There's a Rhyme and Reason...

are you enjoying scrolling tumblr? watching youtube? reading that book? playing that game? drawing that art? doing that activity? if not,

YOU CAN STOP AND DO SOMETHING ELSE

you don't have to stick to something that you are doing for fun if it isn't fun for you anymore. You can come back! If you've loved it before you are likely to love it again! but you can stop!

This isn't a purity thing. This is a "everyone stand with us against destroying the environment and giving asthma to poor people" thing.

Did you know that when one community says no to an AI data center, they specifically search out communities with fewer resources? Communities that can't defend themselves? And the pollution 100 percent affects their health and wellbeing, in addition to burning through our already scarce drinking water.

other favorites from the notes I didn’t get screenshots of at the time:

learn the names/species of local plants, bugs, and birds where you live (iNaturalist or Merlin the bird app help with this)

learn the rules to 10 new card games

steal the colored paint cards from hardware store paint aisles and use them to make art

try out every different apple variety you can find and rank them

similarly LOTS of people in the notes doing soup quests, and a few cheese quests also

similarly lots of people reading/watching certain amounts of media over the year, and tracking/rating it

track the number of cats/dogs/etc you see over the year

And a thing that's missed, while kid's abridged adaptations miss out on the rest of the point, is that the Ugly Duckling decides he can't live like this and leaves the farmyard; he goes into the wild himself. In the various passages in which people try to keep him as a pet, or a duck, it's hammered home again and again that this does not make a good pet. there is nothing in him that suits being a domestic animal.

one of the particular parts that makes you go "sweet jesus, hans christian andersen" is where the wild geese rock up and are nice to the young swan, not quite recognising him as a swan but saying they're pretty into whatever weird vibe he has (is this a sort of queer recognition thing? we are told, explicitly, that the wild geese are both male, and they definitely say "you're so ugly it's hot - come with us" - given HCA, it might be) and then they're, you know, instantly shot dead. Because that's what happens to wild geese. They like your vibe and try to take you with them, and even offer to teach you how to flirt - and then you see exactly what happens to them. And then every encounter from there, from the old woman who attempts to keep him - a very satirical and funny passage - to the young family who genuinely attempt to save his life (but he's too fundamentally panicked and awkward to reciprocate their kindness, and explodes out of their house in a social catastrophe) the story hammers in: not only are you a terrible duck, but you just aren't MEANT to live with people. You're closer to the things they kill than the things they keep.

but yeah, adaptations miss this often: you have to go out into the wild to save your own life. you may die in the wild, and you WILL die where you are. nobody comes to save you - and nobody really could have, when you were younger - but ultimately, mate, you just aren't a very good pet. Of the list of "attributes of a domestic animal" you really suck, in detail, at all of them.

so it's very telling to me that the good ending is the one where he is a wild animal - but more importantly, a WILD SWAN.

Not killed. (like a wild goose).

Not kept. (like a duck).

but a secret third thing, that swans - of few creatures - get. they get admired and they get paid and they get LEFT ALONE. they have a position in relation to humanity, and it is BEING A LOVELY SWAN OVER THERE.

The Ugly Duckling isn't a "fairy tale" or a fable. It didn't emerge from the collective unconscious - it didn't come from nowhere. It's an original work. Andersen wrote it in 1843. It didn't exist before he came up with it. the translation I linked above was translated in 1930.

like many HCA stories (The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen) it's out of copyright and has pretty images, so it gets mined frequently as a free text - you can always republish a cheap Ugly Duckling, and don't have to pay an author. So people tend to just read and remember the various abridged versions. as a result, they think about it like a fairy tale - a sort of ambiguous, detached, floating thing that belongs to everyone and can mean everything. fairy tales - loose cultural fragments - can be hammered to suit any moral, or handwaved to be about anything, and then when you get bored of them, you can "twist" them a different way. Maybe it's about this. maybe it's about that. I read it as being about beauty. I read it as being about me. I don't like the politics. Today King Arthur is going to be Roman. Tomorrow Sleeping Beauty will wake up by herself. it doesn't really matter. And that's grand! that's what fairy tales have become - they are the people's mental property - they're to be played with.

But The Ugly Duckling isn't a fairy tale. it's a single sad, weird queer guy from a while ago, trying to tell you something personal about himself. maybe he isn't communicating clearly, maybe he's too weird, maybe you don't like it, maybe it annoys you - but <TheUglyDuckling> DOES have meaning and intention.

MOST fairy tales HAVE AUTHORS.

I'm not just talking about Hans Christian Andersen, though he wrote many that people now think of as authorless. Many of his contemporaries wrote similar stories and pretended that they were found or anonymous literature to add to their air of authenticity. Even the brothers Grimm, who supposedly collected tales that had no known authors and just appeared fully formed from the head of the collective Folk, in many cases absolutely knew who the specific tellers and performers were and took their names off.

Fairy tales have ALWAYS been a place where writers and editors file off the attribution in order to make them seem more "real," more authentic, more part of a folk culture, and less specific to a performer, teller, or writer who could speak to their intention in telling the story. What happened to The Ugly Duckling is the RULE, not the exception.

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

But on top of that, you know who the most ardent conservationists are once security has been achieved? The people who had once been forced to poach or slash-and-burn to survive. You know who’s great at tracking down gorilla poachers? Ex-poachers. Who’s good at understanding and advocating for people forced to do these things to survive? Ex-poachers. Who can convince others to take a chance on finding a better way to survive? Same answer.

The former illegal fishers are now sought-after experts, because they know how to spot the arapaima and tell juveniles apart from adults. They get to keep practicing the fishing skills that were passed down to them. The actual process of fishing is easier because they can work together and don't have to sneak around. The profits are higher because they can sell the fish openly to restaurants and to the public. The fishing organization members make sure that other people in their communities don't fish illegally. And the numbers of arapaima keep going up and up, so there's plenty to go around even as more people join the fishing organizations.

If you click all the way through to the report from the conservation org that started the fishing organizations project, there are quotes from fishing organization members:

"We built a second house and I'm putting my oldest two kids through college on the money we get from fishing."

"Nowadays you have young people walking around with pockets full of cash saying "I got 6,000 from fishing this year!" It used to be you wouldn't even get 50 reais of pocket money."