a voltron made of seven wire fox terriers

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.

Moon 8 (17/20)

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via @mcrmadness

So I don't know what it's like in Finland, but here in Australia:

Therapy dogs are basically dogs that are trained to be very cuddly. If you're upset, they'll come over and snuggle you. Basically they're interchangeable, almost, with emotional support dogs. They're there to make their owners feel better, not to perform a concrete task. In public you can't usually distinguish them from normal dogs. They might wear a vest claiming they're a service dog because a lot of people do that to their emotional support animals, but if you take away the vest you'd have no way of knowing what they are because they're generally roaming around sniffing things or whatever. Therapy dogs may be professionally trained, but not to the level of service dogs.

Service dogs are trained by professionals, and are working dogs. You will know a service dog from other dogs because of their body language. They are very disciplined, they act like soldiers in that they can act like they're standing to attention. They don't wander like other dogs do, they don't whine, they don't vocalise, they stay glued to their owner's side and are paying close attention to them. If their owner is sitting down they'll lie down beside them, at their feet, or under their chair. A lot of the time you won't notice they're there. You do NOT touch these dogs because they're working and cannot be distracted in case their owner is about to have a seizure/blood glucose drops/has a PTSD attack/about to have a migraine - etc. You're not supposed to even talk to them in case you distract them, you need to pretend they're not there. They are trained to very high standards because if they falter once, their owner could have a medical emergency or otherwise be in for a VERY bad time.

I'm not saying that service dogs are like that 24/7, because they do go "off duty". They get tired, they hit their limits, they get sick and have bad days. But usually this downtime is at home, and when they're in public they're working to make sure nothing happens to their owners when they're out, so if you're not at their home they're switched on and you can really see the difference in body language.

For the person I mentioned in the above post, she was calling her dog a service dog but he was wandering around all over the place and she didn't give a fuck when people walked up to him and patted him or interacted with him. Rule number one of service dogs is you do NOT do that, nor do you as an owner allow it because it can fuck with their ability to notice when something goes wrong, and can undermine their training. The penny didn't drop until she later called him a therapy dog and I realised that she thought the terms were interchangeable.

Meanwhile I work in healthcare and I have seen service dogs there. Those guys are laser focused. One startled me because it was sitting so quietly under its owner's chair that my brain wrote it off as a bag or a jumper or something until it moved a bit and I realised that it was a dog. When I talked to its owner it barely acknowledged me. It didn't have a vest on but you could tell it was locked in.