Not us (the hosts) specifically, but you all, the listeners. What are we as a community doing to make this world a better place?
App for plugging in to local environmental movements
Listener James Gadsby is developing an app that helps organizers and activists connect with one another, and find local efforts to take part in aimed at combating climate change and the forces that enable it.
Find the app for android here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.climatechange.earthrise
Find the app for iOS here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/earthrise/id1457410482
Want to contribute / partner / work with us? Get in touch! [email protected]
Imagining a Better World
In episode 91 David asked us to imagine what a better world looks like to you. Here are some of the responses.
My better world involves my partner and me homesteading at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, becoming integrated with (and making more resilient by our efforts) the single town whence an entire half of my family originates, and developing software and theory to assist liberatory movements from afar. That's my short-term better world, anyway. Better for me and working to make it better for others. My long-term better world is a planetwide confederation of municipalities and ruralities, decentrally planning its economy to eliminate poverty and launch colony ships out of the solar system, because even if we manage to endure or reverse climate change, this planet has an expiration date and I don't want the only known life to be incinerated by the aging Sun.
Anyonymous
(September, 2019)
I want a world where there are no alarms. Where we can wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. It doesn’t matter what day it is, only that it is today, and that the hours inside it do not scream for our attention.
Sometimes, yes, there is work that needs doing. Sometimes we do need to work beneath the moon and let the sun sleep in our stead. But only when we need to.
When the neighbour’s crop is touched by too-quick frost and won’t survive the night. When the wind’s howling whimsy has tossed trees through their yard. When our neighbour has been hurt, or when they have fallen sick. Because in this world I want, when our neighbour suffers, we know we need to help.
I want my neighbours to be many. I want them everywhere between my labour and my leisure. I want to talk to them and listen to them. I want to teach them and learn from them. I want to argue with them and laugh with them and I want us all to cry and sing and dance and play. I want to die, someday, and in my long night be loved in their mourning after.
Death shall be hilarious. It will come like a fright, sudden and shocking. Or it will come like a long and clever joke, building, building, till the end begins to be in sight and then—ah! Sweet release. The suffering is ended, and the tension scatters through the air. I die, and they laugh, happy that I’m gone. Happy I was there. Happy. But in my heart I know this won’t be so, because a world without me is tragic. Because I was the only one in all this world who saw why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
It was the sugar.
Connor
(September, 2019)
Local Solutions
I have been fortunate enough to find employment in a field which is attempting to address these issues (energy efficiency/sustainability in the built environment), and I try my best to live as sustainably as I can. However, over time I have become all too aware of how significant these global problems are, and how little the powers that be are doing to address it. Your podcast has, in part, inspired me to pursue additional action in my own life. I have joined a Soil and Water Stewardship program ... to learn more about local solutions, such as organic gardening/farming, food justice, composting, rainwater catchment/treatment, and so on. I guess I just wanted to share to remind you that you're efforts can make a difference and to encourage you to continue.
Charles
(March, 2019)
Community Recycling Initiative
Hey Dave & Daniel, You asked what your listeners are doing locally for their environment. I only started listening recently, but I recently decided to stop being annoyed by people’s poor recycling habits and resolved to start doing something about it! To that end, I’ve been removing non-recyclables from our single-stream recycling bins at my local university, where I teach. I’ve also started doing my own recycling at home, creating reusable shopping bags for people in my community, as well as using my position as an educator to teach students about proper recycling habits that are more important now than ever thanks to changes in the recycling market (because of course it’s a market, can’t do anything without someone making money, ugh).
Thanks for the great content and the good work y’all do!
Cheers, Tim
(January, 2019)
Dialogues through Dance
Hey guys, I love the cast, it feels like you’re the only people saying what needs to be said, the way it needs to be said. I’ve always been super interested in systemic issues, and the dives into the topics you choose really satisfies my itch for knowledge of these issues. My friend and I are very interested in dance music and rave culture, and the inherent political nature of dance floor, and started a radical queer rave with explicit political intent, supplemented by a manifesto I wrote that was heavily inspired by the podcast, as well as Terre Thaemlitz and The Invisible Committee. We just had our inaugural rave this past Saturday and it was a huge and exciting success, people seemed to really respond to the idea that the dance floor is uniquely attuned to allowing us to internalize and confront the sense of alienation and isolation and despair we all seem to carry with us, and begin dialogues about it. I was absolutely ecstatic about the number of conversations I had or heard people having specifically about politics and culture and the economy in the context of climate apocalypse, it finally started to feel like I was a little less insane and paranoid. Thank you two so much for caring enough about the world to put in so much effort to inform even just a few of us who are willing to listen. Here's a copy of the manifesto we disseminated at the rave, if you wanted to take a look.
(December, 2018)
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