The initial image is a size comparison between the statue of liberty and a wind turbine. The wind turbine is over ninety feet (about 28 meters) taller.
A commenter pretended to misinterpret the image as one of a wind turbine attacking the statue of liberty. The next commenter answered with an image of Don Quixote, a literary character who once thought a windmill was a monster and announced his plans to fight it. They are joking that if a wind turbine attacked the statue of liberty, Don Quixote would be willing to fight the wind turbine.
Incidentally, that scene led to the English idiom “tilting at windmills,” meaning a person who has not only disproportionate reactions of anger, but disproportionate reactions of anger to nonexistent challenges.
So all those people who are fighting to preserve coal jobs and the fossil fuel economy are….
actually…
tilting at windmills.
I feel like this is one of the very few times where explaining the joke leads to another one that everyone can now understand and laugh at
natgeo Photo by @cristinamittermeier // Can you guess what is wrong with this penguin? We spent a month in Antarctica on assignment for @natgeo and it was not until the second week that I realized we had not seen snow once. Every day, however, we experienced several hours of incessant rain. As temperatures warm in Antarctica, the weather regime is changing from snow to rain. In the past, the penguin colony would be covered in snow but now, it is a large, muddy mess. Baby penguins are covered in fluffy down and they can easily preen themselves when it snows. When they get muddy and wet, their down loses its insulation ability and as temperatures drop at night, they become hypothermic and die. As the debate on weather or not to protect the Antarctic Peninsula starts to play out, I hope that the members of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), who will be voting on this issue are inspired to protect it for all humanity. #Followmeat@cristinamittermeier and follow the conversation at @Sea_legacy
Hey guys, my sister is currently doing her psychology dissertation on the individuals decision making regarding environmental choices. It would be a HUGE help if you could participant in the questionnaire linked below. All personal information will be recorded as anonymous from those participating and the researchers. (See link below)
EARTHLING /ərTHliNG/ noun: an inhabitant of the Earth.
The term Earthling is holistically inclusive—it reflects our similarities, not our differences. We call ourselves Earthlings because we are of the same species, living on the same planet.
There is a danger, in suggesting that therapy might help, of pathologising climate anxiety; turning it into a mental health problem that needs to be cured – medicated or spirited away with mindfulness or talking therapy . Many people I interviewed were faced with such reactions from friends, family, colleagues, GPs, and, occasionally, even therapists.
This is not how the author of Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis Sally Weintrobe thinks. “It is important to say that anxiety is a signal that there is something wrong. It’s a perfectly normal healthy reaction to a worrying situation. We mustn’t pathologise climate anxiety. Obviously it can get very extreme – but I would say that government inaction on the climate crisis is pretty extreme, so it’s hardly surprising that people are very worried.” What Knapp, James and Perrin said helped them most was having their emotions validated in therapy – and understanding that their feelings were meaningful and valuable.
Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist, climate psychology researcher and board member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, says, “I would worry about people who aren’t distressed – given that this is what is happening, how come?” She believes that people are using psychological defences such as denial “as a way of coping and reducing the fear that they feel”. This can leave the climate-anxious with a sense of isolation, frustration and abandonment, as others tell themselves, “Oh, well, the government will save us; technology will save us; if it was that bad, somebody would have done something,” she says. “Those are all rationalisations against existential terror of annihilation – and that’s the reality of what we’re potentially looking at.”
To face this reality is to come out of what Weintrobe calls “the climate bubble”, which, she says, “has been supported by a culture of uncare, a culture that actively seeks to keep us in a state of denial about the severity of the climate crisis”. She explains: “The bubble protects you from reality, and when you start seeing the reality, it’s hardly surprising that you’re going to experience a whole series of shocks.” She prefers the term climate trauma over anxiety because “it is traumatising to see that you are caught up in a way of living, whether you like it or not, that makes you a victim and a perpetrator of damaging the Earth, which is what keeps us all alive”. We are living, she says, “in a political system that generates a mental health crisis, because it places burdens on people that are too much to bear, as well as burdens on the Earth”.
