bombs - same idea as above but less emphasis on growing food

The Buy Nothing Project - community resource pooling to combat consumerism

Demand Utopia - Rojava solidarity & social ecology activism - speaking of which, The Internationalist Commune of Rojava have their Make Rojava Green Again project.

Also, if you want your solarpunk social media then start looking to the decentralised non corporate sunbeam city mastodon instance (blend of tumblr and twitter without your data being sold) where you’ll find shit tonnes of information on making food, growing things, building sustainable technology yourself etc being shared - like this $3 DIY solarpowered USB charger or this $30 wind turbine made largely from salvaged parts.

In terms of building online infrastructure to actively combat capitalism, using and helping to develop open-source, community run software & websites like the sunbeam city mastodon instance should be a priority. This is a good alternative to google for searching.

In terms of building real world solarpunk infrastructure as resistance to actively combat capitalism, the organisations linked above are honestly invaluable - especially Food Not Bombs. I’d also add the Industrial Workers of the World (a democratic workers’ union for anyone in the world without hiring/firing power) as well as tenants’ unions - like ACORN in the UK. Finally, find or start a community garden.

@mixbagofholding

It wasn’t until recently that I realized not many people these days know about the Freecycle Network but it’s totally a thing and you should totally know about it.

Finally details for a windmill

It’s happening all the time people!!

thoughtportal:

Solarpunk and How We Escape Dystopia

In this episode we explore a relatively new subgenre of science fiction called Solarpunk, which aims to imagine better ecologically harmonio

The Pop Culture Detective Agency

In this episode we explore a relatively new subgenre of science fiction called Solarpunk, which aims to imagine better, more ecologically harmonious, futures on earth. In many ways Solarpunk is a reaction to both the real-world climate crisis and to the many apocalyptic visions of collapse filling our screens. Andrew Sage from the YouTube channel Andrewism joins host Jonathan McIntosh and friend of the show Carl Williams for this conversation.

References & Links
• The Andrewism YouTube Channel
• Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
• Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
• Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation
• Fighting for the Future edited by Phoebe Wagner 
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Princess Mononoke from Studio Ghibli
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin
• Monk and Robot book series by Becky Chambers
• Dear Alice from THE LINE
• Dear Alice’ Decommodified Edition by Waffle To The Left
• Our History Is the Future by Nick Estes
• 3000-Year-Old Solutions to Modern Problems by Lyla June 
• Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher