#c: deforest

[hotvintagepoll]

I know he's not counted b/c he was a tv actor but I do want everyone to go look at DeForest Kelly.

we are all looking at him trust me

[anghraine]

Further contemplated the femslash Spirk concept while I was going to sleep, inevitably, and concluded:

I am perfectly aware this has been done before in the last, you know, nearly 60 years of this ship's towering fandom influence; I've definitely seen art and cosplay. However, I'm deliberately insulating myself from reading any other versions until the finer details are more nailed down in my own head.

McCoy is definitely still a man (specifically DeForest Kelley c. TOS) because it only later occurred to me that 1) thematically, I definitely prefer this trio as a mixed gender group and 2) the advocate for emotion and instinct and human warmth being a male doctor and the voice of logic and discipline being a woman and technically his superior pleases me greatly. I also like the McCoy-Kirk brotp as a male-female friendship that is intense, complex, and 100% platonic.

I'm still figuring out how Kirk being repeatedly menaced by the woman of the week would pan out with f!Kirk. With m!Kirk it feels like the show pushes him having an irresistible appeal to women in general (regardless of the woman's morality) that is where this ultimately comes from, but he's got a lot of Odysseus tropes to him as a character that make his femme fatale allure and willingness to use it as a tool more interesting than as the inevitable fate of a female space captain. Also, even in a femslash context, it feels homophobic for it to always be women sexually harassing f!Kirk.

Kirk's going to be Jessica instead of my original idea of Deborah. I was thinking of what would be a sturdy, ordinary name in the Midwest comparable to James that would also abbreviate conveniently to a common short form (Jim / Deb / Jess). I wanted the shortened version to be something that could carry the emotional weight of Spock's very occasional "Jim" without feeling that the nickname itself is more significant than Jim is for a dude from Iowa. I also wanted to avoid the -y/-ie endings of so many English nicknames (sorry, Francophones). Deb seemed to work well enough, except I'd forgotten that I have a considerably older family friend who not only uses Deb (and is named Deborah) but happens to have very similar coloring and background to young Shatner. As I was plotting the femslash, the association with her felt increasingly weird and uncomfortable, so I switched to Jessica (chosen for reasons largely unrelated to it also beginning with J, but that helps!).

Does Jessica Kirk wear the miniskirt and go-go boots while issuing non-negotiable orders from her captain's chair? Definitely.

[insectoriium]

timely insect of the day

cerambyx longicorn (cerambyx cerdo)

this species of longhorn beetle can be found in most of europe, north africa, and caucasia.

it's one of the largest native european beetles, getting around 41 - 55 millimetres big. it exhibits sexual dimorphism, in males antennae are longer than the body, while in females antennae are shorter than the body.

c. cerdo is vulnerable according to the IUCN red list, this is especially apparent in central europe, where the species is almost extinct because of deforestation.

pic. 1: a male and a female cerambyx cerdo, notice the antennae length difference! (credit: didier descouens)

pic. 2: a male c. cerdo (credit: lidewidje on wikipedia)

[fwol-jintu]

Concept of transformers in svsss would be so funny

Like imagine shen yuan getting dragged into pidw but instead his system's like "aight, heres your stuff"

As in like, maybe his tablet or something?

But instead that dumbass does not give his tablet and instead gives him

*inhales*

[Ultimate Skill: Foreign Call]

[Due to your title, "Misplaced", you are now able to weaponize your surroundings.]

[Number of slots: 3]

"System, what the actual fuck."

And then like moments later he finds it incredibly cool.

Also its an evil system, not in the sense that its mean to shen yuan but in the sense that it wants pidw to go downhill and fast

And whats the easiest way to do that? Bring in pidw's biggest hater and give him the ability to make metal monsters cuz hell yeah

But then it backfires cuz sy is more interested in the fauna and flora rather than uhhhh killing the world

System: arent you suppose to be pidw's biggest hater?

Sy: but like, look, magical boar :D

System:

System: you know what, yeah sure.

anywayssss

__________________________

Shen Yuan tipped his hat down, trying to find an exit out this forest.

He could just tell Celadon to transform and fight, but- well. Trees. He is NOT going to be a deforester and potentially kill a lot endangered beasts, thanks!

「"Operator, they're locking in on us!"」 Celadon informed with much worry in his rough mechanical voice as he carried Shen Yuan out of there.

At the news, Shen Yuan snapped his head back to look and- holy fuck holy fuck why are those damn people still chasing after them?!

"Celadon what the fuck did you do for them to chase you like this?!!!"

He cursed loudly, panicking and trying to get them out of this situation. For context, they were being chased down by cultivators.

「"How would i know?! I was just trying to get a snack..!"」 Celadon weaved through the forest, movements swift and agile as he swung from tree to tree.

"Mistake number one! Don't try to buy food when you look like a damn demon, you punk~!"

[ The system thinks you both are stupid ]

They were in for a damn long of a run.

________________________

sy: bro wtf did u do!!!!

C: i just wanted to buy food????

System: bruhh.... these fuckin' idiots...

Also, Celadon is a giant mechanical spider cuz... yeah.

And! For shen yuan! A very badass-

Short hair

Martial artist lookin ahh clothes, aka pants instead of flowy gown cuz yes

backstory where he's an exile cuz his hometown prophecized that he'd bring ruin to the world (cant argue with that considering what system's goal is)

And uh yeah

yay!!

Celadon, drinking alchohol: yeaahahahaha! That hits the spot!

Sy:

Sy: can robots get drunk, or even taste?

Celadon:

Celadon: nah, not really, im just drinking for the sake of it lol (Downs another cup)

sy, blinking, and then raging: you punk~!!! You're just wasting my money at this point!! (Cries in a corner)

system: this is peak entertainment

Also no i dont know much about transformers, i just think theyre cool asf

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Chatting with the Chaco Horned Frog

The Chacao horned frog, also known as the lesser Chini frog (Chacophrys pierotti) is a species of horned frog found in central South America, from northern Argentina to Paraguay and Bolivia. It resides in an area known as the Gran Chaco or Dry Chaco, named for its high temperatures and lack of rainfall. Within this region, the Chaco horned frog resides mainly in dry scrubland, floodplains, and dry tropical forests.

Due to the extreme environment in which they live, lesser Chini frogs spend most of the year underground. During the cool, dry season from May to September, adults dug burrows and hibernate; to keep themselves moist, they surround themselves in a cocoon of dead skin. Once the rainy season begins in October, they emerge to feed and breed. Like most frogs, the diet of C. pierotti consists mainly of insects; particularly beetles, ants, bees, butterflies, and moths, and occasionally smaller frogs or tadpoles. There is no record of predators targeting this species, though their small size likely makes them an easy target for foxes, coyotes, and opossums.

