an abundance of green

and we will say "When I was YOUR age, fruits and vegetables came from a supermarket and they were bred to get shipped 1000 miles in a truck and sit on shelves for weeks, and they tasted so sour and watery it was like eating paper compared to these ones. It wasn't even legal in some places to grow your own food"

and they will roll their eyes like yeah yeah just because everything was miserable in the 20s doesn't mean I have to have a smile on my face standing in the hot sun while you listen to that one guy talk about his bees FOREVER

And many other people have been just spitting, foaming at the mouth fucking FURIOUS. How dare I have the audacity to imagine a future where things get better?

Don't I know how BAD things are? Am I not aware of the TERROR and DEVASTATION of climate change and fascism and biodiversity loss? How dare someone be so bold, so callous, as to imagine something other than misery and suicide. How dare someone suggest it will get better. How dare a person propose that there is a future where we will be okay, in the face of so much terror. Hasn't she seen the abyss opening its jaws before us?

Well? What do you think?

there were kids who stayed inside because of the black plague and went on to help cure it.

there were women who sat at home and cleaned the house and dreamt up a world where they could vote and have jobs.

there were kids in the mines who thought up a life outside of it. there were children who hid in annexes and wrote a diary where they prayed for a future without a terrible man in control

there were slaves who wanted freedom so badly and had hope that it would get better

there were gay people who hid in the corners of clubs and fought back for a future where they could walk down the street together

do you know what all of that has in common? they had hope that things would get better and they made that change. they looked at the world in its cruel ways and fought back.

so now, there are kids and teenagers and young adults and new adults who dream of a world so beautiful and the only amazon their grandchildren know is the rainforest

and it is in everything we do that we find this hope. wishing on dandelions, counting the stars, making our own clothes out of crochet or knit or sewing it, watching the sunset, going to the farmer’s market, feeding the birds, planting seeds.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood

As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building

BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

it takes me 20 fucking minutes to walk to work every day in all weather conditions, the sidewalk only goes 2/3 of the way there before i have to walk on a diagonal crabgrass segment between a busy road and a parking lot and cross a bridge without a sidewalk, and there are zero benches, zero chairs, zero trees, and zero sidewalk covers

The back panel of baby's first battle jacket is complete 🍅🏴☀️ Hand painted design plus some storebought iron on letters I eventually had to just sew on individually. @_@

Like not to sound overly radical and idealistic, but maybe we don't have to use fossil-fuel-burning heavy machinery to maintain countless acres of unused land in a state scalped and exterminated of native plant life. maybe we can, like, limit our use of the pollution machine that makes land useless and barren.

maybe all the brilliant scientists of our highly advanced technological society can think of something we could possibly do with land other than "make it useless and barren using the pollution machine." Maybe somewhere in the world, someone is brilliant and visionary enough to imagine a society where "making it useless and barren using the pollution machine" is a slightly less common use of land resources

roadside or other area that needs to be kept relatively low? short native grasses and flowers. there's a billion of them.

Awkward leftover land next to a building? trees. if there's plumbing or power lines to worry about? more native grasses and flowers. pollinator gardens. Or grow fiber plants that can be harvested yearly and turned into fabric/baskets/mats/whatever. If the soil doesn't have anything toxic in it, you could grow food plants. Grow sunflowers, they're allelopathic and keep the weeds down. Walking paths. Solar panels. Walking paths with solar panels. Put solar panels above your parking lot while you're at it. Did i mention Arundinaria gigantea.

The proper response to your dog doing a natural behavior you dislike (digging/barking/protecting etc) it to give them an appropriate time and place to engage in that behavior

The proper response to skateboarders damaging infrastructure is to build more and better skate parks, or build skate elements into the public infrastructure on purpose.

The proper response to homeless people sleeping on park benches is to build them houses.

you see how there's like, a commonality at play here?

The proper response to a disruption is to address the root of the disruption directly, not somehow attack the disruption itself -

you don't invent a muffler by swinging a bat at the engine noise, you don't relieve your hunger by punching yourself in the stomach, you don't resolve public unrest by sending armed men to control them and you don't prevent homeless people using bus shelters as a roof by removing the bus shelters.

and we will say "When I was YOUR age, fruits and vegetables came from a supermarket and they were bred to get shipped 1000 miles in a truck and sit on shelves for weeks, and they tasted so sour and watery it was like eating paper compared to these ones. It wasn't even legal in some places to grow your own food"

and they will roll their eyes like yeah yeah just because everything was miserable in the 20s doesn't mean I have to have a smile on my face standing in the hot sun while you listen to that one guy talk about his bees FOREVER

And many other people have been just spitting, foaming at the mouth fucking FURIOUS. How dare I have the audacity to imagine a future where things get better?

