Video: Let’s talk about armed teachers

After 9/11, amid things like the Patriot Act and the new “War on Terror”, there came a bill that really caught my attention as a teenage Quaker – the Universal Military Service and Training Act of 2001. This was a proposed law that never made it to Bush’s desk (thankfully), that would have required all male citizens of age to enlist for basic training (including Pentagon-approved history lessons) and a term of service. The authors of the bill very kindly provided for contentious objectors to opt out of weapons training and direct combat roles. Needless to say, this freaked me out. I think it freaked out a lot of people, and I feel quite certain that if conditions allow, the idea will come up again.

So that’s something to look forward to…

Another way in which conservatives are trying to create the society in Starship Troopers is proposing that all teachers be armed. As usual, Beau of the Fifth Column has some words worth hearing on the subject, and on what that might actually look like.

This is not a solution. The problem is, that’s not going to stop conservatives from trying it. If you haven’t realized by now that reality is no barrier to the laws they want to make, then I’m afraid you’re very behind on your political education. The fact that they’re happy to legislate based on how they think reality ought to work, makes me think we need to consider that they’ll keep pushing for armed teachers until they get armed teachers. And if it comes to that, the scenario Beau discusses isn’t the only way that could go. There’s another possibility for what this could look like, and it’s a very, very grim one:

They could start requiring that all teachers either be veterans, or have completed basic training, or some other government-sanctioned combat training program.

At the end of the day, conservatives – and that’s not a category limited to Republicans – want to control things. They want hierarchies, and they want those hierarchies to be enforced. The tools they use for this – police, debt, redlining, etc. – are varied and sometimes fairly subtle, but they all seem to aim at creating a populace that will do as they’re told, and won’t rock the boat. It seems to me that this push to arm teachers may be closer than we realize to requiring teachers to undergo formal military training.

Do I need to make the case for why that would be a bad thing? Do I need to explain who would be most hurt by this path?

Friday Film Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

So, uh, this movie is about me.

I mean, it’s not about me. It’s about fictional characters played by people who are nothing like me.

But it could be about me, or you know, it might as well be about me.

I’m gonna start over by going back in time about 45 minutes to when I started this blog post. Bear with me a sec.

When I first started dating Tegan, back in 2013, I had a well-established dislike of horror movies. I’d seen a few, but I didn’t enjoy them, or the visions that they planted in my brain. It just seemed like a way to torture myself for no real gain. Kinda like watching Requiem for a Dream. Tegan convinced me to watch Cabin in the Woods, which is absolutely a horror movie, but it’s also more than that. It’s an interesting story about the “true origin” of humanity’s horror, from ancient monsters to modern-day slashers, with quite a bit of comedy worked in. It changed my mind. It’s not that I don’t enjoy horror movies, it’s that I don’t enjoy the ones that are horror without a meaningful or interesting plot. Cabin in the Woods is currently tied with Tucker and Dale vs. Evil as my favorite examples of the genre, and there are a few others that I like. They’re all ones that have horror as one part of an otherwise compelling story. It’s a central part, but it’s not the only thing going on.

I have similar feelings about movies that deal with intense emotional trauma and/or suffering. The aforementioned Requiem for a Dream might as well be a horror movie like the Jason series. It’s a cautionary tale about drugs, but it feels more like one of the Hell Houses that Christian fundamentalists use to scare each other about Damnation- grotesque and empty.

Tegan has now convinced me to watch Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and it is a ride. The two paragraphs before this are the introduction because this movie starts out like it’s going to be about the grinding misery of a disappointing life. It shows us a person who’s constantly distracted, constantly in doubt, constantly failing, and seems to be unable to hear her family half the time when they’re talking.

It… It hit close to home. It’s not my life, but it’s what my life has felt like many times. I’m not going to lie – as the beginning progressed, I was very tempted back out. The thing is, it’s not not about that misery, but as with the best horror movies, there’s so much more that you only get a taste of that misery before things go in a literally improbable and often hilarious direction. You never really have time to consider it again, except when it matters.

Which reminds me – have you read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? If you haven’t, you should. I’m sure it has it’s bad moments, but it really is a phenomenal work of storytelling, comedy, and imagination. I also suspect that it may have been an inspiration for Everything Everywhere All At Once. Specifically, a ship called The Heart of Gold. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you should at least read the first book in that series. Run along now!

Anyway, I was thinking about those similarities, but as the plot moved along, I suddenly felt like I was watching a version of the movie MirrorMask, but from a parallel universe, or maybe a universe that’s like almost parallel, but a little wobbly, so it bumps into ours from time to time.

MirrorMask, for those of you who don’t know, is a delightfully surreal fantasy movie from the mind of Neil Gaiman, in which a girl who escapes the turmoil of her life through art, finds her self pulled into a dying magical world populated by things she has drawn, and by strange, eccentric versions of the people in her life.

It sort of feels like a mix between Alice in Wonderland (I hope I don’t need to summarize that for you), and The Neverending Story (which would take far too long to summarize here), but it also has a bizarre and at times revolting sense of humor, as a multiverse of limitless possibilities vomits forth strange versions of the main cast that I guarantee you are not expecting. In a way, the sense of humor reminds me of what you’d encounter in a movie like Time Bandits.

Time Bandits is a movie directed by Terry Gilliam, starring the cast of Monty Python as well as a great many other people. It follows the story of a boy who’s caught up in a metaphysical heist, and is dragged through time, space, and different plains of reality. It’s a sort of zany, modern-day theodicy, with an ending that – to me – felt as unfulfilling (and entirely appropriate) as the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a – ok, this time it was a joke. You may have noticed a theme in this review, jumping from one thing to another? Each one forms a connection to the next, and that to another beyond it in a never-ending chain. Did I mention the Neverending story already? Yes I did. I’m very sorry, but I lured you in with a movie review, and ended up trapping you in a creative writing project about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), I’m so very sorry, but this movie (you know, the single movie of which this is a review?) hit me pretty hard. It’s a phenomenal movie. The casting is amazing, and the acting is amazing from everyone involved (It also has a flavor of Kind Hearts and Coronets. If you know, you know.)

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie about a mother and a daughter who both have ADHD, and don’t know it. I honestly don’t know whether either of my parents has ADHD, but looking back I can see how it affected my childhood. I don’t have kids, and I don’t expect to, but I can empathize with a parent’s desire to keep their children from making the same old mistakes. How could anyone not? Every time I learn something new, I want to tell the world, because knowing feels so much better than not knowing. I also want a world with less pain. I want a life with less pain. Who wouldn’t? If I knew a way to make that happen, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but in the meantime, I also understand the desire to just… be numb. To be at peace. Have the noise just stop for one damned second. This paragraph is what this movie is about.

As a kid, I lost myself in things. Things that put me into a state of flow. Things that made me forget who I was, and what my life was like. I want to be clear – my life was good, compared to a lot of people, even in the small schools I went to. This isn’t me saying I come from a background of hardship, because I really don’t. Looking back, I know there were times we were tight on money, but never tight enough that I noticed it. That shouldn’t be a privilege, and it doesn’t have to be. It can and should be the norm, and that’s basically the core of this blog. The-

Fuck. I got sidetracked again.

There’s one more movie I want to bring in, and that’s how we’ll wrap this up. I’ve talked about all these other movies that started playing in my head as I watched, but this is the one I really want to compare it to.

Arrival.

I’m not going to summarize the movie. You’re safe from that now. All I will say is that it is one of those rare movies that makes you feel like your mind is being opened to just a hint of how huge and strange our universe is. To harken back to The Hitchiker’s Guide, Arrival is a little bit like the Total Perspective Vortex (on the planet Frogstar B). It gives you a taste of what it would be like to remember your future as you remember your past, existing in your entire life at every moment. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is another Total Perspective Vortex movie, in more ways than one. It’s not a coincidence that I find this movie so relatable, and I’m not declaring it to be about ADHD just because it feels like this movie about a Chinese-American family is also about me. Like all original works of art (am I gonna get flamed for this?), the movie is about the people who who created it, and they say it’s about ADHD.

So I started doing some research. And then I stayed up until like, four in the morning, just reading everything I could find about it, just crying, just realizing that, “Oh, my God, I think I have ADHD.” So this movie is the reason why I got diagnosed. I got diagnosed, I went to therapy for a year and then went to a psychiatrist. And I’m now on meds, and it’s such a beautiful, cathartic experience to realize why your life has been so hard.

I’m intensely jealous. For those of you who’ve never tried, getting diagnosed with ADHD is still extremely difficult, at least as an adult. In Ireland, where I live, it’s functionally impossible for me, or for Tegan. The public system can’t accommodate, and the private system only gives a shit about rich people.