At only 4.5 - 6.5 cm (1.7 - 2.5 in) long, lesser Chini frogs are on the small side. However, they generally appear rather plump and round-- the better to retain moisture during the dry season. Adults can appear mottled brown or green, which helps them to camouflage against the surrounding foliage. Despite their name, Chaco horned frogs have no horns or similar-looking appendages.

Mating occurs throughout the rainy season, and typically peaks in January. Males attract females by calling, especially just after heavy rains. Females lay their eggs in the rivers and temporary lagoons that form, and the larvae hatch some time later. Tadpoles only take about 2 weeks to metamorphose into adults, and by the following rainy season they are ready to mate. Individuals typically only live to be about 5 years in the wild.

Conservation status: The IUCN has classed C. pierotti as Least Concern. However, it is threatened by habitat loss due to agriculture and deforestation, and by collection for the pet trade.

Photos

Nadia Bach

Norman Scott

Josh Vandermeulen

[your-blorbo-is-a-dog]

Cwilbur guy voice: can I get a cwilbur as a dog 🥺

⭐️ c!Wilbur from the DreamSMP is a Siberian Laika.

Eastern Siberia Laikas were used in sledding, hunting, and reindeer herding. After a bit, their use was made to be narrowed down, however, due the fact the dog breed wasn’t exactly bred to be specialised for any of these uses, that proved difficult. Deforestation depopularised the breed in a similar manner to how Wilbur without a home left him without purpose. They are bark-pointing dogs, very similar to wolf-dogs. They dig their own dens when they have pups, and bark a lot, hence the name, “Laika” and are highly territorial.

[ovwechoes]

do you write for venture? if so, could you do nsfw and sfw headcanons with them? i love them sm!!

Venture SFW/NSFW Headcanons!

Yes I do! Thank you for the request, and I hope you enjoy them c: Any thoughts or opinions are always welcome, and my asks are open! NSFW headcanons will be under the cut, and please don't read them unless you're 18+/over the age of 18yrs old.

Does Venture have any secret talents or skills they don't talk about much, if at all? I think Venture would have an affinity for painting, especially natural scenery and landscapes. They'd love Bob Ross paintings and would follow tutorials in their downtime, but with their own flair added to them. They also, of course, enjoy collecting crystals and loves collecting rocks to break open and see if they're geodes. They have a secret TikTok to show what they find, and they like to remain anonymous there to keep things private and entirely focused on their discoveries.

What personal goal or ambition drives Venture, which they rarely share with others? How does it influence their behaviour? Venture wants to protect what's left of the environment and the Earth itself; they're paranoid and cautious about deforestation, and the possibility that archaeological discoveries could be destroyed before they're appreciated and found, so it's something that they're passionate about and influences them in their daily life. They don't like to cause too much harm to the Earth when fighting, and they secretly donate money to organisations that put said money into rebuilding the environment. They feel immense guilt when they see the after effects on the ecosystems around them after fights between overwatch and talon, for example. It's something they don't discuss very much, and when they do they keep it simple because they don't like being that open about it incase others' opinions make them feel more guilty.

Who is an unlikely friend or ally for Venture? How did this friendship develop, and what do they value in each other? I can honestly imagine Junker queen being one of the most unlikely allies and friends of Venture. They might both share an affinity for the beauty of geodes and crystals, and Venture would want to share with Junker queen the beauty of archaeological finds that have been found on her land. It's something they'd bond over, and Venture would appreciate Junker queen's acceptance of their eclectic personality, which sometimes rubs off on people the wrong way. They're both weirdos in their own ways, and they both love shiny and historical things.

Does Venture have any unique or peculiar habits? How do these quirks affect their interactions with others? Venture 100% has self soothing stims that aren't necessarily autism related, but help them focus when they're busy or stressed out. They'd do things such as twisting their fingers, playing with small rocks between their fingers, or fiddling with tech just to pass the time. It's something they don't hide anymore, and they like to encourage others to take part even if they're not neurodivergent. They also pick up words and habits from people very easily; they heard Tracer say "okie doke" one too many times and now they can't stop using it even in professional spaces. It's apart of their vocab now and until something new replaces it, it's what everyone at Waypoint has to tolerate.

What is something that really annoys Venture? How do they typically react when faced with this annoyance? Venture is bothered by narcissism; they don't mind when people are confident and admit their own strengths, but it's bothersome to them when people flaunt it as if they're a walking god. They appreciate humble people, and like when someone shows their strengths, rather than plays them up with their words to inflate an ego they shouldn't have (in Venture's opinion). Another big pet peeve they have is when people have ignorant bliss. They believe that being aware and working towards a better future is better than staying blind to what's happening; they very much believe that if you choose to stay unaware of what's going on and how it's impacting society or the planet, you're encouraging the harm it causes and are complicit. It's something they're very passionate about and they can be seen as blunt or too harsh when confronting people like this.

NSFW headcanons are below the cut! Sexual themes are present so keep this in mind when reading.

What is a desire or fantasy that Venture keeps private? How do they reconcile this with their public persona? With Venture being the first openly non-binary overwatch agent, they feel an expectation to be a switch and to have no sexual preferences. Regardless of this, they privately enjoy being submissive and letting their partner take the reigns during sex. They find it hard to be openly sexual, and feel that they shouldn't be because they're trans non-binary, as if it's something seen as dirty in the public eye. However, when they trust someone enough as their partner, their sex drive speaks for itself.

What are some fantasy scenarios or settings that Venture finds particularly appealing? How do these fantasies align with their real-life desires? I can imagine they have a fetish for sensory play, especially the use of wax in sex and foreplay. They enjoy the feeling of it burning their skin, and the submission aspect from their partner doing this for them. In reality, this isn't a make or break thing for them and it's not something they need from his partner desperately to be happy. They would crumble if their partner suggested in with pure lust, but it's not something they're particular about because they understand that not everyone's interested in it. However, they're open with their partner about the idea of being restricted via sight and touch. They like the idea of not being able to touch their partner without permission, and being blindfolded. They're not too into BDSM, and it's not something they're experienced with, but fantasies wise, they'd be open to these things and light bondage if they trusted their partner enough with it.

How does Venture incorporate technology into their intimate life? Are there any gadgets or tech they particularly enjoy? Venture would 100% make a new toy for their partner to use based on one conversation they had about potential fantasies or what they'd want in an idealistic world. They're not too experienced with using toys, but they'd be willing to explore it more with a partner who understood them and accepted them fully, and was willing to do so with them without judgement or pressure. They'd of course make toys based on rocks and based on historical findings just to see how they'd feel in the modern era.