Don't I know how BAD things are? Am I not aware of the TERROR and DEVASTATION of climate change and fascism and biodiversity loss? How dare someone be so bold, so callous, as to imagine something other than misery and suicide. How dare someone suggest it will get better. How dare a person propose that there is a future where we will be okay, in the face of so much terror. Hasn't she seen the abyss opening its jaws before us?

Well? What do you think?

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

This is the process a person near where an old PFA factory has to do (12:22)

According to Scientific American, a new method of breaking down PFAs has just been discovered!

It’s not for every kind of PFA but holy shit it’s a start. Normally these bastards have to be roasted at ~1,000 C/1832 F to even begin to fall apart and even then they leak into the environment, and burying them only - you guessed it! Leaks into the environment.

The new method can break them down at a mere ~100 C/212 F using inexpensive reagents. To quote the article:

“PFASs owe their durability to a series of carbon-fluorine bonds, which are among nature’s strongest chemical bonds. Instead of trying to break this stable bond, Trang and her colleagues targeted a chemical group containing oxygen atoms at one end of the molecule. By heating the compounds in a solvent called DMSO and a common reagent found in cleaners and soaps, the researchers successfully knocked off the oxygen-containing group. This triggered a cascade of reactions that ultimately broke the compounds down into harmless products.”

There are about 12,000 PFAs known to science right now, and the team was able to break down ten of them - including a particularly nasty kind of one called PFOA - and were able to break them down three carbon atoms at a time instead of the presumed one. HOLY SHIT. They recognize using DMSO in wastewater treatment probably isn’t practical on a large scale - right now, anyway - but as John Oliver points out in his video, having a huge filtration system in your home and a guy check it every two weeks sure isn’t going to do much either except mitigate further damage to the owner. The team is also plenty aware this is no final solution, and yet

ALT

see this is exactly what i’m afraid of posting responses like this.

YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED. YOU SHOULD BE MAD. YOU SHOULD BE SO APPALLED BY THIS YOU ARE READY TO KILL AND EAT THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE.

science isn’t some magical benevolant force that will fix the world’s problems. science is not free from capitalism, it’s deeply entangled with it. that’s how we got undrinkable rainwater in the first place. all of the world’s problems are easily fixable. that isn’t the issue. none of them will be so long as capitalism prevails. we can’t sit back and wait for someone else to fix things, we have to force the change we want to see.

RATING: RELIABLE

Source: ’New research shows that rainwater in most locations on Earth contains levels of chemicals that “greatly exceed” safety levels. […] Such is their prevalence now that scientists say there is no safe space on Earth to avoid them.’

Source: ‘Chemists have identified how to destroy “forever chemicals” in a low-cost way for the first time, new research says. […] New research, from scientists at Northwestern University, US claims to have done the “seemingly impossible” and destroyed PFAS using low temperature and cheap products. This could be very useful in helping communities suffering from high-level contamination, according to Prof Sunderland, who is not part of the research team.

The team of scientists hope that with further research PFAS could be filtered from drinking water and this new method applied to destroy the contaminants.

However, treatment of high concentrations of PFAS is only one part of the solution.

With PFAS remaining in production it can continue to build up at low levels in fish and other wildlife as it cannot be broken down naturally very easily.

This new method was applied to the 10 most prominent types of PFAS, but the US Environment Protection Agency has identified more than 12,000.’

The first two sources listed are from the BBC, a state-owned yet publicly funded (it’s too complex an issue to go into here) highly reliable source of information. Whilst occasionally they are guilty of jumping on the ‘shiny science’ bandwagon, their editorial guidelines temper it down more than some science infotainment media. They can be biased towards the establishment in more directly political matters (environmental science is indirectly political due to the debate on climate change etc*), but this is not a directly political matter and so their bias is likely to be towards established science rather than alternative theories.

*The debate between anthropogenic climate change, natural climate change, and outright climate change denial is ultimately a political one, even if the vast majority of science agrees with the stance that it is mostly anthropogenic. I must refer to it as a political debate due to its use as a political tool. For me to suggest it should not be so would be to inject my own opinion and would introduce a source of bias.

The second two sources are from the EPA, the US government department for the environment. Whilst any government department is ultimately biased towards justifying its own existence, their requirement to publicly publish research and statistics regardless of whether they support the government’s/department’s agenda means they are at least decently reliable; to accuse government departments of bias is far beyond the scope of this post and can start to lead into governmental mistrust and conspiracy, which I will not cover here.

The final source given is the original paper. The principal author is Shira Joudan PhD, who has been publishing on environmental toxicology/chemistry since 2015 and has attended conferences on environmental toxicology etc since 2012. She has multiple publications which have been cited many times, multiple awards and scholarships, and has worked with multiple universities. As far as I can tell there are no conflicts of interest and I am satisfied that the paper itself is highly reliable.

I am not an environmental scientist nor chemist, and so if you have more experience in the field and can offer further information, please do.