Notices by Will Tuladhar-Douglas (yetiinabox@todon.nl), page 2

As someone who ran the only other #ethnobotany programme in the UK (Aberdeen, which was closed more than 10 years ago), and who taught #ethnobiology at the Edinburgh Botanics for many years, I believe I am qualified to say that the closure of ethnobotany, ethnobiology, and anthropology at Kent is appalling cultural vandalism.

Dark times are upon us, and the custodians of the lineages of wisdom must be careful now.

@pvonhellermannn

There is no legal framework for an environmental refugee. Why not?

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/2/protecting-climate-refugees-requires-a-legal-definition

Cristina-Ioanna Dragomir assesses the obstacles and argues that we must update existing international refugee law.

So I handed over my Samsung A72 to a child, and replaced it with a used Pixel 7a . I thought it would be smaller (I am tired of large phones!) and run better software.

It's an awful phone. No ANT support, no SD card, aggressive Google stuff everywhere, confusing and fiddly interface, and my plan to use #GrapheneOS has apparently been thwarted because bank apps now use Google, not Android, calls to check that they are on a secure phone.

#fediscience folks: who (else) is working on biodiversity and (human) migration?

Last Sunday pancakes of the year.

#COP28 No appeasement for petrostates.

The second, "compromise" text is what the fossil fuel industries and their client governments are hoping for. No agreement woukd be better than appeasement. I hope AOSIS and others have the strength to walk away unless there is binding language that includes phase out of production and consumption of fossil fuels.

"The UN climate change conference is failing humanity and Mother Earth. We are seeing firsthand the fossil fuel polluters and wealthy governments manipulating developing countries to undermine real action on climate change. " --Tom Goldtooth, quoted in the Guardian. <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2023/dec/13/cop28-live-updates-news-agreement-outcomes-draft-text-fossil-fuels>

I am reading _ Eichman in Jerusalem_ , and this time through, as an older person confronted by the systematic failure of ordinary people to recognise or act against the environmental crisis, for decades, it has un-wished-for explanatory force.

My children don't understand why anyone would use a car, all those cars driving by every day, or buy water in a plastic bottle, why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are used as examples of "good" entrepreneurs in their curriculum. I can see the corrupt business practices that meant we were offered a new gas boiler rather than a ground source heat pump in the government-backed scheme...but I don't understand it.

#Arendt did. She understood evil. What a terrible gift.

Pungent argument: the hope that benevolent superordinate institutions will allow us to change bad processes is a vulnerability that malevolent elites exploit over and over again. The capture of code repositories and coding tools by a multinational, and the capture of the IPCC COP meetings by petro-oligarchs (to pick two examples) are so similar that we should seek to find and fix the social flaw that causes good people to squander their political movements. Unfortunately, it's an attitude that is overtly taught in schools: trust the state, admire the wealthy, compete against each other to find true merit. We need #anarchist teaching across our homes and families to immunize children against this vulnerability.
This is a separate question, though related, to the objectification of non-human life and capitalist extractivism, which also needs to be called out and neutralised in the education system.
Home schooling is not the answer, because in the long run solidarity across communities is essential for long-term transformation, and that solidarity is learned in school. But as families who care about the future, we must transform how young people engage with teachers and curricula, from the very first moment of nursery.

Diary entry, of sorts. Three weeks out from #Covid and it hasn't left me. The fever and cough are long gone but cycling is harder than it was, and what were unnoticeable undulations in the road are suddenly hills that need gears. It's also dark, still, as the Aberdeen->Glasgow train turns inland and heads up the Tay. Although I have lived in Scotland for 20 years now, my bodymind still expects to wake up in the #mountains with a hot sun right overhead.

Unsurprisingly, _Science_ published an attack on academic unions. It portrays successful struggles to improve pay and conditions for PhD and postdocs as anti-individualist (!) and an attack on innocent research group leaders.

https://www.science.org/content/article/student-and-postdoc-unions-proliferate-academia-scrambling-adapt

Among other gems:

'Individual faculty members, who support grad student researchers and postdocs out of their own grants, are having to take a careful look at their budgets as well. “Every lab is in many ways its own little microbusiness,” says Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the graduate division at UC Berkeley. '

and

'“less research is going to be produced per dollar of [grant] money,” Nestler says. "This is the way the … research enterprise will have to change.”'