What kinds of physical or emotional stimulation does Venture find most fulfilling? How do they incorporate these into their intimate life? Venture enjoys verbal reassurance and words of affirmation; they enjoy being told dominating words filled with praise during sex, it makes them feel as though they're doing everything right. They love when a partner 'matches their freak' and can get on board with exploring new kinks and new ideas they've considered a couple times. They also love when their partner entertains their behaviours that others would consider weird; it somehow turns them on even more and makes their sexual tension even higher. They love to be touched on their shoulders, their lower back and the back of their neck - that's their main erogenous zones and if their partner touches them, Venture will be left high and dry until they're able to get off fully. It'll stick with them for days as well...

How comfortable is Venture with showing vulnerability during intimate moments? How does this vulnerability impact their relationships? For years, Venture couldn't have sex with someone unless he knew them well. One night stands never worked for them, and they were always left feeling used and unfulfilled. It was uncomfortable, but they take them as learning moments that helped them understand what they like and don't like in sex. They used to only have sex with the lights off, so that they wouldn't have to see what their partner's face looked like after seeing their body naked. As confident and unapologetically authentic as Venture can be, their body was something they felt especially uncomfortable with for years. They still sometimes need the light off to stay in the mood, but it's something they've improved on. On the other hand, Venture encourages their partner to be as vulnerable as they need to be; if they need to cry, laugh, hold them, etc. it's okay with them. It's not a turn off for them to see those from their partner, if anything they view it as a way to build their relationship even more.

I hope you enjoyed these anon and thank you again for the request ^^

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Crime more than climate is to blame for record fires in the Amazon

An investigation by SUMAÚMA suggests land grabbers and ranchers are committing arson for commercial and political objectives, safe in the knowledge that investigations are few and punishments weak

The area burned in the Brazilian Amazon in the first ten months of this year would cover a space equal to 100 times the size of São Paulo, Latin America’s most populous city. From January to October, over 120,000 fires destroyed 15 million hectares in the biome, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Despite a record number of blazes and certainty that human action is what caused them, only a few dozen people have been arrested, as found in a SUMAÚMA survey of federal and state police departments. There are cases like São Félix do Xingu, Pará. In this municipality, which holds the country’s largest herd of cattle and the record for most area burned in 2024, nobody has been punished for a single fire thus far.

The numbers illustrate how weak the laws are and how difficult and insufficient the investigations are in the Amazon, leading crime to continue rising. This year, the area lost to fire in the Amazon grew by at least 114% compared to 2023, according to the MapBiomas organization’s Fire Monitor. Police, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, and environmental authorities have a hard time obtaining evidence that would lead to a criminal prosecution of the people behind the fires. And when this happens, forest arsonists receive a slap on the wrist: their entire sentence can be served with work release or in home confinement.

According to the Fire Monitor, most of what burned in the Amazon from January to October 2024 was forest. Yet over half (55%) of fires started in areas where cattle are farmed – the vast majority (86%) of which were cleared after 2015. This means that most of the fires began in regions where there are agricultural activities, but they spread to native vegetation areas. At this point, 14% of the Amazon’s forests have been replaced with pasture.

That is why it is no surprise that the few suspects arrested and charged with causing these fires are ranchers and land-grabbers who use fire as a tool to remove native vegetation and clear space for their cattle. That is what investigations by the Federal Police and Civil Police in Mato Grosso and Pará have found.

According to the Federal Police, 112 investigations were opened to look into fires that happened in 2024 in every region of the country (there is no Amazon-specific data). Seven people were arrested and ten were formally charged after sufficient evidence was found to file a criminal complaint. Some of these investigations led to operations like Dracarys, which is targeting those responsible for the deforestation of 1,672 hectares and for setting fire to 2,368 hectares of forest located on public land in the municipalities of Boca do Acre and Pauini, in the southeast of the state of Amazonas – burning an area equal to 15 Ibirapuera Parks, the city of São Paulo’s largest urban green area. According to the Federal Police, “the leader of the criminal scheme” and the “main financial backer and articulator of illegal operations in the two cities in Amazonas resides in an upscale condominium in Campinas [in the interior of the state of São Paulo].” His name was not disclosed.

“In various cases [as with Dracarys] we have signs of planned and coordinated criminal activities, aimed at a subsequent crime, the theft of public lands for livestock farming,” Humberto Freire, a chief of police and the Federal Police’s director of the Amazon and Environment, told SUMAÚMA. Another two police operations in the state targeted public forest arsonists. One of them is looking into fires that ravaged 5,000 hectares of forest to create pastures. Although the crime was committed in Apuí, in southeastern Amazonas, one of the suspects lives in Novo Progresso, in the state of Pará. Two sources in the city told SUMAÚMA the Federal Police were looking at a rancher involved with illegal mining and deforestation in the Jamanxim National Forest, where 17% of the plant cover has already been illegally cleared by land-grabbers in the region.

Continue reading.

[whencyclopedia]

Mutapa

Mutapa (aka Matapa, Mwenemutapa, and Monomotapa) was a southern African kingdom located in the north of modern Zimbabwe along the Zambezi River which flourished between the mid-15th and mid-17th century CE. Although sometimes described as an empire, there is little evidence that the Shona people of Mutapa ever established such control over the region. Prospering thanks to its local resources of gold and ivory, the kingdom traded with Muslim merchants on the coast of East Africa and then the Portuguese during the 16th century CE. The kingdom went into decline when it was weakened by civil wars, and the Portuguese conquered its territory around 1633 CE.

Great Zimbabwe Decline

By the 15th century CE, the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe (est. c. 1100 CE) was in decline and any links with the lucrative coastal trade of the Swahili coast had ceased. This may be because gold deposits had run out in the territory controlled by the kingdom. Additional factors may have included overpopulation, overworking of the land, and deforestation, leading to food shortages which were perhaps brought to crisis point by a series of droughts.

By the second half of the 15th century CE, the Bantu-speaking Shona peoples had migrated a few hundred kilometres northwards from Great Zimbabwe to a land where they displaced the indigenous pygmies and smaller tribes who fled to the forests and desert. The exact relationship between Great Zimbabwe and Mutapa is not known other than that archaeology has shown both kingdoms had very similar pottery, weapons, tools, and luxury manufactured goods like jewellery.

The Shona thus formed a new state, the kingdom of Mutapa, from around 1450 CE, although it may well have been a case of the Zimbabwe ruling elite changing capital rather than a general population movement from the south. The founder and first Mutapa king was Nyatsimba Mutota. According to Shona oral tradition, Mutota had been sent to investigate the land around the north bend of the Zambezi River and he came back with the glad tidings that it was plentiful in salt and wild game. The second king, Mutota's son Nyanhehwe Matope, would expand the kingdom even further, capturing both land and cattle.