The thing about trauma is that it can reignite earlier, individual trauma. That experience of coming out of the climate bubble and having your worries dismissed, of realising that you have been abandoned by people who were supposed to look after you, can be particularly triggering. For Weintrobe, this is where therapy can have a role to play, “in helping people to disentangle what is personal to them and their own individual histories, from what is hitting them from the outside”.
It is perhaps surprising to hear Weintrobe – a psychoanalyst – say that while there is a role for therapy in addressing climate anxiety, it is limited. We need to normalise this distress, she says, but not by pretending it’s not there, or shouldn’t be. “It’s very perverse that normalising has come to mean getting rid of anything that’s disturbing. Can we make it normal that we are very disturbed and bothered by what is going on, and help each other?” She recommends meeting to talk in groups about climate anxiety, such as at the climate cafes run by the Climate Psychology Alliance. Hickman runs psycho-educational groups with youth activists to address the impact of the climate crisis on mental health, where they discuss ways to support themselves and each other.
[ID: four screenshots of select parts of the linked article, Don’t Tell Me to Despair About the Climate: Hope Is a Right We Must Protect, by Morgan Florsheim. The screenshots read as follows, with some sections highlighted for emphasis:
One - Recently I read an essay that kept me up at night. The piece, Under the Weather by climate journalist Ash Sanders, left me with an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach that I found myself struggling to shake, even weeks later.The personal essay tells the story of Sanders and a mentor of hers, Chris Foster. Sanders recounts how both she and Foster have struggled for much of their adult lives with a gripping sense of impending doom, a depression deeply tied to their grief for a world lost. She writes about the newly coined terms for environmentally related mental health problems—eco-anxiety, climate grief, pre-traumatic stress disorder—and suggests that these conditions should not necessarily be viewed as disorders, but rather as the only reasonable response to a world experiencing catastrophe.
Two - But equally, I know what it is to watch someone you love feel crushed by the weight of the world, and to feel helpless in lifting that burden. I’m 22, barely out of college, and already I have seen more friends than I could have ever imagined fall into deep depression, magnified by their care for the world and the way they felt helpless to stop the suffering within it. I know the way depression closes a person off to the good and spotlights the bad, how it sows seeds of shame and self-doubt and sits back to watch them grow. I wish that I didn’t. Highlighted for emphasis: Depression tells us that we are at once powerless and culpable, and therefore the only logical response is to disengage, turn inward, eschew connection—a response which only serves to reinforce the oppressive systems like racial injustice and capitalism that are truly responsible for our suffering.
Three - In one of my final college classes over Zoom in spring 2020, my professor, environmental anthropologist Myles Lennon, led us through a discussion of Braiding Sweetgrass, the awe-inspiring book by Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer writes of the endurance of Indigenous people (highlighted for emphasis): “despite exile, despite a siege four hundred years long, there is something, some heart of living stone, that will not surrender.” The climate crisis is not the first time a people has faced the end of the world. As we navigate this latest existential threat, we would do well to listen to Kimmerer and other Indigenous leaders. As my professor put it that day, (highlighted for emphasis) existence can cohabitate with collapse. It is not one or the other.
Four - I have a lot of decisions ahead of me. As I consider how I want to live my life, where to dedicate my energy, I refuse to accept the idea that I must sacrifice all joy to attend to the world’s problems. I know myself to be more helpful when I have addressed my own needs: needs for good food and good company, for hope, for long afternoons in the sunshine. I am grateful for the teachers that I have had in this movement, such as professor Lennon, and the people who have reminded me of all the reasons to imagine a brighter future. I know that hope is not a happy accident. (Highlighted for emphasis) Hope is a right we must protect. Hope is a discipline, according to Mariame Kaba, an organizer and educator building the movement for transformative justice.
(Entire paragraph highlighted for emphasis) The climate crisis is ongoing. And, also, a bird is building a nest in the eaves outside my window. Come spring, there will be new birth. In shaky hands, I hold these two truths together.