Watching Arrival for the first time was a revelatory experience. I consider it to be one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, and Everything Everywhere All At Once now stands along side it. I’ve never cared about the Oscars before (and I don’t really now), but I think this ought to win Best Picture.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

So stop me if you’ve heard this one. A Buddhist monk is walking down the street in New York, and seeing a hotdog stand, decides he will get one. He approaches the stand, looks at the vendor, and says, “Make me one with everything.”

Rebecca Watson on Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and domestic abuse

Like Watson, I’ve been doing my best to not pay attention to this particular bit of ugliness. I feel a bit callous saying this, but it’s none of my business, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. My instinct has been to believe Heard, and it was surprising to see an increasing number of people saying that actually she is the abuser. It never seemed compelling to me, but I’ve had my doubts, and when something is making this much news, it is going to affect a lot of people’s lives, and while this one relationship is far outside of my sphere of influence, I think that addressing the issue is important, because there are a lot of abuse victims who I believe could be hurt by the coverage and rhetoric around this case. That’s why I’m grateful to Rebecca Watson for digging into the issue. EDIT: Here’s the transcript for those who’re interested.

The Sharkcano has erupted. I repeat: The Sharkcano has erupted. This is not B movie.

So I vaguely remember hearing about the “sharkcano” once before, but I definitely needed a refresher. It’s an underwater volcano in the Solomon Islands, and in 2015 it was discovered that there were a number of sharks and other fish living in the crater of the volcano, where the water is both hot and acidic. We’re talking temperatures of 40°C/104°F or higher, if I’m reading this paper right. Long-time readers will know that one of the concerns with a warming climate is that hotter water can hold less dissolved oxygen, meaning some fish – especially the larger, more active ones – will have to find cooler water, or suffocate. From what I can tell, the fact that the crater is near the surface, and there’s a lot of thermal activity there, means that the water mixes around more than usual, so I’d guess that that raises the oxygen level. I suppose it’s also possible that the fish there somehow need less oxygen? I really don’t know. Regardless, I hope the sharks and everyone else living there knew their home well enough to flee, because it has erupted. I honestly expect that they’ll be OK, because this isn’t the first time.

Named after a sea god of the Indigenous Gatokae and Vangunu people, Kavachi is located about 15 miles south of Vangunu Island, part of the Solomon Islands east of Papua New Guinea. It’s one of the most active underwater volcanoes in this part of the Pacific and has been erupting nearly continuously since at least 1939, when people living on nearby islands first recorded an eruption, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Global Volcanism Program.

The volcano is also known by the name Rejo te Kvachi, which means “Kavachi’s Oven”—a fitting moniker for the superheated lava, steam, particulates, rock fragments and sulfur that sometimes reach the water’s surface. Scientists believe the volcano’s summit is roughly 65 feet below the water; Kavachi’s base is on the seafloor, about three-fourths of a mile below sea level, per NASA.

Over its recorded history, Kavachi has created a handful of ephemeral islands that have spanned up to a kilometer in length. But the ocean’s waves have always eroded and washed these islands away. It also produces dramatic phreatomagmatic eruptions, in which superheated magma and water interact to create violent, steamy explosions.

“Sharkcano” earned its nickname after a 2015 expedition found two species of sharks, along with active microbial communities, living within the volcano’s crater. Using a baited drop camera, an international team observed scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini) and silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis) living in the hot, acidic water. Kavachi is a “fascinating natural laboratory” that “remains full of mysteries to explore,” according to the researchers, who published the results of their exploration in the journal Oceanography in 2016. NASA has been tracking Kavachi for some time, taking equally spectacular photos of eruptions in 2007 and 2014.

When I played Subnautica, I thought that the “lava lizards” that lived in and around underwater volcanoes were pretty far-fetched as life forms went, but this is honestly closer to that than I realized could exist. The 2015 paper I linked above points out that higher temperatures and higher acidity are both major concerns for the survival of life in the ocean in the coming years. Last year’s heat wave killed hundreds of millions of sea creatures on the west coast of North America, and I think it’s fair to say we’re going to see more of that. It’s nice to know that life – even life that’s familiar to us – is possible even in an acidic stew like that.

Even so, I think I’ll keep trying to prevent those conditions from becoming commonplace around the world.