Continue reading...

[star-trek-pop-quiz]

Star Trek POP-QUIZ #57

( 26 / 11 / 2024 )

Question 1. How does Spock appear in the short film "Unification"? a. AI Deep-Fakes b. CGI c. An actor using prosthetics d. It was filmed in advance

Bonus Question: What does 765874 mean?

Question 2. TRUE OR FALSE The writer for the episode 'Amok Time' is credited with the first positive portrayal of homosexuals in media.

Bonus Question: What is the writer's name?

Question 3. Which of these women in Star Trek did not play a Talosian? a. Georgia Schmidt b. Serena Sande c. Meg Wyllie d. Sandra Lee Gimpel

Bonus Question: Who does the last actress play?

Question 4. Which of these actors were not considered for the role of Spock? a. Deforest Kelley b. Nichelle Nichols c. Michael Dunn d. Carl Shelyne

Question 5. Fill-in Question! Which state was the Gorn fight-scene in the episode "Arena" filmed?

Score: __/ 5 + 3 bonus ( Answers under cut )

Question 1. c. An actor ( Lawrence Selleck ) using ( both physical and digital ) prosthetics

+ It is the service number of Yeoman J.M. Colt as shown in "Star Trek: Early Voyages" (1998) comics.

Question 2. FALSE. He is credited as the first positive-portrayal of homosexuals in science-fiction, with his short story 'The World Well Lost'.

+ Theodore Sturgeon

Question 3. d. Sandra Lee Gimpel

+ She plays the Salt-Vampire or Species M-113.

Question 4. d. Carl Shelyne

Question 5. Vasquez Rocks, California.

[mariacallous]

“In Praise of Floods” (Yale), a study of rivers by the late political scientist James C. Scott, arrives after a year of catastrophic floods. Last spring, heavy rainfall lifted parts of the San Jacinto and Trinity Rivers, in East Texas, at least a dozen feet above the flood stage, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. In September, during Hurricane Helene, the French Broad River surged into commercial corridors in Asheville, North Carolina, wiping out restaurants, breweries, stores, and dwellings. In October, in Spain, the Magro, Júcar, and Turia Rivers overflowed their banks in the region around the city of Valencia, leading to the deaths of two hundred and thirty-two people.

Scott wants us to look past disasters such as these. Focussing on the human costs of flooding, he argues, is too anthropocentric. A flood may be, “for humans,” the “most damaging of ‘natural’ disasters worldwide,” but, from “a long-run hydrological perspective, it is just the river breathing deeply, as it must.” A seasonal inundation, known as a “flood pulse,” delivers crucial nutrients to organisms that depend on rivers. “Without the annual occupation of the floodplain, the channel—that line on the map—is comparatively dead biotically,” he argues. Or, as he puts it more succinctly elsewhere in the book, “No flood, no river.”

It is as difficult to imagine a flood survivor reading these sentences without objection as it would be to picture a displaced resident of Pacific Palisades reading a book called “In Praise of Fires.” But Scott doesn’t ignore how damaging a river’s overflowing can be to those living along its banks. In celebrating periodic flooding, he is also warning about the costs of human intervention. Dams and levees lead to less frequent flooding, but erosion and deforestation mean more catastrophic floods when these barriers are breached. The more civilized you are, the less resilient you are.

“In Praise of Floods” offers a posthumous conclusion to a scholarly career of upending conventional wisdom. Scott spent forty-five years in the political-science department at Yale, where he taught until a few years before his death, last July, at eighty-seven. But his interests were broader than those of most political scientists. He started out as a specialist in contemporary Southeast Asia; just as he was beginning to gain recognition for his work, he risked his career to move to Malaysia and embark upon an ethnography of village life. He founded the agrarian-studies program at Yale, researching and teaching about rural communities from around the world. By the end of his career, he had left detailed field work behind and was writing sweeping treatments of the distant past, which nonetheless managed to broach some of the most vexing political questions of our time.

Though Scott came from the political left, his most famous book, “Seeing Like a State,” a vigorous critique of big government projects intended to improve human welfare, was warmly received by the libertarian right. When asked to define himself, he hedged and qualified: he sometimes called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’ ” He was an anthropologist “by courtesy,” in acknowledgment of the fact that he had no formal training in the discipline. Late in life, he drifted toward anarchism, but even this belief system exerted a tenuous hold, and he could offer only “two cheers” for it. He strove to cultivate a similar openness in his students. For several years at Yale, he led what he called an “incubator” workshop, in which he encouraged graduate students to bring in half-formulated ideas as a way to develop risk-taking instincts. Another risk he encouraged was student organizing: he was a strong and consistent supporter of the decades-long project to form a graduate-student union at Yale. In his private life, he tried his hand at farming (his biography on the political-science department’s website listed him as “a mediocre farmer”), and he brought eggs to his classes.

The lives of people working in agriculture were at the center of Scott’s work. Small farmers and peasants the world over endured dramatic transformations in the twentieth century and were subject to grand and ill-begotten experiments by capitalist and communist states alike. In colonial and post-colonial regimes, they were forced to plant cash crops and were heavily taxed. Under Stalin and Mao, experiments in collective farming led to famine. Scott wanted to study how rural populations responded to these upheavals.

Peasants have often been seen as docile and passive. Scott thought otherwise. He looked out for tacit “local knowledge” that states ignored in their giant programs of social remodelling, and discerned in small acts of disobedience a pattern of resistance that sometimes erupted into full-scale revolt. In his later work, he cheerfully depicted the “barbarians” who hovered on the edges of states, eluding conscripted labor and leading daring raids on grain hoards. Scott himself was a bit like one of these barbarians, constantly attacking and unsettling a seemingly stable consensus on the value of state power, and of civilization itself.

Scott first visited Southeast Asia in his early twenties. Born in southern New Jersey, in 1936, he attended a Quaker school before going to Williams College. At Williams, a professor encouraged him to study Burma, now Myanmar. After graduating, Scott went there on a Rotary Fellowship, in 1959. Riding a 1940 Triumph motorcycle, he travelled throughout the country, ending up at Mandalay University, where he studied Burmese for five months. The sojourn launched his interest in Southeast Asia, the peasantry, and the formation of states.

