Digital illustration of a blonde woman wearing a mask facing the New York City skyline. She is standing on a fire-escape wearing a tan dress that reads, ‘climate change is a public health crisis.’
On Saturday I hung out with my 84-year-old ecologist great uncle and he stopped in mid-conversation (abt the return of the whooping crane) and very seriously told me that “you can go one of two ways, as a naturalist”; either you keep sight of the hopeful possibilities, or you don’t. I’m one of nature’s wretched little pessimists but when an old ecologist literally holds your hands in his and tells you, “don’t despair,” you have to try, I feel.
I’m immune to a lot of the “hopepunk” narratives about ecology but…
The Karner Blue butterfly was extirpated from Canada the year before I was born. He donated to one of the projects to bring it back for years, and even though the project he was working on fizzled out, I told him about the branch in Toronto, still going strong. They save every lupine seed they can harvest and germinate them carefully so that in 20, 30, 40 years we might have enough habitat to bring the Blues back. He was part of the first wave of that effort.
Fuck!!!! What do you do with that kind of care? You have to at least try to believe that better things are possible!
Growing up, I never imagined AI + book bans would be a REAL LIFE concern of mine in middle age. I don’t think I’d believe most of the crazy shit we deal with in 2023 was coming our way.
We need a new word for that roaring 20s feeling of being constantly upset and overwhelmed.
a massive cloud of paper airplanes descending upon a 747 and when they disperse all that’s left is a massive airliner skeleton picked perfectly clean of all flesh
![A screenshot of text, which reads: "Trump has become an unfortunate statistical outlier in the nation's 247-year history, comparable only to 'Spiders Georg,' a fictional person dreamed up by a Tumblr user who 'lives in cave & eats over 10,000 [spiders] each day' and is solely responsible for upping the average number of spiders eaten by each person per year."](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f1a6b8186061832a5987851ed485c685/d93dd066f518b5ca-ec/s500x750/a14fb68e92d7036ce3b89c60a6efdf2c3a2f2e76.png)
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