The image shows six images from the underwater volcano Kavachi. The top left image is blue, and shows streams of bubbles rising from cracks in the sea floor. The next image over shows a microbial mat, followed by a picture of a bluefin trevally. The bottom three images, left to right, are of red snappers, a scalloped hammerhead shark, and a silky shark. The fish pictures all show yellow, cloudy water.

2. (A) Oblique view of a line of bubbling gas along the outer edge of Kavachi’s crater with orange, cloudy plume fluids in the background. (B) Downward-looking view of a microbial mat on the summit of the Southwest Extension. (C) Bluefin trevally, (D) snapper, (E) hammerhead shark, and (F) a silky shark observed using a baited drop camera deployed inside the crater.

Video: True Facts about nudibranchs (and a little Oceanoxia lore)

Can washing machines get trichobezoars? Raksha has been gone for a while now, but she’s still managing to clog drains from beyond the grave. Anyway, today involved an unexpected flood followed by turning the apartment into a sauna to dry out the particle board flooring under the linoleum flooring in my oh-so-well-managed flat. I believe we managed to stem the tide in time to prevent any water leaking down to disturb the neighbors, but it was by no means a sure thing. Then, right before I was gonna make supper, I got sidetracked by writing a thousand words or so in my current fantasy novel, and then suddenly it was late and I had to cook. Time is vastly overrated. I want a refund.

All of this is to say, here’s a video I thought was neat

Fun fact – the banner of this blog is from the background of its original home, and I took that photo on the same day as I shot the nudibranchs in the banner that’s still there.

Tegan Tuesday: The Music Video Effect

Part of the fun of graduate level training is the introduction to existing questions in your field. One of the topics presented for debate in my Masters was the phonograph effect. A short description of this debate is: does knowing there are preserved, repeatable versions of a performance change how we write, perform, and listen to music? Of course it does. Technology changes cultures and music is no exception to this. (The debate then becomes what specifically is the phonograph effect versus changing tastes.) But now, 150 years after Edison’s invention, I think we are experiencing a second shift: the music video effect.

While videos of musicians and songs existed in the 1960s and 1970s, these mostly don’t resemble the current understanding of a music video. A modern music video is a separate work of art that uses a piece of music as the predominant soundtrack for storytelling. This isn’t that they can’t be more than that — Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album come to mind — but they usually stick close to the recorded sound. Sia’s “Chandelier” is an example of modern visual storytelling that uses the song as the primary audio.

Early music videos, rather than being a separate art form, were often recordings of live TV performances, or weren’t far off from that format. Here’s The Monkees’s “Daydream Believer” as an example of the fake concert format.

These early videos weren’t much beyond advertising for tickets to live concerts and for album sales. Notable exceptions to this were long-form videos like Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” and The Beatles’s “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Compressing two decades of music video history, it’s enough to say that the biggest change to the value of music videos came in August 1981 when MTV first went on the air. The story I had always been told by my dad was that the first video played was The Buggles’s “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It is a story so pat, I doubted it, but a quick glance at wikipedia — your friend and mine! — suggests that it’s true. Now, because of the impact of MTV on young people, if an artist wanted to reach that market, they needed an arresting video in addition to a catchy radio hit. The forty years since then have only increased the emphasis placed on music videos, and even prioritized them over the development of albums. According to my friend’s own MA research (unpublished thesis entitled How TikTok is Changing the Music Industry), it is more cost efficient in the Spotify and TikTok world to have a handful of well-made and highly-produced singles with music videos than to build the narrative of an album that would have three-quarters of its tracks commercial non-starters. Most pop music consumers today are only looking for individual tracks anyway. The TikTok connection to videos is obvious, as it’s a visual medium, but even Spotify will often show music videos while streaming if the app is up on the phone or computer. That a streaming audio service is attempting to capitalize on the music video phenomenon is indicative of how prevalent this format is in the modern music industry.

Where the music video effect gets really interesting — to me — is the relationship between music videos and non-current popular music. Today, we have access to 150 years of recorded sound and each era has modern fans. One of my favorite digital archives and preservation projects is the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archives, with a close second being the Library of Congress National Jukebox. These platforms allow modern music lovers to hear everything from the latest vaudeville hit of 1899 (“Hello My Baby” anyone?) to home recordings of unidentified children singing folk songs. While I’m sure that there are early sound fans creating videos for some of these recordings, the majority of early sound fans on YouTube prioritize the physical medium. Their videos are often simply a turn table or phonograph playing the music, sharing the early album with you, the viewer. I suspect that these earliest recordings are less susceptible to the music video effect simply because they are niche markets with dedicated fans of the aesthetic. The goal of a digital rendition is not to bring modern aesthetics to the era, but to introduce modern music lovers to the aesthetics of a previous era.

