I wish I was a tree

What with the heatwaves, the fires, and the billionaires on their private jets, I've been seeing more climate doomism on here than usual. I get it. Everything feels terrible. And it can be so frustrating to see stuff about personal carbon impact when you're already washing your laundry on cold cycles, biking to work, eating less meat, etc., and meanwhile the US Senate is killing energy initiatives.

But if you have climate anxiety, I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to a carbon-negative project. My carbon subscriptions help me sleep at night. They have been my antidote to feeling helpless.

Some quick math. In the US, there are 74.5 million Netflix subscribers. And in 2020, the US had CO2 emission averages of 14.2 tonnes annually per capita.

So, if every US American with a Netflix subscription took out a subscription that offset their emissions, that'd be 1.06 billion tonnes annually: over 3% of total global emissions (34b tonnes). And that's just if a subsection of the US population did this.

Obviously this is an oversimplification. Carbon offsets are admittedly more expensive than Netflix. Also, offsetting usually works by funding projects elsewhere to reduce global emissions, so it's overall less efficient than, I don't know, the US getting its shit together and funding public transit, which would cut emissions at the source.

But the point remains: collectivism does exist, and we CAN do something about the emissions that we're unavoidably responsible for.

Enter these services, all of which do carbon offsets that are effective, additional, verifiable, and permanent.

WREN. I subscribe to Wren. You pick a dollar amount per month, and they funnel it toward carbon offset projects worldwide. They offer a carbon calculator, personal suggestions for how to reduce your footprint, and are generally awesome. An example of their projects: in the last six months, they enabled 12 Indigenous communities in the Amazon to reduce local deforestation by a staggering 84%, preserving 180,000 acres.

CLIMEWORKS. Climeworks is more expensive per kg removed, but I subscribe to this one too and LOVE this project. It's direct capture, meaning their factories suck CO2 out of the air and sequester it in rock. I want this to scale SO, SO badly. Climeworks doesn't just prevent or reduce emissions—it's carbon NEGATIVE, which is massive. And it's fully permanent: once the Climeworks facilities sequester the carbon in rock, it's there forever (unlike, say, tree-planting, which relies on the lifespan and health of the tree). Climeworks, like Wren, is a no-minimum subscription. You could do a dollar a month.

ECOLOGI. Pretty similar to Wren, but with high emphasis on tree-planting! Ecologi is big on reforestation, and other recent projects include access to clean cookstoves and providing renewable fuel to farmers. They do tree-planting gifts that would be an awesome option around holiday time.

NORI. A carbon-removal marketplace that connects its users to farmers, who submit plans for carbon removal and storage! This one has more of a businessy bent to it, but you can outright buy a tonne of CO2 storage in a transactional way.

To finish off with some good news: the US has joined China and Europe in hitting the 5% tipping point for electric car adoption, the costs of renewable energy have cratered, and China is set to hit its emissions peak earlier than anticipated (huge for the world's largest emitter).

Hang in there.

the oral history project from act up

the lesbian herstory archives

the transgender archives of the university of victoria

the digital transgender archives

glbt historical society (digital)

anything that moves

a masterpost of lesile feinberg’s works by @genderoutlaws

the dyke march compilation 

paris is burning 

how to survive a plague

united in anger: a history of ACT UP

one archives

Historical commissions open!

Friends and I made a website that has all of this info plus a REALLY easy way to send an email to your state reps. If you click the link below and click send email, you can send a letter of support for the SSI Restoration Act to your state reps. It's already written and takes only a few minutes. Seriously it is ridiculously easy. These emails have more pull to reps than resistbot so please fill out if you can!

We also have a Facebook page called "Campaign to Fix SSI" that has this information and regular updates. Here's the link for that.

the night her father’s brothers visited, she couldn’t help but find herself in their dark hair & thick brows.

it had been years since then, but the feeling was a lot like that.

____________________________________

i’ve been drawing zoya with a nose ring since the very beginnings of my page. over the past year & a half, it’s been crazy to see so many pieces of fanart start incorporating the detail as well.

when i got my own a month ago, i briefly wondered - under what circumstances would a brown girl who grew up extremely distanced from this half of her identity feel the desire to start wearing one?

i imagine that she was once a young brown girl - not unlike much of my audience, nor so different from the one in the mirror - who did not find more than a few pages of her people’s history in the textbooks at school.

i imagine that she avoided looking too closely at the things that set her apart because she was beautiful, yes, but also undeniably different amidst prejudices & biases. that is, until she finally gave into curiosity & scoured the little palace library & os alta’s archives for anything with so much as a mention of the suli.

there was little aside from the texts used in the language classes, but what she did find she consumed whole. she read the slim book of fables more times than she could count & shuffled endlessly through faded papers in the dusty boxes, feeling the names on the census documents heavy on her tongue. she traced the script of a language that was both hers & not, that she’d only heard a lifetime ago in whispers before hearths & in stories told in secret after dark.

she lingered over the sheafs of photos & scattered illustrations, studying the images until she felt she knew the faces looking back at her - though, she supposed in some ways she did. she knew the brown bodies & their delicate swirls of hair draped in embroidered silks because hers was the same, clothed in the shimmering markers of her power. she knew the strong brows & noses too, noting the intricate jewelry that seemed to praise them.

she saw them, these reminders of her history, but somehow she was the one that felt seen - finding those pieces of herself worth celebrating for the first time.

____________________________________

zoya nazyalensky belongs to leigh bardugo.

https://mthg.org

1,000+ palestinians were arrested in a mass-arrest campaign designed to, and i quote, “instill fear” - including children

al-aqsa mosque and worshippers were attacked and beaten

literal children, not even teens, children, were arrested and tried in a military court (this is not new, thousands of children have faced this terrorization over the years. Isr@el is the only country in the world that tries children in military courts. 500-700 children are prosecuted each year.)

a soldier deliberately ran over a child on a bike for having a pales/tinian flag on his bike. an adult man ran over a child with his car. on purpose. the child is 12. read that again.

sheikh jarrah was blockaded, illegally

whatsapp blocked the accounts of over 100 pal/estinian journalists

silwan, another pal/estinian neighborhood like sheikh j/arrah, is being violently ethnically cleansed to make way for more settlers

Isr@el has forced social media sites to censor the hashtags “free pal/estine” and “save sheikh ja/rrah” many posts and accounts have been deleted

25 pales/tinians have been murdered by the ID/F and settlers

in Jaffa, 300 arab families are under force expulsion orders to make way for more settlers. 300 families.

suicide rates in g/aza have risen to an all-time high due to PTSD and hopelessness

some resources to peak at

this website belongs to the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc community, and also provides a significant amount of important and informative resources.

the history of residential schools told from the perspective of indigenous people of canada - this website also provides other information in regards to the truth and reconciliation commission, as well as more information about how indigenous people's are still fighting for the truth to come out.

st anne's residential school in port albany, ontario was one of the worst of them all, and many of the indigenous children who were forced to attend are currently fighting for the entire truth to be revealed.

this entire website put out by UBC gives an informative and important look into the systematic racism that indigenous people's in canada still suffer under

 Kuu-us Crisis Line

Indian Residential School Survivors Society

This is a non-exhaustive list of brands to boycott if you would like to participate in the Palestinian call for global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation. I've excluded security, construction, etc. firms that cannot be boycotted in an individual capacity. However, pressuring governments & other organisations to refuse contracts to those firms is an integral part of the BDS movement. Will also try to make seperate posts on how to add your voice to the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

On another note, Coca-Cola and Nestle belong on every boycott list. Not just because they are complicit in the Israeli occupation but also because they have committed some of the worst human rights violations the world over. Coca-Cola has gone as far as having Union leaders murdered. Both Coca-Cola and Nestle steal water supplies and create water insecurity in already marginalised regions among many, many other crimes. I did not include them in the list because I am aware of how overwhelmed people become when they see those two companies and all their endless subsidiaries and I wanted to keep the list targeted on companies that have been the specific focus of the Palestinian BDS movement.

I have also excluded some brands that are often on older BDS lists, like McDonald's, because over the years they have stopped engaging in the activity that resulted in their boycott or have simply fallen to a lower priority because their relatively lower level of involvement compared to the brands that are our focus.

Focusing on only a handful of companies also just makes it easier for people to remember. Rather than trying to store all of the above companies in your memory and forgetting half of them, or just throwing your hands up and deciding that it's all too complicated, BDS gives a short list of strategic targets that people across the world are focusing on

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Stop what you are doing. Seriously. Put it down and pick up the phone.

AOC, RashidaTlaib, and MarkPocan have introduced a resolution to BLOCK a $735 million weapons sale to Israel and we need all hands on deck to help them.

Take action NOW (link)

the pcrf has an excellent charity score. you can donate to their urgent gaza relief fundraiser by clicking this link. if you can’t, spreading information about the crisis is valued by the palestinians living in conditions that the human rights watch describes as an apartheid state.

palestine children’s relief fund: provide urgent humanitarian care for children in gaza

anera: provide on-the-ground emergency relief

medical aid for palestinians: emergency relief for women and children, psychosocial support, disability help, other medical needs

doctors without borders: medical teams on the ground treating injured palestinians as needed

feel free to add on in the notes, notify me if any of the fundraisers listed arent necessary/actually helpful to donate to, and let me know if anything needs added on/modified

as always, if you cant donate then please share and spread awareness