While overseas, Scott wrote reports on Burmese student politics for the C.I.A., and was involved in the U.S. National Student Association, then a hotbed of global student activism. As detailed by the political scientist Karen Paget, Scott’s involvement with the C.I.A. was brief, but his time with the U.S.N.S.A. seems to have whetted his interest in radical politics. This was the era of Third Worldism, when countries that had ejected colonial powers began to band together, many of them under the banner of non-aligned socialism. With the U.S.N.S.A., Scott travelled to Singapore, where he met representatives of the Socialist student union, and to Indonesia, where he was introduced to the heads of the Communist student union, many of whose members were later killed in the country’s anti-Communist purges of 1965.

In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the Vietnam War was a matter of urgent concern in politics and scholarship alike. The leading role played in the war by the Vietnamese rural poor prompted Scott to wonder what motivated peasants to revolt. This question led to his first major book, “The Moral Economy of the Peasant,” from 1976, which borrowed the idea of a “moral economy” from the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson. Scott described a universe of mutual assistance that peasants—his subject was Southeast Asia, but his conclusions were general—created for themselves to insure that they didn’t go hungry. The peasantry relied on what Scott called a “subsistence ethic,” a safety-first principle that dictated that access to food and other means of sustaining life took precedence over maximizing profit. If this fragile web of economic relationships was disturbed, it could lead to starvation and a breakdown of social trust.

Just such a breakdown had occurred in Vietnam and Burma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when colonial authorities began to intrude into peasant life, privatizing village lands, forests, and fisheries and introducing a multitude of punishing taxes. These moves disrupted the tenuous balance that had allowed peasants to survive. When the Great Depression reached these countries, in 1930, putting further strain on the livelihoods of small farmers, they erupted in resistance. Crowds, sometimes swelling to the thousands, began an assault on the colonial state. In a series of rebellious actions in central Vietnam, Scott writes, “administrative offices and their tax rolls were destroyed, post offices and railroad stations and schools were burned, alcohol warehouses plundered, collaborating officials assassinated, forest guard posts destroyed, rice stores seized, and at least one salt convoy attacked.”

“The Moral Economy of the Peasant” came out as political events were laying waste to the hopes that many had placed in Third World revolution. Post-colonial and socialist states founded in opposition to colonial oppression exhibited their own brutality and oppressiveness. One country after another employed fantastic schemes to improve general welfare, such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa campaign to resettle rural populations in Tanzania in planned villages. These efforts often required coerced labor and diminished democratic participation, and sometimes led to famine. When peasant rebellions appeared, they were crushed even in superficially democratic countries such as India, whose government violently suppressed the Naxalite uprisings in West Bengal. Later in life, Scott would confess to having become “disillusioned by the way in which revolutions produced a stronger state that was more oppressive than the one it replaced.”

Scott’s fourth book, the extraordinary “Weapons of the Weak,” from 1985, registers a growing disenchantment with revolutionary politics. In 1978, hoping to observe peasant struggle up close, he had moved with his wife, Louise, and their three children from Connecticut to a remote village in the state of Kedah, the rice bowl of Malaysia. In that country, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, revolutionary idealism was giving way to forms of state power that were sometimes as intrusive as the colonial regimes they had replaced. As part of the so-called Green Revolution, the Malaysian government had introduced new machinery and cash crops intended to boost agricultural productivity, restructuring the farming economy in ways that were greatly resented by the rural poor.

Scott went to Malaysia looking for rebellion. But, instead of open defiance, he found a series of half measures—“foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage.” Outward conformity and deference on the part of the poor masked quiet subterfuge: villagers were squatting on land that belonged to others, stealing food and money, refusing to work or working more slowly than usual, and secretly damaging farm machines. A man in Kedah told Scott that he knew exactly how to put barbed wire and nails into an auger to jam a combine harvester. He recounted watching as other villagers surrounded a harvester belonging to a Chinese syndicate, poured kerosene over the engine and the cab, and set it on fire. Scott defined these actions as “everyday resistance,” and argued that this was the most common form assumed by the fight against an oppressive society. Organized revolt was rare. But public servility masking private resentment was everywhere.

There is a certain doomed quality to the activity Scott describes in “Weapons of the Weak.” The peasants in Kedah knew that they had no way to win their campaign against the state; they hoped only to minimize or delay the threat to their livelihoods. Scott came to think, however, that such muted protests were in fact more common and more important than any other kind, and that these actions had the potential to bring down governments. In a later work, he named this sort of rebellion “infrapolitics”—politics outside the visible range. Throughout world history, he argued, people fought the encroachment of state power not by public protest—which under an authoritarian regime often meant death—but through a series of clandestine activities that amounted to protest nonetheless. In “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” from 1990, he told the story of how, as eighteenth-century European states began taking control of forests previously held in common, the peasantry in England and France continued to forage in them, and gather firewood and pasture animals, even after these activities had been outlawed. They considered it an injustice that their customary privileges had been abrogated by fiat, and they would fight, if quietly and subversively, rather than cede what they understood to be their rights.

Scott’s injunction to look for resistance where it does not immediately appear turns the familiar hierarchy of the visible and the invisible on its head. Don’t look only at the operations of power, at the crushing machinery of the state, at the apparent acquiescence of people to being ruled, he seems to say. Look, instead, at things that don’t seem worthy of comment at all. That is where the vast majority of resistance takes place. Look at rumors, gossip, metaphors, euphemisms, folktales—all the means by which subordinate groups disguise their opposition. This isn’t just another way of submitting to power; this is a way of maintaining safety, of living to fight another day. And, Scott believed, slipping from the worlds of his peasant subjects to something more universal, it is all around.

Scott’s sympathy for resistance to the state and his congenital skepticism of any project coming from on high constitute a political orientation that he eventually began to call anarchism. Unlike the late anthropologist David Graeber, one of the founding organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Scott wasn’t an anarchist activist: he had long ceased to be involved with social movements, and he offered no strategic considerations. But he shared with Graeber a theoretical viewpoint that didn’t take for granted that “civilization” was a natural good. Much of human history occurred outside the context of states, and a good deal of it, if you abstracted the objects of your gaze through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” took place in direct opposition to states. This meant that, when you looked at how states worked, even when they were trying to improve human welfare, you often found that they ignored the very things that people did on their own, without the help of government, to maintain their existence, or to live free of coercion.

The subject of how government worked or failed to work was the focus of “Seeing Like a State,” a series of case studies of high-modernist social-engineering projects undertaken mostly in the course of the twentieth century. Perhaps the book’s most familiar example, for Americans, is that of the large-scale city planning to which the urbanist and writer Jane Jacobs objected. But Scott also looked at German scientific forestry; collective farming in the Soviet Union and Tanzania; utopian city planning in Chandigarh, India, and in Brasília; and Vladimir Lenin’s theories about the formation of revolutionary parties.