There is, however, a pre-MTV era of music that is still commercially viable and widely popular: the classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s. Not all of the hits from the early music video days had videos made because it was an expensive extra. More than that, hindsight can tell us what tracks have stood the test of time. “Purple Haze”, for example, was considered a flop upon release, and now it’s one of Jimi Hendrix’s most well-known tracks. Why waste the money on a video if you weren’t even sure the song would be popular? Classic rock is thus the only genre that both has a large, active fanbase, and doesn’t currently have in-period music videos to bring into the digital, visual world. They also are still all under copyright. Because of this visual gap, in the past 5-10 years, many record companies have started producing officially licensed music videos to bring these beloved hits to a new market. There are three main categories for how to structure these videos: listening community, artistic community, and retrospective.

The first category is the celebration of the listening community. The first song that I noticed having had a modern music video made fits this category: Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

The music video is simple and doesn’t even include the singer, but it instead highlights the listener. “Tiny Dancer” has been a part of people’s listening experience since it’s release in 1971 and has been loved for all of those fifty years (although it technically wasn’t a commercial success as it never topped the charts). The newly crafted music video shows the viewer snapshots of the lives of the many people who listen to Elton John, and invites us to link our experience with theirs. Rather than highlighting a new work or an artist, this video celebrates the long-lasting cultural power of a hit song. The artist is important, the song is important, but the listening community built around it is where its current value lies.

The second category is also a variant on community. “Artistic community” specifically refers to the community that the artist has built. An example of this I saw recently (it’s what prompted this article!) is George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.”

The music video for this song is a fun romp telling the story of a secret spy organization, and has nothing to do with the song content. For this star-studded video, it is clear that the artist — who is posthumously present in the film — had had all of his friends asked if they wanted to make a film. This video is just a goofy and entertaining introduction for viewers who might be unfamiliar with the song. The non-topical video also in no way impedes the enjoyment of a long-time fan.

The final type of new video for an old tune is the nostalgic retrospective. An example of this is the new video for The Beatles’s “Here Comes the Sun.”

It’s a beautiful video that references the source material, but it primarily highlights old footage from the band’s heyday. A viewer of this type of video is most likely already familiar with the source material and the context for the nostalgia. This style is the hardest video for a newcomer to appreciate, but perhaps the easiest for a long-time fan. This style also feels closest to a fan video with an actual budget, so the only novelty here is the official sponsorship from the record label.

The thing that all three of my examples have in common is that they are mega-hits. It is a low-risk financial investment for a recording company to make a video for one of these tried-and-true songs. The Lovin’ Spoonful or Lulu aren’t likely to be eligible for officially licensed videos any time soon, no matter how popular they may have been in their own time. Personally, I hope that more videos are made in the first two categories, as I find both of them significantly more fun than simply being sad about times gone by. Feel free to share any examples of the music video effect that you’ve seen in your own corner of the internet — I’m always looking for more fun videos to watch!

Have a tiny bit of good news about climate change; as a treat!

There’s a book I got years ago – I think it might have been a stocking stuffer – called The Miseries of Human Life. The book was originally printed in 1806, and dwells not on true horrors like war and poverty, but specifically on the minor miseries of our lives. Those things that seem to afflict us all, simply for the crime of being human. It’s things like hangnails, or food that slips out from under your knife when you try to cut it. It’s people conversing across you at a bar, or being suddenly overcome with sleepiness while listening to someone talk, even though you’re genuinely interested, and respect the speaker.

One such misery of modern life is the fact that every speck of good news about climate change seems to fall into the category of “well, it’s still bad, but it’s not as bad as we feared”. We never get unambiguously good news. I hope that will change in my lifetime, but as it stands, it’s a minor frustration, like a sock that keeps slipping down your heel as you walk.

So, there’s good news! It seems that methane emissions from melting permafrost aren’t as bad as we feared!

Permafrost runs like a frozen belt of soil and sediment around Earth’s northern arctic and sub-arctic tundra. As permafrost thaws, microorganisms are able to break down thousands of years-old accumulations of organic matter. This process releases a number of greenhouse gases. One of the most critical gasses is methane; the same gas emitted by cattle whenever they burp and fart.