If you have not been alerted to this research through other channels, this is a paper published yesterday that changes our expectations for near-term and long-term climate heating. To quote Hansen, "1.5 is dead and 2.0 is on its deathbed" - the IPCC modelling numbers are much too low.
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889

Here's a video (youtube, sorry) of a discussion of the paper. https://youtu.be/NXDWpBlPCY8

The downside to the paper is that it calls for a crazed programme of technocratic geo-engineering.

#climateChange #GHG

Future medicines are at risk because of habitat loss.

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-humanity-future-medicines-due-extinctions.html

I would add that loss of Indigenous languages multiplies this risk, as both landscape stewardship and knowledge of plants are transmitted through them.

#CrossBorderRail #AberdeenToBielefeld first leg done: I cycled from Bridge of Don to Union Station on a folding bike at night with a bright yellow suitcase (matches the jacket!) strapped onto the luggage rack. It definitely got me some odd looks from the partying students.

The new Caledonian Sleeper seated accommodation is really good!

#SleeperTrains #Bielefeld #Aberdeen #mindfulTravel

#AberdeenToBielefeld #CrossBorderRail

Feesht! *just* made Eurostar. In true I'm-worried-about-the-bike form, I managed to cycle from Euston to St Pancras but forgot a bag, so had to sprint back, all the way down platform 15, get the bag, and get back to the Eurostar gates...last one through the gate, and the Eurostar staff were incredibly helpful with the folding bike, helping get the bike into the bag and then the flustered Old Guy onto the train. 12/10 to them, 3/10 to me.

I wish people would stop describing the environmental crisis as a "tragedy of the commons". Even Hardin's original model, which has been debunked and disproven, postulated a resource badly shared among near equals. What we are experiencing is comparable to the deliberate desolation of a forest by strip miners with vast machines. To adjust the metaphor, the multinational oil, agrochemical, and weapons companies and the billionaires that own them are not selfish villagers across the green, they are invading armies with weapons. Not pathetic tragedy based on a flaw in human nature, just deliberate desolation and extirpation.

One child came back from school with a copy of the dreadful Shirley Jackson story "The Lottery" in hand. Along with _Lord of the Flies_ it's a chunk of Cold War libertarian propaganda - so I promptly handed them a copy of Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". I don't know if Le Guin actually intended her story as a point-by-point refutation of "The Lottery" but it does a magnificent job of exposing the underlying ideology and challenging it, right down to the question of what is acceptable in literature for 12 year olds - "Omelas" overtly discusses sex and drugs, with gentle humour, and condemns violence, while "The Lottery" features prudes who practice ritual murder.
If anyone here is teaching "The Lottery" or has a child for whom it is prescribed reading, I heartily suggest Le Guin's antidote to cultural poisoning.

Last month, I happened to read Octavia Butler's _Blood Child_ and Macy & Johnstone's _Active Hope_ in the same week.

I came away feeling as though each lacked something crucial that the other had. _Active Hope_ is a book which, for all its good intentions, is written from a place of unexamined privilege. A lot of hard work has happened among Buddhist activist/scholars recently, led by criticism of sexism and sexual abuse, systematic racism, and class/caste biases. It hasn't been comfy, but it is necessary, and it has to continue. The stories in _Blood Child_ begin from that awareness, but as much as I like Butler, there is a pervasive despair and absence of compassionate, stubborn hope in the bits of her work that I know.

Be ungovernable. Bring the light with you.

Well, I've put in a proposal for a #solsticeschool talk. Sacred sites, Aboriginal burning, vultures, turtles, community forests....

h/t @JohnBarentine

Anyone who has published an academic paper or presented at a conference gets emails every day from a range of dodgy journals and publishing projects - I dread to think what some of the more prolific academic authors here wade through. Long gone are the days where "two papers a year" is enough to stay in the game -- and since, for the kind of detailed ethnographic and archival work folks like me do for every paper, that's a tough ask, then it's impossible to compete. This article from El Pais lays it out in grim detail.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2023-06-03/un-cientifico-que-publica-un-estudio-cada-dos-dias-muestra-el-lado-mas-oscuro-de-la-ciencia.html