i feel like there’s a bit of a tendency in leftist circles to do the same thing conservatives do, and pine for an imaginary time period that never existed. except instead of like, ancient rome, or the 50s, a lot of people are weirdly fixated on like…the middle ages? or the hunter-gatherer days? or pirates? like people will try to be anti-capitalist and say “oh medieval peasants had better lives than we do” or “humans used to all live in small communities that took care of each other” and like. idk man id rather have vaccines and the ability to leave your abuser and the right to vote.
it’s tempting to think that since things are bad, they must be uniquely bad. but there is no utopia in the past that we need to return to, no garden of eden we were cast out of with the advent of. idk the industrial revolution or whatever. we need to create a better future, not despair about an imagined past.
part of this is also the extremely reductive idea that like, White Men are the root of all evil in the world, and therefor pre-colonial cultures must have all been utopias. in reality, they were neither barbaric nor magically perfect, they were just people with their own flaws and virtues. it turns out people everywhere were and are basically the same. looking for the magic button that will make everything perfect again just distracts from the mundane and hard work of making things better.
“Is it possible to turn things around by 2050? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.
Many scientists have been telling us how the world will look like, if we don’t act now. However, others, like Chan, are tracking what success might look like.
They are not simply day-dreamers either. They aren’t being too optimistic. They are putting together road maps for how to safely get to the planet envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where temperatures hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before we started burning fossil fuels, this article from July states.
“Three decades is enough to do a lot of important things. In the next few years—if we get started on them—they will pay dividends in the coming decades,” says Chan, the lead author of the chapter on achieving a sustainable future in a recent UN report that predicted the possible extinction of a million species.
Making these changes won’t mean years of being poor, cold and hungry before things get comfortable again, the scientists insist. They say that if we start acting seriously NOW, we stand a decent chance of transforming society without huge disruption.
No doubt, it will take a massive switch in society’s energy use. But without us noticing, that’s already happening. Not fast enough, maybe, but it is. Solar panels and offshore wind power plummet in price.
Iceland and Paraguay have stripped the carbon from their grids, according to a new energy outlook report from Bloomberg. Europe is on track to be 90 per cent carbon-free by 2040. And Ottawa says that Canada is already at 81 per cent, thanks to hydro, nuclear, wind and solar.
Decarbonizing the whole economy is within grasp. We can do this.
“If we have five years of really sustained efforts, making sure we reorient our businesses and our governments toward sustainability, then from that point on, this transition will seem quite seamless. Because it will just be this gradual reshaping of options,” Chan says, adding: “All these things seem very natural when the system is changing around you.”
Hoping people with more relevant knowledge and science parsing skills than I do might comment on this …
I think it is absolutely vital that people be able to picture The Healed World. Honestly I think it’s one of the most important things we can do.
Look at how many different apocalypses people can visualise. Our brains can freely feast on unlimited scenes of scarcity, competition and fear. Everywhere we turn we can consume endless content about killing our neighbors for scraps, about hurting children, about bleak planets and extinction, and lots and lots of guns. It is easy, accessible and cheap. Our minds gobble up as much of this content as the market generates and the market gleefully generates more. We feed and feed upon a future of suffering and loss. We feast on images of brown children being hurt, unnecessarily, and say smugly that “that’s just what humanity is like.” Our brains are programmed away from the natural human responses to crises (fix it, help each other, rebuild and hope) and TOWARDS the mindsets of fictional apocalypse (cause it, turn on each other [it’s just what humans do! We’ve all seen the same stories!], collapse, fight each other for crumbs, the world is doomed anyway.)
It’s pretty unnecessary. And frankly pretty cringe. Imagine being part of some of the most prosperous, empowered, educated, connected group of humans to ever exist, and having a brain that can only picture the future as apocalypse-movie.
And where is the food of abundance, equality, beauty, hope, diversity? Where is the actual food of the future? Oh. It’s in, like, three solarpunk anthologies, huh?
Huh.
Anyway not to get all Amitav Ghosh on main but we have GOT to address this unnecessary and EMBARRASSING failure of imagination. Because we are the generation currently failing in our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth, because of this deranged inability to picture the world as being a real place, and the future being a place where people will live.
So, basically, yes, let’s just say it and start saying it regularly. The work is now and we have to do it. It isn’t impossible. Yes there is hope. Yes it can all be done. Yes there is a future for fucksake. It’s within our grasp. that is what futures are.
👆 Not sure if I’ve already reblogged this, but @elodieunderglass is 100% right here. We find it so easy to picture doom, but we find it so hard to picture healing.
Also, giving up on a future that is still possible means not only giving up on your own life, but the lives of your loved ones, on the poor and disadvantaged people who will face the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and giving up on nature itself.
For some people, climate disaster is already here. There are millions of people already fighting for survival. They don’t have the privilege of sitting back, giving up, and waiting for the apocalypse to come.
