We saw a firefly on our way home from national night out tonight.
I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 20 years, and never seen one here, before.
In less than a decade, I’ve watched the proliferation of native planting, habitat planting, signs saying an area is for pollinators and no pesticides allowed, fewer and fewer monoculture grass lawns. Better raking and soil health practices. Businesses and schools are installing rain gardens and native plants all over my neighborhood, and it’s slowly spilling out into more and more types of neighborhoods.
if you haven’t been paying attention to gardens for the past decade you’d never notice it.
But it started slow and now it’s speeding up rapidly.
Women scientists made up 25% of the Pluto fly-by New Horizon team. Make sure you share this, because erasing women’s achievements in science and history is a tradition. Happens every day.
it’s so Weird how ppl STILL make fun of the idea of alcohol-free queer spaces just because an asexual teenager suggested it in 2015. it was odd then and it’s odd now. Why are you mad at the idea of a coffee shop for queer people. don’t answer that i do not gaf
As a queer who spent his twenties struggling with alcoholism, I’d very much appreciate alcohol-free queer spaces. Frankly I find it weird and a tad disturbing that a queer space is that is not a bar or a nightclub is such a rarity. I don’t enjoy a lifestyle of partying, getting drunk, and having casual sex being my only option to socialize with people who are like me.
And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.
If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There’s a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.
Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there’s now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?
We’ve becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.
I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.
Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.
if there are people who care, it’s never a lost cause. at one point, kākāpō, a nocturnal flightless parrot species from aotearoa, were thought to be entirely extinct for decades. until 1977, where booming calls from males were heard on the small island of whenua hou. now, thanks to people who care so much they dedicated their lives to caring, kākāpō numbers are close to 300. despite the setbacks. despite the small gene pool causing infertility and health problems. people cared so fucking much that they survived. this is one of COUNTLESS, countless similar stories. I’m studying ecology so that I can go into conservation and all around me, every day, I see people who care enough to put years of their lives into learning about and solving environmental problems. I don’t know man. hope isn’t just some nebulous thing. it’s tangible if you do something with it.
Tim Wong saw the decline of the pipeline swallowtail butterfly, and dedicated himself to providing habitat and raising babies, and it worked.
Spix’s Macaws were extinct in the wild for 70 years, and now captive breeding and conservation groups have reintroduced a small population (with more on the way) and there are babies being successfully raised in the wild again.
And what else is there, but hope? We exist for the grace of hope. Those who have lost all hope don’t stay here. If you are here to send an ask like this, it is not because you have given up, it’s that you are hoping someone will show you that that hope is worth having.
It is!! It always is!!
There will be good things and if you cannot find them, make them! The time will pass anyway, you can choose what to do with it, and so many, many people are choosing to try to help.
On the nuclear point, we also thought it would take 1000 years for Chernobyl to recover, if it even could. It was expected to be a wasteland. Bare mud and rusting shells of buildings as far as the eye could see; after the reactor blew, in the days that followed the forests turned red as they died from the radiation, and they had to be felled, chipped, and buried down deep. Every plant, every animal, gone.
I took these photos in 2016, on the 30th anniversary:
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Animals that have now returned:
Pine martens
Deer
Wild boar
Wolves (previously extinct in the region)
Bears (endangered in the region)
European bison (previously extinct in the region)
Giant eight foot catfish in the cooling channels (fed my mate’s lunch)
And you would not BELIEVE the insect life. The exclusion zone - even the worst affected bit around Pripyat and the reactor - is so, so alive. The only taxon struggling to return still is birds, and even then, I did hear a crow at one point in Pripyat.
Even if we die. Life, in some form, will always find a way.
Anon is spouting fossil fuel industry propaganda (unwittingly or not).
Don’t give in to despair - it’s what they want, because that way they can continue to lobby governments to ignore citizens’ pleas to divest from using it. And they can continue to talk pension schemes companies into investing in their products, too.
Don’t give in to despair. I cannot - despair is far too exhausting.
Just a quick reminder that AI isn’t just an offense to artists and creators. It’s draining massive amounts of power and resources at an unprecedented rate.
Resources that are actively being pulled from people in order to be used for AI data centers
Everytime you use chat GPT, or make those actors kiss, or create ‘AI art’, this is happening. We may not be there yet, but this will lead to loss of life.
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