(hypo)manic satanic panic

gives people safety to explore and realize oh hey, i might be queer

side effect: deconstructing gender becomes a fun mainstream hobby, can u imagine

confuses bigots about who their target is

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

eBird (birds

Merlin (birds)

citizenscience.gov (big project database, US-based)

iNaturalist (nature)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data) Smithsonian archives (transcriptions, many subjects)

Cornell Bird Lab (birds)

FoldIt (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

In person

Bioblitz (nature) Species watch (species) Audobon Society (birds)

Also:

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere

req'd by @dir7eater

i was provided with the following image upon request