Despite ideological differences, many twentieth-century intellectuals, politicians, and planners were united in their belief that the state had a special capacity to make vast improvements in human lives through wide-reaching social transformations. To accomplish such improvements, modern states had to reorder society in a way that was legible to them by bringing their subjects under centralized administrative control. How can the government collect taxes, for instance, or conscript soldiers or enforce the law, if people do not have last names? Better assign some. In a footnote drawn from a historical document, Scott unearths the example of a sixteenth-century Welshman who was chastised by an English judge for giving his name, “in the Welsh fashion,” as “Thomas Ap”—son of—“William, Ap Thomas, Ap Richard, Ap Hoel, Ap Evan Vaughan.” Afterward, the man “called himself Moston, according to the name of his principal house, and left that name to his posteritie.”

“Seeing Like a State” radiates with Scott’s fondness for reversing hierarchies of knowledge. He insists that high-modernist projects of social reform, however sophisticated their proponents, were less complex, not more, than the local societies and forms of knowledge they attempted to reorder. (How much more detailed knowledge is concentrated in “Thomas Ap William, Ap Thomas, Ap Richard, Ap Hoel, Ap Evan Vaughan” than in “Thomas Moston.”) The vision that a planner and his state bureaucracy projected onto an agricultural area or a neighborhood was far more rigid and simplified than what already existed. Scott called the practical knowledge accumulated by locals “metis,” after the ancient Greek word for “skill” or “wisdom”—distinct from “gnosis,” the word related to our “knowledge” and “insight.” Metis was “common sense, experience, a knack” or “savoir faire.” It was the way, for example, that certain Indigenous Americans taught Colonial settlers to plant corn “when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel’s ear,” a folkloric aphorism that contained within it years of observation of the sequence of seasonal change. But metis was also the informal system of “eyes on the street” that Jane Jacobs observed as having developed over the years in dense urban neighborhoods, and which no project planned from on high could replicate. Metis was also the warren of narrow city streets, perhaps built over old cow paths, that both represented and generated a thick network of intimate and practical neighborly relationships. High modernism, on the other hand, was the grid—easier to survey, tax, and police.

“Seeing Like a State” was published in 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of socialism, and after the United States had lost its taste for New Deal-style economic planning. Perhaps as a result, the book appeared more conservative than Scott meant it to be. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama gave it an approving notice in Foreign Affairs, and, a year after it was published, the head of the libertarian Cato Institute invited Scott to address its annual convention, much to his dismay. Many on the left concurred with their libertarian colleagues that Scott had made, however inadvertently, a pro-market case against state power. In a review, the liberal economist Brad DeLong noted the striking similarities in argument between Scott’s brief against planning and the libertarian Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s praise of the “spontaneous order” of market economies. Scott, unlike Hayek, was an avowed skeptic of free markets; in “Seeing Like a State,” he had argued, albeit briefly, that “market-driven standardization” was susceptible to many of the flaws of modern social engineering. But his critics on the left weren’t wrong to compare his arguments to Hayek’s: so intently and thoroughly did Scott make his case against the modern state that, once you’ve read “Seeing Like a State,” it’s difficult to imagine the virtue of any state action, even of the incremental and meliorist variety. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Years later, it’s possible to look at Scott’s book less as an isolated broadside against the state and more as a way of seeing, through extreme examples, the extent to which planning ignores local knowledge at its peril. Still, even in those instances, Scott offers equivocal lessons. When it comes to contemporary debates on how best to solve our nationwide housing crisis, for instance, he can be read as an ally to movements attempting to protect neighborhoods against large-scale development. He asks planners to “prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move.” He makes special pleas for “context and particularity.” At the same time, he asks to make room for “human inventiveness” and “surprises,” which might suggest removing constraints to development—for example, restrictive zoning—that stifle initiative and drive. If you need room to build, better for the state to get out of the way. Both stances are conceivable within the capacious framework of the book, and that is perhaps why radicals and conservatives alike have found support for their arguments in its pages.

“Seeing Like a State” offers an even more complex (or blurry) lens through which to view the climate crisis. Scott’s study of how states reordered the natural world to generate maximum revenue may help to explain our own landscapes of fracking pads and pipelines. But it’s difficult to extract from the book a coherent strategy to fight climate change. To avoid the worst of the devastation from rising global temperatures will undoubtedly require not just state action but multistate coöperation on an unprecedented scale. Governments may need to override city and country alike to produce solar arrays and wind farms, shut down coal- and gas-fired power plants, unearth minerals for large-scale battery storage, and retrofit millions of houses, offices, and schools with electric cooling and heating systems. With Scott in mind, it’s possible to hope that states engaged in this collective project will overcome the blindness of the past. Still, if they—and we—are to succeed, Scott’s advice that planners pause before making their “next small move” will likely be discarded.

It’s an irony of Scott’s career that, though he pleaded for respecting local knowledge, his own writing began to take on imperial proportions in the later decades of his life. The last major works that he published before his death, “The Art of Not Being Governed” and “Against the Grain,” both cover centuries of history, confidently summing up many shelves’ worth of research and surveying wide tracts of geography. Scott examines how ancient states formed around sedentary agricultural practices—growing rice in medieval Southeast Asia, and wheat in ancient Mesopotamia—not because such farming had any intrinsic or inevitable value but because it was an important step in creating a “legible” and “manageable” state. Outside the rice “padi-state” and “grain states,” in Scott’s view, intrepid rebels engaged in more mobile, nomadic forms of agriculture, trying to escape taxation and forced labor.

Scott saw each step in the civilizing process, from farming cereals to working on an assembly line, as a loss of complexity, a diminishing of the “great diversity of natural rhythms” to which our ancestors were attuned. “It is no exaggeration to say,” he writes, before arguably risking just such an exaggeration, “that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.” From this perspective, a civilization’s collapse, rather than something to be lamented, might be experienced, at least by those at the edge of a state, as “an emancipation.” Scott acknowledged that so-called dark ages offer “fewer important digs for archaeologists, fewer records and texts for historians, and fewer trinkets—large and small—to fill museum exhibits.” But he argued that “such ‘vacant’ periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare.” Anarchic social orders erect no monuments, and leave no ruins to be bleached over the centuries in the desert sand. Instead they offer alternative visions of how society might have developed had states not formed, concentrating manpower and crops, homogenizing landscapes, and taming rivers.

