Solarpunk Witchcraft

Bottom trawling has been banned in an area off the Sussex Coast supporting rare chalk reef and sandstone reef ecosystems. With this new law, nearly 30% of inshore waters around Sussex are protected from trawling.

In other positive UK ocean news, a recent study found Scottish seabed ecosystems can see a dramatic rebound after receiving trawling protections. After a decade of protection, these areas had three times as much marine live and twice as many species present. Intact and undisturbed seabed ecosystems can also function as carbon sinks.

ICE is attacking immigrants for now, but their goal is to subjugate all of us. Fighting for our neighbors today is a way of fighting for ourselves tomorrow.

Map the infrastructure that ICE depends on. Publicize their vulnerabilities. Popularize simple, reproducible ways to impose consequences every time that ICE inflicts harm on a community. Don't just react to their attacks—choose the time and place of confrontations. Take the initiative.

https://crimethinc.com/zines/seven-steps-to-stop-ice

"If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.

"If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."

ICE killed another person in maine today, just days after the murder of lorenzo salgado araujo in houston

the maine immigrants rights coalition has released a statement confirming he was a 26 year old columbian man who was authorized to work in the US and had a valid social security number

Or the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP): https://ilapmaine.org/

More than 50% of Indigenous communities in reserve areas in Canada are at high risk of pipeline spills. When there is a spill, reserves are disproportionately impacted.

The National Energy Board and Supreme Court of Canada has a history of declaring the "public interest and economic interests outweigh Indigenous and treaty rights." Basically, Indigenous peoples don't count enough as "public" to matter.

Pipelines are built without proper consent from the Indigenous Nations they choose to occupy. Keep in mind I say choose, because this is the case even when alternative pipeline routes are suggested that could avoid reserve land. This is a direct, constant, and often violent threat to Indigenous sovereignty.

The MMIW crisis is funded by the oil industry through the creation of worker's "man camps" near reserve land. These "man camps" are nothing but pits of sexual violence and human trafficking of Indigenous women and girls. I am not exaggerating; this is well studied and well documented.

Resources & Sources:

To become an ‘energy superpower’, Canada wants to bulldoze Indigenous rights (START HERE!)

Indigenous Resistance to Alberta Oil and Gas Development Report

When the environment is destroyed, you're destroyed: Achieving Indigenous led pipeline justice

First Nations Consent Ignored as Canadians Asked to Subsidize LNG Expansion

Oil pipelines and food sovereignty: threat to health equity for Indigenous communities

Is Violence against Indigenous Women in “Canada’s interest”? Liquified Natural Gas in B.C., Sexual Violence & Narratives of Terra Nullius

The colonial playbook never ended, Canada’s pipeline deal proves it

Called the Data Heat Island Effect, the study showed that temperatures are rising an average of 3.6 degrees fahrenheit (2 degrees C) in areas immediately surrounding the " locations of the main AI hyperscaler centres", while as much as a 16.4 (9.1 degrees C) degree increase was shown in the most extreme cases. Its findings also provided insight into how widely felt the thermal effects are, claiming the centres and associated heat islands could impact a total of over 340 million people worldwide.

[...]

Each of the 6,733 data centres that constituted the research group were located away from largely dense metropolitan areas. The study claimed that heat island effects were being carried by a distance of up to 6 miles (10 kilometres) from the facilities.

[...]

"The prevailing logic has been one of acceleration, the infamous 'move fast and break things', which translates into building capacity first and perhaps mitigating later," Harvard researcher and architect Marina Otero Verzier told Dezeen. "If development continues at this pace, we will see a significant increase in emissions, the intensification of thermal effect." "These impacts extend well beyond the data centers themselves, shaping entire territories, although those living next to them usually bear the burden." "In a context of ecological fragility and energy instability, a moratorium is needed, followed by a much stricter regulatory framework that would involve public oversight."

so much cheap generic medication. reverse engineering compounds would be even more financially profitable.

fewer people dead of vaccine preventable illnesses in the global south bc the greatest barrier to distributing some vaccines like hpv is their ip

plant seeds and grafts that come from the plants instead of licensing them. don't invest so much in preventing cross contamination. more localised experimental breeding.

library of the world: every book and journal article in the world could be digitised and be searchable for every person in the world to read regardless of where they live. cheap reprint runs and local translations everywhere.

an online interface where every citation could actually lead to the text in question

freedom from the hell that is DRM software

everytime someone reverse engineered your shitty proprietary software we would all be freed from it instead of them getting DMCA'd

so much hardware would be opened up & therefore made so much cooler.

so many more songs that riff off and sample and interpolate shit from this decade instead of like 70 years ago and more analysis of music that didn't keep getting nuked off the internet

preserving movies and tv shows and games as long as someone, somewhere has the desire to host them

just go publish your fanfic/art/vid as is instead of all us pretending it isn't fanwork or begging the corporation for mercy / licensing

Green sea turtles have been an iconic endangered species since the 1980s, mostly due to bycatch in fishing nets and taking adults and eggs for food. I have core childhood memories of watching Steve Irwin talk about sea turtle conservation in front of a beach full of nesting green sea turtles.

After 45 years of conservation efforts, their population now meets the IUCN criteria for Least Concern rather than Endangered.

For a species with such a slow life history (it takes green sea turtles decades to reach sexual maturity) and a nearly global population, this is a Really Big Deal. This is the kind of long term conservation victory that many of the amazing humans who started working on green sea turtle conservation back in the 80s didn't live to see.

‼️ Scottish Anti-Fascist Mobilisation to Dundee ‼️

On Saturday 18th July Aberdonian far-right group Unite the Klans are planning to descend on our city alongside fascists from across Scotland, in an attempt to repeat the disgusting scenes of racial violence we saw in Glasgow and Arbroath. This is a desperate throw of the dice to try and reignite the thoroughly extinguished "Dundee Patriot" movement, whose last demonstration saw just 3 men with a list of convictions for racist and misogynistic crimes gather in the city square to chat to drunk teenage girls. This time they hope to increase their numbers with busloads of nazis and abusers from other cities. Let's send the message once and for all that Dundee is and always will be antifascist, with a proud tradition of welcoming refugees. Our city square belongs to us, the diverse and organised working class of Dundee.

Saturday 18th July

2pm

Dundee City Square

“It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said. “If you look at our efforts across the whole government, so far 45 coal plants are open today that would not be open.”

Yet, while at the time of early fascist parties, the climatic toxicity of CO2 emissions was virtually unknown, far-right campaigns and governments today explicitly mock the global concern for climate change. Carbofascism, in this sense, could be different from historical fascism in so far as it merges its fascination for fossil modernity with a political discourse that promotes human domination over nature through the preservation and amplification of the fossil energy model as an endangered ideal of modern society. While fascism looked at fossil fuelled objects as the future of humanity, carbofascism would tend to consider them as the remnants of a golden age which need to be preserved in spite of their impact on the planet´s (and human) health. [emphasis mine]

When the turquoise dwarf gecko became a focus of the illegal pet trade, it's estimated that over 15% of the wild population was removed in just five years.

Scientists worked to get the species designated as critically endangered and then to get it CITES protection to ban international trade. During that same time, captive breeding helped to stem the demand for wild-caught geckos and their price dropped from over $1,000 a gecko to less than $50.

And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that's a lot of red.

And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don't know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it's normal there?

But nope, that's not the case:

Some selections from the article:

"The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving