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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Grow food — plan abundance, but persist through setbacks
“Most sustainable gardening advice doesn’t survive a real garden. It sounds right: let things grow, help pollinators, step back, work with nature, stop things taking over completely, and deal with weather. That is where a lot of what is called sustainable gardening begins to fall apart.
“I tried to do this. I thought if I approached it the right way — gently, sustainably, with good intentions — it would respond in kind. It didn’t.
“The garden pushed back. Weeds didn’t stay in their place, crops didn’t behave, and things always took more time than I had. The greenhouse roof came off in a storm and left everything in a total mess. At one point, I stood in the middle of it and said out loud, ‘feck this, I’m done’.
“But I went back. I stopped trying to get it ‘right’. I stopped expecting it to behave. I stopped thinking in terms of control or abandonment. Instead, I started paying attention to what grew easily and what didn’t, to what came back on its own, to where the soil held water and where it didn’t, and to which parts needed work and which parts were better left alone. I listened to the garden, the soil, the plants, the earth. They told me what to do.
“There is a version of sustainable gardening that exists in theory, and there is the version that exists in a place where you actually have to live with the results. They are not the same. If you pay attention, you begin to build something that is not regimented and not completely abandoned, but somewhere in between.”
Windigo: unrestrained exploitation
“Something is devouring our world. Forests collapse. Species vanish. Billions live in grinding poverty while a few hundred individuals accumulate wealth beyond imagination. People attribute this to bad policies, corrupt politicians, or individual greed.
“But what if the problem runs deeper — embedded not in particular decisions, but in the very essence of our civilization? I explore this question through a powerful Indigenous myth: the Windigo. Windigo is the name given by the Ojibwe to a cannibalistic monster driven by insatiable hunger. The more it consumes, the more ravenous it becomes.
“This metaphor offers a chillingly accurate diagnosis of the dominant system that came to engulf the world. Forests become timber reserves. Animals become livestock. Oceans become fisheries. People become labor inputs or human resources.
“Consider the structural logic of our economy. A corporation that prioritizes its workers’ wellbeing over quarterly returns will find itself outcompeted and eventually eliminated by rivals that don’t. This is what I call Windigo Inc.: the institutionalization of insatiable hunger as the organizing principle of our civilization. It’s a self-reinforcing system that rewards extraction and punishes restraint.
“Capitalism, in this sense, is not merely an economic system. Like a malignant process within a living organism, it must keep expanding or collapse. It cannot recognize ‘enough’. Every gain becomes a platform for further gain. Every efficiency becomes a launchpad for more extraction.”
Stalemate: humility, and chess, are not Trumps strong suits
“In a TV streaming series, the main character named Bosch kills two bad guys in a plane, then goes to the cockpit holding a pistol. The pilot looks at him and says, ‘You kill me, you kill yourself’.
“In this analogy, President Trump is Harry Bosch, the pilot is the Supreme Leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the plane is the world economy. Khamenei can crash the plane, that is, kill the world economy by destroying the oil and gas infrastructure. It’s important to recognize that the Iranian military has demonstrated that it can hit precisely what it wants to hit with missiles and drones and destroy it.
“Sticking with the Bosch analogy, it’s still possible for Trump to let the plane land and save the world economy from complete destruction. The difference is that the pilot — in this analogy, Iran — must be allowed to go free and live undisturbed. That is what Trump believes he cannot allow because it would be a humiliating loss.
“So, there you have it. Trump and his team have stumbled into a war they cannot win. If the war does not end soon, it will likely destroy the world economy for lack of energy supplies and plunge it into a deep, years-long depression.”
But for Reagan’s treason, neither Iran nor the US would be so brutal
“UN Ambassador Mike Waltz said that Trump was going to reach out to our allies to ‘demand their participation to help their own economies’, and help us open the Strait of Hormuz. Other countries of the world are largely echoing German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who said on Monday, ‘This is not our war, and we didn’t start it’.
“It shouldn’t have been our war, either, and wouldn’t be if Reagan hadn’t committed treason to become president and then sold the GOP to the fossil fuel industry.
“After the Arab oil embargo of 1973, when Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, he declared the energy crisis ‘the moral equivalent of war’. He said ‘The energy crisis is a clear and present danger to our nation. I am tonight setting a clear goal that this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 — never’.
“Carter proposed legislation to create ‘this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000’.
“Tragically for America and the world, it all came crashing down when a faction of Iran’s most extreme rightwing mullahs helped the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter in the 1980 election. Reagan then killed the solar bank and the solar bond programs, and removed Carter’s 32 solar panels from the roof of the White House.
“President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected, moderate Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two US hostages held in Tehran. But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s most hard-core rightwing radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 presidential election.
“The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called ‘October Surprise’ — catapulted the most repressive, violent Iranian religious faction into total power over that nation.”
Freshwater fish in severe decline globally
“From the Amazon River to the Mekong River, migratory freshwater fish underpin food security for millions, but over 300 species need urgent conservation intervention, warns a new UN report. In the planet’s rivers and lakes, the historically heaving migrations of freshwater fish are thinning out.
“Declining faster than many terrestrial populations, 325 migratory freshwater fish species have already declined by over 80% since 1970. This week, ambitious international safeguarding efforts will be unveiled at the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals 15th annual meeting in Campo Grande, Brazil.