Some critics have called Scott a romantic, in part for seeming to indulge the lawlessness of non-state peoples. In “Against the Grain” and “The Art of Not Being Governed,” there is an ineluctable charisma to the frontier nomads, with their state-repelling egalitarianism and their sense of freedom. “In Praise of Floods” extends the forms of resistance Scott celebrates to nonhuman subjects. Laboring to evoke the sheer variety of what gets lost when rivers are subjugated by humans, he devotes a questionable chapter to ventriloquizing the voices of riverine animals—mollusks, river dolphins, snow carp, Asian hairy-nosed otters—speaking out against human intervention. But his work, even at its most tendentious, speaks uncannily to our current political mood of gnawing anxiety, fleeting optimism, and partial resignation over the future of the human project. To read Scott is to feel the fatalistic sense that civilization may have been botched from the beginning. But it is also to be hopeful—that what seems to be a runaway ecological crisis and a global drift toward authoritarianism contains within it the potential for political transformation, if you look closely enough.

At Scott’s memorial service, last October, organizers handed out tote bags with the slogan “Become Ungovernable.” Disobedience was, in certain respects, the watchword of all his work. In “Two Cheers for Anarchism,” a short book published in 2012, he testifies, like a latter-day Henry David Thoreau, to insubordination as an animating principle of all social change. He describes the desertion of Confederate soldiers during the Civil War as potentially a key factor in the overthrow of slavery, and even lauds the Vietnam War-era practice of “fragging,” in which infantrymen supposedly used live grenades to eliminate their commanding officers. Authoritarianism, in Scott’s view, dies this way: not through “revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs” but through “the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people.” Just as “millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef,” he writes, “so do thousands upon thousands of acts of insubordination and evasion create an economic or political barrier reef of their own.” 

[theriverbeyond]

Love your post about Gideon inadvertently breaking John's pattern of lashing out when she can't be used, and it made me wonder- what would John keeping the home fires burning for the Earth have looked like?

omg ty so much! ok so. things John could do to keep the home fires burning:

(tell the world) STOP (the war) the nuclear standoff. put those things away!!! better yet. destroy them.

let the trillionares go. they did it. it's done. your home is still here and can still be saved. let them go!!!!!!

MORE THAN THAT. if all the rich capitalists are the ones who ruined so many things, and now a bunch of them are GONE, then a lot of their influence is also gone!!! the oligarchs are gone baybey!!! John could step into the power vacum they left and force the hands of governments to like, do good things. force them to give everyone food and healthcare and stop fossil fuels. he could be a climate influencer online to dramatically influence the greater culture, instead of just doing that weird necro cult shit on twitch.

John cracked the code with the death of C--, and drank a BUNCH of deaths at the compound, so he Understands now. he wouldn't end up as powerful as he did when he Ate Alecto, but he cracked the code when he saw (& grabbed) the soul. this means he likely could...

BRING BACK HIS FRIENDS!!! The bodies are still there and he is literally holding the souls. bring them back and put the souls inside. they keep him sane and they love him and they have ideas

FEED EVERYONE. a big problem he mentioned was the planet running out of resources, but you're the lifedeath guy now. you cracked the CODE!!! it is time to go full jesus on the world. make wine from water and more bread from just one bread. take a fish and make it 100 fish. take an oil spill and turn it into nutrients for the fish. etc.

USE his new deathlife powers to do other things like, fix the oceans. fix the ozone. transform the big piles of garbage into something more readily taken by the sea. plant new sequioas and giant cacti and then accelerate their growth by 1000 years so they can provide for all their living things. inject biodiversity into endangered species and prevent their deaths by boats and deforestation etc. Yeah some of them might be teeth mutants, but when god sings with his creations, will a tooth mutant not be part of the choir?

to be evil but for the greater good, John could also kill and then puppet other world leaders and then more aggressively force institutional climate change, and end things like overfishing and Shein. i don't know if he is politically smart enough to finesse this but idk if he had his friends it could be a group effort. yeah he would still be one shade of evil dictator but it could NOT be worse than exploding the solar system.

i think the last point especially, like. in general, not exploding the world would be better than exploding the world. he could have done kind of a bad job of keeping the home fires burning and it would have still been way better than what he DID, which was kill everyone else and then himself

[valar-did-me-wrong]

So this convo by @mai-komagata & @illegalcerebral about how JCB could also be a Harfoot, made me pause & think about the probability of it happening. Which then lead me to look up on the history of Hobbits a little & I think I've got a Tinfoil Hat Theory for the Harfoot & Gandalf storylines in Season 3!

Imo we're gonna meet the Fallohide hobbits & Gandalf is going to visit Greenwood in S3!!

(I know atleast 10 other people have already speculated about Gandalf in Greenwood for S3, this is just my own tin foil hat attempt at the same!! So let's goooooooo 🫣)

So according to the lore, there were 3 tribes of Hobbits & by S2 we've met two of them the Stoors & the Harfoots..

Now the show seems to have given a lot of lore Harfoot traits, like burrow digging to the Stoors of the show for some reason.. maybe as a way to make Harfoots a migrating community & use it as a call back to the Wandering Days of hobbit history from the lore since season 1..

And seeing as neither the Stoors nor the Harfoots in the show seem to have facial hair or an adventurous side as a whole community, I think these are the traits they're planning to give the Fallohides who we might meet this season!

Maybe on the journey back towards the Harfoots, the Stoors & our girls (Noppy & Co) for some reason will meet the Fallohides?!?

Now what I could gleam from the maps in the show, the lore & the path of Harfoot migration according to this Nerdist article, the position of most major players by the end of S2 seems to be this:

N is where Noppy & Co are leaving from (seeing as there were no rivers or water sources all through Gandalf + Noppy's journey in S2) also the Dark Wizard is also somewhere here

H is where the Harfoots migrate about usually

And T is where Theo & Kemen are in S2E8 along with U which is Adar's Uruk colony in Mordor (now orphaned :c)

C is Cirdan in Lindon or Grey Havens, wherever you want him to be & E is where all our elves are after leaving Eregion (RIP)

Sau is where Sauron is supposed to be wreaking havoc rn

I am guessing, Noppy & co will follow the Migration song & trace their steps back to Rhovanion & then follow the migration trail to try & reach the Harfoots.

Now with all the Numenorian deforestation, Mt. Doom eruption & Uruk spread near Mordor, it would mean the Harfoots probably won't be able to survive in this area anymore, so they must go West or North now.

So probably following the migration trail will be fruitless for Noppy & co now and atp maybe they might find some sign or clue left behind by the Harfoots for them, to hint where they must be going.

This can be a pretty nice point to introduce Noppy & co. to the community of Fallohides & explore them a little like they did with the Stoors in S2.. maybe somewhere on the banks of Anduin, seeing as Anduin & it's river valley is mentioned by name in hobbit history often

Now seeing as Noppy & Co are going to travel west from Rhun, Gandalf probably won't follow the same path (after that emotional goodbye, unless they wanna throw a Poppy reappearance at us again) so Gandalf probably is going to go North West towards Greenwood & bring Oropher & Thranduil into the show!