The bees, especially those living in the wild are in trouble. They don’t find enough blossoms to collect pollen and nectar from in urban areas. Help them by throwing seedbombs with wildflower seeds everywhere in town!
Especially today, it is literally about turning all your lights off. It’s earth hour at 8.30 pm your local time. Living in the dark for one hour is a message that you care about our planet. But turning everything off you don’t need at the moment is something important every day. So much energy is wasted by tv’s nobody’s looking at or lights in rooms with no one in it.
Not everybody has the chance to, but if you have the option to change your power supplier, do so. It might seem obvious, but people underestimate the power we have. We can vote with our dollars for the world we want to live in. Also, check what company is behind the green power supplier of your choice and try to find one who is not part of a big coal or fracking company.
This is an easy one: Carry around a set of cutlery in your everyday bag. You can use an outdoor camping set or just go with your normal forks, spoons or sticks. Whenever your eating out anywhere in a place that doesn’t offer reusable cutlery, just use your own and skip the plastic. You can just put them in the dishwasher when you are back home and save a ton of plastic.
@ilsa-of-drentha made me write this because of a 4am note she made about lobster amulets. My fellow writers are great people.
“On an Island”
On an island in the wide blue-green sea there lived a people who worshipped the Sea-Goddess and her kin. Their lives were begun in the salt lagoons on the leeward side of the island where the sun warmed the shallow waters and the breeze was gentler and mothers came to birth their children into the pools rimmed with algae and bottomed in carefully tended sand.
Their clothes were of sea-grasses and the scales of fishes and the skins of the sea mammals and the feathers of the sea birds. Their meat came likewise from those animals, and their small light gathering-craft and their cumbersome fishing-craft to stalk and spear and net their prey were cleverly done up with driftwood and seaweed and, folks on the mainland would say, long after the sea-folk had all drowned, a touch of magic. For how else does a boat float in waves so high as those around the island without some charm to protect it?
The sea-folk worshipped their Sea-Goddess who gave all life and who took it, and they wore as amulets against her wrath and trickery (for the sea is a harsh mistress and not given to sentiment) bits of seaweed or scales from deep-sea fishes to trick her into recognizing them not as creatures of land who she might wantonly destroy but as fellow beings of the deep blue-green waves.
Their life was not idyllic there on a small island alone in the great sea but they were happy, for who is not happy when she has nothing more to covet? The sea provided, and the sea took, and they lived and fished and were born and died and celebrated the blue-green depths and white-capped waves and wove seaweed into their hair and imagined themselves alone in the world.
Sometimes the sea-fog would come in and they would be alone indeed for days or weeks in a cloudy, echoing wilderness that swallowed people whole and, worse, did not always spit them back out. Often wild storms came up out of nowhere and took whole boats to the bottom, washed the fish huts off the far rocks and dredged old wreckage up to lay it on the beaches in return.
But mostly people learned to survive with the sea and became complacent with it. And generations passed and slowly the water rose or the island sank and no one really knew which but one day a woman whose home had once been many steps from the shore came out to greet the sea and found it at her door, and the whole island realized what a danger they were in.
And among them sprang up a following who were more zealous than the rest, who saw that despite the amulets of seaweed, the sea was not satisfied. And they found a leader, a man who had survived a great storm by clutching in both hands the shellfish cages he had just pulled from the depths, cages which held live lobsters which also survived the storm and floated back to shore with him. So they concluded that dead and dried objects from the sea were ineffective. So they preached a new doctrine to the island.
The water will rise, and the island will sink, and the sea will reclaim everything she has given us.
But we will survive who carry with us life. We will be granted life under the waves.
I discovered this almost-joke saved in my phone, today. I think I woke up at 4 AM to write it, and it made sense at the time? But then my friend turned it into a beautiful story about life on an island threatened by sea level rise, and it’s gorgeous, and they are amazing, and this is why you always need to wear your lobster amulet.