“Facing accelerated decline from dam construction, overfishing, pollution, climate-driven flow changes, and habitat fragmentation, many species are increasingly unable to make the journeys from spawning grounds, to feeding areas, to floodplain nurseries.
“Migratory freshwater fish, less visible than birds, land animals, or other large marine mammals, have historically received little attention despite their decline. ‘This crisis has escaped global attention partly because it is taking place underwater’, said CMS Executive Secretary Amy Fraenkel.”
Protect Texas wildlife refuge from Elon Musk
“Nestled right on the Gulf of Mexico shore in Texas, the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge is a biodiverse landscape of scrublands and prairies. It’s home to some of the United States’ most critically endangered species — from ocelots to piping plovers, Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles, and aplomado falcons.
“Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering handing over for free 712 acres of this precious refuge to SpaceX in exchange for smaller, scattered land parcels across the region. SpaceX’s activities in the Lower Rio Grande Valley have already damaged important habitat. If this sweetheart deal goes through, even more wildlife will suffer.
“Don’t let SpaceX gobble up our public lands. Tell the Service not to give the company any part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.”
Is some AI “green”, or just a pretense?
“Supposedly interchangeable terms like Green AI or Ecological AI or AI for the Planet are often very different things. Sometimes Green AI refers to making AI itself less energy-intensive, and sometimes it refers to how humans, machines, and the living world relate. One way to navigate this quickly evolving terrain is to distinguish between three broad orientations of Green AI: technical greening, ecological intervention, and relational reorientation.
“Technical greening focuses on reducing AI’s own ecological footprint. This focus is increasingly important. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres currently consume around 415 terawatt-hours annually, roughly 1.5% of global electricity demand, and projects that this figure will double by 2030, driven in large part by AI.
“Ecological intervention asks what AI can do for the planet. There are dozens of applications: optimizing power grids, monitoring biodiversity, detecting deforestation, forecasting extreme weather, supporting ecosystem restoration, reducing emissions in agriculture and transport.
“This approach leads to important contributions. Yet it can also frame ecological breakdown primarily as a problem of insufficient data — as though more sensors, better models, and greater computational capacity might allow us to better manage, or even transcend, planetary instability.
“Relational reorientation begins from a different question: what if the problem is not only how much energy AI uses, or what tasks it performs? This strand draws on Indigenous, meta-relational, and posthumanist perspectives to examine how prevailing paradigms of AI often mirror the extractive and exceptionalist patterns of modern culture: efficiency, optimization, control, and reducing non-human nature to ‘resources’. From this perspective, ecological breakdown is not only a technical challenge, but also a relational one.
“Ultimately, none of the three orientations is sufficient on its own. Technical greening without ethical accountability risks making harmful systems more efficient: a more energy-efficient military surveillance platform remains ethically compromised, regardless of its carbon footprint.”
Misgivings about having a data center in your town?
“Three days after the U.S. and Israel began their joint bombardment, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched drone strikes against Amazon-owned data centers that provide an array of cloud computing services to customers throughout the Middle East.
“The motive behind the attack, according to Iranian state television, was to highlight ‘the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities’. The quasi-official Tasnim News Agency listed dozens of regional facilities deemed ‘Enemy Technology Infrastructure’ suitable for targeting.
“Amazon, Google, and Meta are all eager partners of the Pentagon that augment the destructive power of the United States in Iran and elsewhere, server farms may now have the same status as factories building bombs and warplanes.”
Fantasyland on the take — it’s crazy
“Have you ever had that feeling when you suddenly realize that the person you’re talking with might have a screw loose? Well, what about when you are the one others are trying to slowly back away from at the Punch Bowl? The question of who’s the real nut often arises for us collapse-aware folks living here in late-stage capitalism.
“In 2018 I wrote this piece that got a lot of buzz about meeting these five billionaires who wanted advice on their bunkers. And I wrote, the richest guys among us, the super tech bros, have so little faith in the ability of their technologies to actually solve anything that they’re preparing for the end of the world.
“So a bunch of TV shows ended up being developed around that central premise. And this one called Paradise is one of these Hulu shows about a post-apocalyptic underground giant city that was created by a tech billionaire. They invited me to be on the companion podcast.
“I said, ‘What makes the show important is that the bunker that you’re talking about is already happening. This is Prospera in Central America. It’s Neom in Saudi Arabia. It’s Sao Paulo today with a very super wealthy city-center protected by God knows how many armed guards from the rest of the world’.
“So I explained how our government is creating the conditions of disaster capitalism that puts farmers out of business, and then a sovereign wealth fund could come in and buy the farmland. And she goes, ‘Oh, what’s a sovereign wealth fund?’
“And as I’m describing a sovereign wealth fund, she was like, ‘Really?’ And I kept going back and almost having to explain the roots of capital. And the more I explained, the more her eyes got wider and wider, and I realized I sounded like a conspiracy theorist.
“I don’t know whether she was humoring me. I couldn’t tell if she was because it’s good entertainment to have a guy who has no idea. But my sense was she was thinking, who the fuck did they book here? Yeah, I was supposed to be a bunker expert talking about the depth of the concrete that gets poured.
“So I realized there’s no way I can tell the basic simple story here without sounding crazy because of how crazy it’s become.”
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