Because of this, scientists and public agencies have long feared methane emissions from permafrost to rise in step with global temperatures. But, in some places, it turns out that methane emissions are lower than once presumed.

In a comprehensive new study by a collaborative from the University of Gothenburg, Ecole Polytechnique in France and the Center for Permafrost (CENPERM) at the University of Copenhagen, researchers measured the release of methane from two localities in Northern Sweden. Permafrost disappeared from one of the locations in the 1980’s, and 10-15 years later in the other.

The difference between the two areas shows what can happen as a landscape gradually adapts to the absence of permafrost. The results show that the first area to lose its permafrost now has methane emissions ten times less than in the other locality. This is due to gradual changes in drainage and the spread of new plant species. The study’s findings were recently published in the journal Global Change Biology.

“The study has shown that there isn’t necessarily a large burst of methane as might have been expected in the wake of a thaw. Indeed, in areas with sporadic permafrost, far less methane might be released than expected,” says Professor Bo Elberling of CENPERM (Center for Permafrost), at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.

This is good news. Methane doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but it’s much more powerful as an insulator in our atmosphere, and the reason climate change is so dangerous is the speed at which it’s happening. Anything that means it’s moving slower than it could be is good for us. It means that we have just a little bit more time to act.

What’s even better is the reason why the researchers think there’s less methane production:

According to Professor Elberling, water drainage accounts for why far less methane was released than anticipated. As layers of permafrost a few meters deep begin to disappear, water in the soil above begins to drain.

“Permafrost acts somewhat like the bottom of a bathtub. When it melts, it’s as if the plug has been pulled, which allows water to seep through the now-thawed soil. Drainage allows for new plant species to establish themselves, plants that are better adapted for drier soil conditions. This is exactly what we’re seeing at these locations in Sweden,” he explains.

Grasses typical of very wet areas with sporadic permafrost have developed a straw-like system that transports oxygen from their stems down into to their roots. These straws also act as a conduit through which methane in the soil quickly find its way to the surface and thereafter into the atmosphere.

As the water disappears, so do these grasses. Gradually, they are replaced by new plant species, which, due to the dry soil conditions, do not need transport oxygen from the surface via their roots. The combination of more oxygen in the soil and reduced methane transport means that less methane is produced and that the methane that is produced can be better converted to CO2 within the soil.

“As grasses are outcompeted by new plants like dwarf shrubs, willows and birch, the transport mechanism disappears, allowing methane to escape quickly up through soil and into the atmosphere,” explains Bo Elberling.

The combination of dry soil and new plant growth also creates more favorable conditions for soil bacteria that help break methane down.

Like I said – less methane is good even if it’s just being replaced by CO₂. Ready for the even better news? There doesn’t seem to be a big increase in CO₂ either.

“When methane can no longer escape through the straws, soil bacteria have more time to break it down and convert it into CO2,” Bo Elberling elaborates.

As a result, one can imagine that as microorganisms reduce methane emissions, the process will lead to more CO2 being released. Yet, no significant increase in CO2 emissions was observed by the researchers in their study. This is interpreted as being the result of the CO2 balance, which is more heavily determined by plant roots than the CO2 released from the microorganisms that break down methane. Crucially, even though methane ends up as CO2, it is considered less critical in climate change context as methane is at least 25 more potent greenhouse gas as compared to CO2.

The article goes on to talk about the role precipitation could play in affecting this – more water probably means more methane – but I find this genuinely encouraging. It’s another indication that if we can get our act together, the ecosystems around us will probably help us in our efforts to stabilize the climate. This is also information that we could put to use in trying to mitigate permafrost emissions in other areas, as we look to engaging in stewardship of a rapidly changing planet.

It’s worth remembering, sometimes, that the indifference of our universe means that sometimes things work out in our favor in ways we didn’t expect. Obviously that’s no guarantee of a good outcome, but it does give me more motivation to do what I can now, so that as those bits of good luck come our way, we’re better able to make use of them.

The people of Atlanta are standing up for themselves, because their government won’t.

I revisit the subject of urban greenery on a fairly regular basis. My vision of a better world still involves cities, but I want those cities to be integrated with the surrounding ecosystems as much as possible. Rather than being a sort of desert landscape, we could have cities that could almost feel like living in a forest. Beyond the mental and physical health benefits, there’s also the fact that plants tend to lower the temperature around them, rather than simply absorbing heat the way asphalt and concrete do. As the climate warms, the amount of plant life in and around cities is going to make a big difference in how hot they get. To that end, we should be both advocating for new green spaces, and defending those that currently exist, whether or not that existence is “official”.

