Strange Women Lying in Ponds

As July gets started people on tumblr will invariably turn their mind to International Bog Day, and I want to get ahead of it and propose something.

Bog Day falls on the 4th Sunday in July, the 22nd the year the screenshot was taken but this year the 26th.

Given that this always takes off with the assumption that its the 22nd, I think we should split the holiday into two forms: observed and official

Observed will take place on the 22nd as usual, and we can celebrate it here with memes, shitpostery and bog awareness.

Offiical is for action and celebration away from tumblr. Make something with dolphin-safe cranberries! Find out about wetlands in your area! Visit them if open to the public! Sign up to volunteer with orgs that protect them! Donate to nonprofits looking to preserve them! They’re very vulnerable habits - ever more so in the U.S. after the devastating Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency decision from the supreme court in 2023, which limits the Clean Water Act and took protection away from the majority of the nation’s wetlands. The Audubon Society is one of the orgs working to look after them in the face of that, and Wetlands International has a fund you can donate to help monitor the areas used by migratory waterbirds, but I encourage you to do your own research and find ones that speak to you. It’s worth it - they are so important to natural world and the one built by humans alike.

Iris Murdoch, July 15, 1919 – February 8, 1999.

Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land

Guardian analysis finds facilities to be built in some of the driest areas as outcry grows over water needed to power AI

城ヶ島にて｜Jogashima, Miura city

Members of parliament have demanded full publication of an explosive report by the UK’s spy leaders that found the collapse of ecosystems overseas would have catastrophic consequences for the UK’s national security, warning that the UK has “no future” if the findings are not urgently acted on. Despite growing concerns for the UK’s food security, likely to be worsened by the third heatwave this summer currently afflicting the UK and swathes of the northern hemisphere, the government has refused to publish the full report, which has circulated among defence officials for more than a year. The report paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation, as the Guardian has previously revealed. Food shortages could result within five years. MPs on the environmental audit committee, who held a hearing on the report on Wednesday afternoon, also warned that the government was failing to “join the dots” between the national security threat posed by the climate crisis and the collapse of species, and swingeing cuts to the overseas aid and climate finance budgets.

[...]

Chris Hinchliff, the Labour MP, and a member of the committee, contrasted the £15bn to be added to the defence budget with the lack of funding to protect critical ecosystems. “The government can summon billions of pounds for new military hardware when the defence sector calls for it. We need an equally decisive mobilisation of investment to restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air. Without these essentials our country has no future,” he said.

Rock crystal bracelet, Moche culture, Peru, 1-800 AD