They don’t have the privilege of saying “Oh well, the world’s doomed anyway so why should we bother?” And neither should anyone else.
I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of “people also watched” and “for you” into the results. That’s not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.
“I despise your wretched little games” perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy
They also refuse to actually show the parameters you searched for. If you sort by “upload date,” the first few videos might be more recent ones by upload date, but anything past that you’ll find a video that was uploaded five years ago, then five months ago, then three years ago, etc, which—NO! That’s NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!! PUT THEM IN ORDER!!!
Also sometimes the “people also watched” bullcrap will not only be entirely unrelated, it will also be videos with violent, sometimes outright triggering thumbnails. I’ve gotten some AWFUL unrelated video thumbnails just when searching for video game music videos.
Jason Aldean has a small man insecurity. He is trying to exploit small town insecurities from his mansion and security detail. #PlasticCowboy
Can’t imagine surviving a mass shooting where guns killed 60 innocent people and wounded 400 more, and you think guns are the way to resolve issues. Fcuking 🤡
still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt
i promise you, a man can be fem to the point of being in danger while wearing literally exactly the same thing as a hypermasculine guy. a boring basic black suit. a t shirt and jeans. a UNIFORM. gender conformity is not only about what you wear
None of you have watched that heartbreaking scene in The Birdcage where Albert gives up wearing everything he likes to try and blend in for their son’s conservative prospective in-laws and is so awkward and uncomfortable that no one says much until finally he says, defeated, “I know what you’re thinking - dressed like this, I’m even more obvious, aren’t I?” and it shows.
Here, have your queer heart broken:
This is what I’m talking about. This is still literally how it is in most places in the Midwest if you’re trying to “pass” for straight/cis/whatever.
I cannot begin to describe how hard I cried when I saw this scene the first time and how confused my conservative family was as to why I was crying.
It’s so funny how literally the way a man holds his wrists is an indication of femininity but also people think it’s all about makeup and clothing. But we’re also at a point that if you have a suit that is any color other than black, dark grey, or navy, it’s flamboyant.
Men’s sartorial stylings are so rigidly controlled it’s painful. Tim Gunn here is at the very absolute bleeding edge of “acceptably masculine” here for most cishet men, just for some noticible stripes, patterns, and purple, and that’s before he even moves. This is how restricted it is.
But Trixie Mattel (out of drag here) wearing standard masculine garb is could still be deemed unacceptably feminine for body language alone.
This is why we talk about “toxic masculinity” – the idea that any expression of emotion besides anger or even wearing colorful clothes is non-masculine and therefore restricted is horrifying. It sucks! Men should be allowed to express themselves outside of a tiny box of acceptable behavior, because they’re, y'know, people, and people have a wide range of expression in the way they like to look and move and act.
I honestly feel like it’s gotten worse over the last couple decades, too. If you look at men’s fashions from the 70s and even into the 80s, there’s a lot of style choices that look pretty cringe to us, but…. you also see a lot more color and pattern in suits than you do now. I’m not sure when this started to shift, or if it’s tied in to the increasing lack of color in all consumer products, but it sucks.
LGBTQ PEOPLE! if you were thinking of looking up your emotionally abusive cishet ex girlfriend/ex best friend from high school and/or college, DON’T. let me make it easier for you. if you were wondering what she’s up to now, it’s probably one of these
nurse
charity coordinator that is under IRS investigation
racist
housewife to doctor who she will probably kill
writing job (thinkpieces on medium about taylor swift, “imposter syndrome” or writes the dialog for the duolingo owl)
At first Netflix said, come write for us. We’ll save your cancelled shows and write about whatever niche story you want. Our algorithm says people will watch it!
Then a few years later they said, regardless of our promises or contract obligations we are cancelling shows after two seasons without telling anyone. Turns out no matter how loved a show is, we get less subscriptions after the second season.
How many subscriptions did we bring you? Netflix won’t say.
So writers started writing two season shows. Just give us two seasons, Netflix. Like you promised.
Then Netflix said, oops sorry! Turns out your show didn’t premiere at #1 and the views in the first day weren’t what we wanted so we’re cancelling your second season.
What were the numbers? How many people watched our show? Netflix doesn’t say.
Then, they did something extra special. They started taking shows and splitting their first season into two halves. Inside Job was not two seasons. It was one season split in half.
Oops! Sorry! The second half of your first season didn’t do as well as the first half, so now your show is cancelled!
Why? How many people? How much money? These companies are making cash hand over fist and they refuse to tell people the truth: people loved your show. Loved it. But some corpo exec wanted an infinite money making machine. Do you know how long shows are in production for before you watch them? Years. Like, 5+, even 10+ years. And Netflix gives it less than a week before they decide whether you’re getting cancelled.