:D

*gently removes the tinfoil hat & bows*

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

As CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, capturing and storing carbon is essential to keeping global warming below 1.5°C. However, not all carbon capture methods are created equal, with some perhaps doing more harm than good for biodiversity.

A new study published Thursday which modeled three prominent land-based carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategies found that reforestation is the only option that, along with effectively sequestering carbon, actively boosts biodiversity rather than potentially harms it.

The three CCS strategies analyzed were reforestation, the practice of restoring native trees on previously deforested or damaged land to sequester carbon; afforestation, adding trees where there were previously none; and bioenergy cropping, raising fast-growing crops — which sequester carbon as they grow — to burn for energy while collecting any emissions released in the process.

“Of the strategies we modeled… we found that all three strategies have the potential to benefit biodiversity by helping to mitigate climate change,” Jeffrey Smith, lead author and researcher at Princeton University told EcoWatch on a video call.  

However, he added, “In the case of afforestation and bioenergy cropping, we found that even if we account for the benefits they provide to biodiversity by helping to mitigate climate change, that wasn’t enough to outweigh the harms that they caused biodiversity by driving the loss of habitat.”

Bioenergy cropping requires razing land for crop growth which destroys part of an ecosystem. And it’s the transformation from natural ecosystems to agricultural plots that’s been the single largest driving factor of biodiversity worldwide, he said.

For afforestation, which may be feasible in savannahs, for example, Smith says that artificially placing trees could hinder the ecosystem by interfering with certain interactions, like those between shrub and herbivore species and frequent fires that burn across the landscape in an open ecosystem. “If you convert one of these savannahs to, say, a forest, you’re actually taking away habitat from lions and ostriches and things like that,” Smith said.

On the other hand, the authors found that reforestation provided a win-win by both capturing carbon and restoring vital parts of ecosystems that many species rely on.

[hirakhalder1000]

Global Warming: A Growing Threat to Our Planet

https://www.worldopress.com/post/the-fragile-truce-analyzing-the-fractured-india-pakistan-ceasefire-and-india-s-strategic-imperative refers to the long-term rise in Earth's average surface temperature due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Primarily driven by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes, global warming has emerged as one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Causes of Global Warming

The root cause of global warming lies in the increased concentration of greenhouse gases—mainly carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O). These gases trap heat from the sun, creating a "greenhouse effect" that warms the planet. While the greenhouse effect is a natural and necessary phenomenon, human activities have intensified it to dangerous levels.

Burning coal, oil, and natural gas for energy and transportation releases vast amounts of CO₂. Agriculture contributes through methane emissions from livestock and rice paddies, as well as nitrous oxide from fertilized fields. Deforestation also plays a critical role by reducing the number of trees that can absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Effects of Global Warming

The impacts of global warming are already being felt across the globe. One of the most visible effects is the increase in global temperatures, which has led to more frequent and intense heatwaves. Melting glaciers and polar ice caps contribute to rising sea levels, threatening coastal communities with flooding and erosion.

Climate change also disrupts weather patterns, resulting in more extreme events such as hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires. Ecosystems are under threat, with species facing habitat loss and extinction. In human populations, global warming affects food and water security, health, and economic stability.

Mitigation and Adaptation

Addressing global warming requires a dual approach: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions through cleaner energy sources, improved efficiency, and sustainable practices. Renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, and hydropower are critical in this transition.

Adaptation involves adjusting our societies to minimize the damage caused by climate change. This includes building resilient infrastructure, developing drought-resistant crops, and planning for disaster response.

The Role of International Cooperation

Combatting global warming is a global challenge that demands coordinated international efforts. Agreements like the Paris Accord aim to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Success depends on the commitment of governments, industries, and individuals alike.

Conclusion

Global warming is a defining issue of our time. Its consequences affect every aspect of life on Earth, from ecosystems to economies. While the challenge is immense, so too is the opportunity to reshape our future through innovation, cooperation, and responsible stewardship of the planet. Every action counts in the fight against climate change.

4o

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[bsenvs3000w25]

Blog 7: Music in nature? Nature in music?

Hello everyone,

I hope everyone had a relaxing reading week! I can’t believe it’s already week 7, with only two more blogs to go!

Music in nature? Nature in music?

To answer this question we need to consider both where music exists in nature and how nature is reflected in human music. For many, the idea of music in nature brings to mind the rustling of leaves in the wind and the rhythmic crash of ocean waves. However, nature does more than produce sound; it also shapes and inspires human music. Across cultures, musicians have translated natures rhythms and tones into musical expression.

Music in Nature

Humans use music as a form of self-expression and as a source of relaxation and connection. Music stimulates the brain, which can help with pain relief, reduce stress, and improve memory. A study conducted at Harvard University has shown that listening to relaxing music may lower blood pressure and heart rate (Harvard Health). Additionally, music brings people together through concerts and festivals. It also has a significant storytelling aspect, as many artists use it as an outlet for self-expression, often writing songs about their lives and emotions at different points in time. For example, Taylor Swift is well known for writing songs that reflect different eras of her life, often about love and heartbreak.

More info if interested!

Music requires either a voice or instruments both of which are found in nature. The key difference is that the musicians are not always human. Just like humans, animals also use music as a means of expression. For instance, the palm cockatoo uses twigs from trees as drumsticks to beat on hollowed logs. This behavior is a part of their courtship rituals, aimed at winning over a mate (Gray et al., 2001).

This demonstrates that musical expression is not unique to humans; but nature, too, has its own rhythms and melodies.

(This is so cool)

Nature in Music

Many artists are known for creating metaphors about nature in their songs. Some examples include

"What A Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong: "I see skies of blue and clouds of white, the bright blessed day…"

"Willow" by Taylor Swift: "Life was a willow and it bent right to your wind…"

One of my fav songs!

Artists also use music to raise awareness about preserving nature. For example, "Earth Song" by Michael Jackson addresses issues such as deforestation, war, and climate change.

"Did you ever stop to notice this crying Earth, these weeping shores?"

Final Thoughts Nature interpretation through music is a powerful way for those who struggle to connect with nature. Just remember, you don’t need to be a skilled musician to appreciate nature through a musical lens.

Thanks for reading!

Biona🎶🕊

References: Gray, P. M., Krause, B., Atema, J., Payne, R., Krumhansl, C., & Baptista, L. (2001). The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music. Science, 291(5501), 52.

Music and health. Harvard Health. (2021, September 11). https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/music-and-health