"If you find it difficult to think of a #river as alive, try picturing a dying or dead river. This is easier ... Can a forest think? Does a mountain remember? Is a river alive?"
One of my favourite nature writers is Robert Macfarlane. And since I can follow him again on another place, I get his new texts. Here's a great #essay from his coming #book 'Is A River Alive': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/26/is-this-river-alive-robert-macfarlane-on-the-lives-deaths-and-rights-of-our-rivers

New climate crisis book display up in the Scott Library at York University. I printed zines by @Aepasek and @hakan_geijer to give away. (Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and the film adaptation, on also on the table.)

(None of these displays ever look good in photos, but the space is grim and we do the best we can.)

How Everything Can Collapse by Pablo Servigne & Raphaël Stevens, 2020

Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#Anthropocene
#collapse

So, yeah. That whole #Anthropocene thing's going well. Thank you for asking.

https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rain

Perhaps you know about the art collaboration between Herbert Duprat and #caddisflies producing precious #casings?
Inspired by this work, biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra et al. worked about the cases for detecting #plasticWaste before the term #microplastics existed.

A fascinating thread about the scientists' detective work https://bsky.app/profile/aukeflorian.nl/post/3lmeqk4xpnc2m and the study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969725005820
#Trichoptera tell about 50 years of #plastics history.

I have spent the last 2 years focusing on waste management, especially that of Electronic Waste—from the mining of the resources to the discarding of the commodities, and while we are well aware of the pattern of disparity between the over-consumption in the Global North and overproduction in the Global Majority parts of the world, the problems largely still exists. Who to blame, somebody is surely making profits from this trade deal.

Anthropocene is a (Poubelle)ocene.

Certain headlines, like the one below, always make me feel disgusted, knowing that the patterns of dreadful and atrocious colonial practices are still prevalent. I am so perplexed as to what design thinking hat to put on or what circular economy principles to explain the exporting of trash to their previous colonies.

Not only that, but in a recent survey commissioned by the Repair Campaign (https://repaircampaign.org/), more than 2,000 people in the UK found that 85% did not know that more than 3 million people had been forcibly shipped from Africa to the Caribbean by British enslavers. It also found 89% were unaware British merchants had enslaved people in the Caribbean for more than 300 years.

As Dr. Shashi Tharoor has mentioned various times, "And LOOT, a Hindi word which the Britishers took into their dictionaries as well as their habit" (Link below of the talk of Dr. Shashi Tharoor - Looking Back at the British Raj in India at the University of Edinburgh)

Sources -
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c14jy2dd8jeo
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/most-britons-do-not-know-scale-of-uks-involvement-in-slavery-survey-finds?utm_source=instagram&utm_campaign=ig_gu
3. https://youtu.be/OB5ykS-_-CI?si=iczPAnaOR5j6E-K-&t=224

Humans constantly change and even destroy #ecosystems - what happens then? It's called 'novel ecosystems'. "They now exist as self-sustaining systems. These are wild but changed ecosystems. They have passed some critical threshold which means they are unlikely to ever go back to how they were before." #Hawaii has become a laboratory for #ecologists to study such "freakosystems": https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250403-the-new-hawaiian-freakosystem-emerging-on-oahu-accidentally-created-by-humans

Émission autour de l’ouvrage #LaNatureEnRévolution, une #histoireEnvironnementale de la #France (1780-1870) (Editions La Découverte)

Avec Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (historien, chercheur au CNRS) Corinne Marache, professeur d’histoire contemporaine à l’Université Bordeaux Montaigne et Julien Vincent, maitre de conférences en histoire des sciences (Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)

https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/c-est-pas-du-vent/20250327-une-histoire-environnementale-de-la-france-1780-1870

#environnement #histFr #industrialisation #anthropocène #écologie #livres @histodons @bookstodon

"Baker noted that "there's long been this very human-centric idea of intelligence that only humans are intelligent." That's fallen away within the scientific community as we've studied more about animal behavior. But there's still a bias to privilege human-like behaviors."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/ai-versus-the-brain-and-the-race-for-general-intelligence/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

A #longread by @arstechnica about the #anthropocentric #bias of #AGI and #AI companies - money versus nature.

"As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy... [but] fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature."

A really good article, with lots of fascinating speculations on the nature of the 'WTF?!' layer we are in the process of creating for future cockroach geologists.

#geology #Anthropocene

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/22/technofossils-how-plastic-bags-and-chicken-bones-will-become-our-eternal-legacy