I add that last bit because there’s just such a fight going on right now in Atlanta, GA. A prison farm that used convict slaves to grow food for Atlanta’s prison population closed down in 1989, and has since been increasingly consumed by forest. That’s all well and good, but there are a couple problems. The land is still owned by the city, and it’s apparently been used as a dumping ground, and a firing range for Atlanta police. The early stages of a new development project have begun, which will clear away a big chunk of the forest in order to make a sort of “dummy city” for the cops to train in.

Because as we all know, what we need is for law enforcement to become more militarized.

That would be bad enough, but unfortunately there’s more to the story. I’ll just quote the folks working to defend the forest:

ATLANTA IS A CITY IN A FOREST

We have the highest percentage of tree canopy of any major metropolitan area in America. Our canopy is the main factor in ensuring Atlanta’s resiliency in the face of climate change. The forest in Southeast Atlanta is home to wetlands that filter rainwater and prevent flooding. It is also one of the last breeding grounds for many amphibians in the region, as well as an important migration site for wading birds.

The history of this particular land is deeply scarred. In the 1800s shortly after the land was stolen from Muscogee Creek peoples, it was used as a plantation. In the early 1900s, a prison farm was opened where inmates were forced to perform unpaid agricultural labor, marking the rebranding of slavery into for profit prison labor. The Atlanta Police Department currently uses this hallowed ground as a firing range.

This forest is at risk of destruction as the police and Hollywood make plans to pave over Atlanta’s largest remaining green space.

The Atlanta Police Department seeks to turn 300 acres of forest into a tactical training compound featuring a mock city. This project was recently announced to the shock of community members who had been given no opportunity to weigh in on the proposal. The entire process has been shadier than the forest itself.

Intrenchment Creek is an existing public park adjacent to the Prison Farm. Dekalb County seeks to swap this land with Blackhall Studios, a major film production company. Blackhall wants to clear cut 170 acres of forest to develop into an airport and erect the largest sound stage in America. This project would cement Atlanta as the new Hollywood, making the cost of living in our city outrageous.

We refuse to let our forest be bulldozed in favor of the police and sold out to Hollywood. There are many forms of action and advocacy to be taken. This is a broad, decentralized, autonomous movement. Get involved in whatever ways move you. Take a walk in the forest with your friends.

Forests and other wild spaces are vital public resources, and should be protected. I’ve talked before about how enraging it is that we’re all forced to just go through life like nothing’s happening, while the rest of the biosphere collapses around us, and a tiny number of the most evil people on the planet use their obscene wealth and power to continue the destruction of everything we hold dear. It’s difficult to know how to discuss these things for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I’m not always sure where the boundaries of legality are when it comes to discussing what to do about unjust laws. I’m very glad that movements like this go out of their way to avoid harming any of the people they’re trying to stop, but I also find it encouraging that they’re clearly unwilling to abide by a rule of law that would see us all die to maintain the lifestyles of the rich and powerful.

The reality is that if we are going to survive, we need to protect every halfway-healthy ecosystem we can. That may be less urgent than ending fossil fuel extraction and use, but not by a whole lot.

I was talking to someone on Twitter the other day about what I do and don’t want for the world, and because it’s so easy to miscommunicate on a platform like that I ended up doing a brief rundown of what changes I think humanity needs to make. It’s… It’s a lot. There’s so much work to do, it’s hard to wrap my head around. I talked a while back about the problem of chemical pollution, separate from climate change, and that’s something that we can help by stopping pollution at the source, but I think it’d be a very good idea for us to do what we can to actively clean stuff up. I’m no doctor, but maybe it’s not good that there’s plastic and other shit in our blood? That’s going to mean cleaning up old dumping grounds like the area in the Atlanta forest, and cleaning up what could be centuries of mine waste, and battlegrounds all over the world, and sunken ships, and all the while the richest people on the planet want to keep making that monumental task bigger.

At what point is it self defense to obstruct this kind of “development”? At what point is it self defense to force the closure of a factory that’s poisoning your water?

As with white supremacy, the United States has responded to these questions with bluster and resentful concessions at best, and outright denial at worst. The reality is that our current structure of laws and norms has always devalued life, and now it seems poised to simply make life impossible for large portions of the planet’s population.

