Links: Let Us Not Abandon the Earth

[sonia]

Great post by forestofglory, Let Us Not Abandon the Earth.

I want more fiction to engage with the idea that we can be good members of the community of nature, and that we don't have to either destroy or leave.

On theme, via runpunkrun, The True Story of Wild Rice, North America’s Most Misunderstood Grain by Amy Thielen. "The Ojibwe people of northern Minnesota are sustained by the real wild rice, which they harvest by hand and dry over fire." Great photographs, great info, great stories about individual people.

Given that many local Ojibwe now parch in large steel-drum barrels over wood fires, Cloud’s iron kettle seems like a throwback. I asked him: In the long history of rice parching, from birch-bark vessels to the larger barrel parchers used today, why stop here? Why parch in the iron kettle? He smirked. “Doing it this way is like fixing your own car.” Then he said, more seriously: “When we began to mechanize the parching, we started thinking in a colonized way. Processing rice became easier, but our lives did not get easier.”

And, related to that, Embrace the Grind by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Originally via oursin, but it's been a while and I found it again via silveradept instead. I have such a rant about this that I might turn it into a whole article. Most of life, maintenance, and creativity is backed up by grind! Thinking one can live without it is a huge (overwhelmingly male, white) privilege.

People said I did the impossible, but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.

Which was posted with Efficiency is the Enemy by Farnum Street Media.

Slack allows us to think ahead. To consider whether we’re on the right trajectory. To contemplate unseen problems. To mull over information. To decide if we’re making the right trade-offs. To do things that aren’t scalable or that might not have a chance to prove profitable for a while. To walk away from bad deals.

ETA: A negative example of what forestofglory was discussing. Abandon a dying earth, colonize a new conveniently empty planet, oh wait there are sentient inhabitants, never mind they're wish fulfillment directly from the mind of a lonely colonist. Below Salt-Heavy Tides by Andi C. Buchanan.

Comments

[asakiyume]

"Processing rice became easier, but our lives did not get easier.” --That's a great statement, and it's true of so much of so-called labor-saving innovations.

[sonia]

Yes. Reminds me of "The Little Prince", where someone is trying to convince him to take pills instead of drinking water to save the time, and he says he would use that time to take a long leisurely drink of water.

[asakiyume]

I love that