Part of the reason I favor the approach of local organizing networked to allow for national or global action, is that while we face huge, planetary problems, their manifestations are local in nature. Different communities have different needs, and the people on the ground – as in Atlanta – best know what the stakes are for themselves. The same was true with the opposition to the Keystone pipeline extension – activists came from all across the country to help, and they put themselves under the leadership of the Indigenous people whose land they were trying to defend.

People in Atlanta are fighting to do what their city’s government will not, and preserve the ecosystem that gives Atlanta its best hope of a better future as the climate warms. I support what they’re doing, and I hope to see more actions like it in the coming years. Maybe I’m just a bit too cynical, but I don’t see our “leaders” doing anything real any time soon, and we’re short on time.

Chile’s potential new constitution looks interesting

Last time I wrote about goings-on in Chile, it was to talk about a hilarious campaign ad from a very promising candidate. That candidate – Gabriel Boric – won, and is currently serving as president of Chile. The movement that put Boric in power also had other agendas, and it seems they’re close to getting real results. Apparently they have a final draft for a new constitution, to be voted on in September:

After 10 months of fraught negotiations, Chile has finalised the draft of a new constitution that could replace the document drawn up during Gen Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

María Elisa Quinteros, the president of the gender-equal, 154-member assembly will formally present the draft at a ceremony in the port city of Antofagasta on Monday afternoon.

“This is an ecological and equal constitution with social rights at its very core,” she said in an interview.

Among the long list of rights and freedoms the draft enshrines, the new constitution makes higher education free, ensures gender parity across government and makes the state responsible for preventing, adapting to and mitigating climate change.

The constitution will be put to a referendum on 4 September in which all Chileans aged 18 or older must vote.

Chile exploded into protest in 2019 and millions of people took to the streets decrying a host of entrenched inequalities. In response, political parties struck a compromise to move towards replacing the Pinochet-era constitution.

Nearly 80% of voters chose to begin that journey in an October 2020 plebiscite, and seven months later leftists and independents stormed elections for a constitutional convention.

“With every bill that passed, we have provided answers to the demands of the 2019 demonstrations, such as better healthcare, education and pensions,” Quinteros said.

The new document will for the first time offer constitutional recognition to Chile’s Indigenous population.

“Whether this constitution is rejected or approved [by the plebiscite], I believe that Chile’s Indigenous peoples have already won,” said Rosa Catrileo, who represents the Mapuche, the country’s largest Indigenous group.

“We have made our demands visible on a national level, and so never again will we be excluded from the conversation,” she said.

The new document even includes a clause for the compensated restitution of historically Indigenous lands.

Among a host of other changes, it opts to eliminate the senate in favour of a single-chamber legislature, and paves the way for Chile’s deeply unpopular private water rights system to be replaced.

Since July last year, the former congress building in Santiago has been the stage for a lengthy and often bitter public battle over Chile’s future.

The process was designed around participation, with citizens able to endorse articles and debate legislation at assemblies the length of Chile.

As the country confronted its past head-on, delegates have occasionally been hounded by the public, while a vociferous campaign to undermine the process has raged in the background.

Although the Pinochet-era constitution was reformed significantly under the presidency of Ricardo Lagos in 2005, it retains the ideological fingerprints of Chile’s dictator.

It omits certain rights, such as the right to housing, and focuses on securing the legacy of the military regime as well as a market-led model for the provision of social services.

With 499 articles, Chile’s new constitution would be the world’s longest, prompting some concern over the “maximalist” approach taken by the delegates.

The convention has divided into three commissions: one to streamline and condense the document; another to plot the transition from one constitution to the next; and a third to write a preamble.

However, the outlook is uncertain ahead of September’s plebiscite.

Latest polling suggests that initial enthusiasm for reform has dissipated, with 46% saying they will reject the draft compared with 38% voting in its favour.

The future is uncertain, and always will be. We can know some things for sure, but no struggle for liberation is a fight for a guaranteed outcome. We can make all the right decisions and have bad things happen anyway. That’s as true at a national level as it is at an individual level. Failing to get it right is not evidence that we should go back to a worse way of doing things – it’s an inevitable process of figuring out how to do things in a new way. It seems like “uncertain times” tend to make a lot of people cling to a familiar illusion of stability, forgetting that those very conditions were what led to the chaos we want to escape. I hope Chile manages to start something new and positive in September, and if they don’t get it then, well, life goes on, and we try again.

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