I’m tired of land acknowledgments. I’m tired of people saying they live on stolen land. I’m tired of them saying they acknowledge this as an act of reconciliation. That’s not reconciliation. That’s rubbing it in. If they want it to mean anything, they should include what they are doing to fight colonialism. At the very least they could make their services affordable for Indigenous Peoples. #LandBack#Indigenous#LandAcknowledgement#colonialism
Why we’re all likely screwed no matter what we do…
Yes, each one of us should cut our carbon footprint as individuals. It’s the right thing to do. We can stop flying, stop eating meat, and stop using Amazon. We can also vote Green, go to protests, even get arrested for the cause. Perhaps we should go that far — but the truth is no matter what you and I do, it won’t make a big difference.
That’s because decisions about the future of the planet are taken far above street level, far above voting level, far above legislatures or the UN.
The choices that matter most come from capitalist industrialists and investors in the United States and in China. Some decisions of consequence are made in Russia, India, and Brazil, but those are largely taken along paths already laid out in New York and Beijing.
First, let’s look at China…
China’s carbon dioxide emissions have relentlessly grown, more than quadrupling from 1990 to 2020. Since 2019, China’s emissions have exceeded those of all developed countries combined and presently account for 33% of total global emissions. Paradoxically, China leads the world in the production of installed capacity of both wind and solar electricity generation. Yet, 85% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2020 was still provided by fossil fuels.
Far from transitioning to a green and low-carbon mode of development, China is developing the most carbon-intensive large industrial economy in the world. The Party-State has abandoned the transition to renewables in favour of an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy generation: more solar and wind, but even more fossil fuels.
There are insuperable technical barriers to decarbonising China’s economy, especially in any time frame that matters for human survival. China is home to the world’s largest concentration of carbon-intensive, hard-to-abate industries like steel and cement. Thermal electricity generation (90% from coal, 10% from gas) accounts for 32% of China’s total carbon dioxide emissions. Replacing coal-fired power plants with solar and wind-powered generators could cut China’s emissions by about one-third — a huge gain if this transition can be implemented. But electricity generation is the low-hanging fruit of carbon mitigation — one of the very few sectors in which economic growth can be decoupled from emissions growth.
At least 47% of China’s GHG emissions come from hard-to-abate manufacturing and other industries, most of which cannot be significantly decarbonised with current or anticipated technology either at all or in time to avert runaway global warming and climate collapse. Steel, aluminium, cement, aviation, shipping, heavy road transport, chemicals, plastics, synthetic textiles, and electronics stand out. Decarbonising those industries has defied all efforts to date both in China and in the West.
Although I’ve chided Joe Biden for this (to make the point that when it comes to the climate and the environment, mainstream Democrats really are no better than Republicans), the choice was never actually his. That’s above his pay grade.
Decisions like these are made in corporate boardrooms, then passed down to politicians owned by the fossil fuel industry and their investors. If Biden had any intention of standing up against such plans, he never would have been allowed to run for President, let alone win.
The truth is that our future is in the hands of a small minority who care about nothing except making more money and gaining more power — at any cost.
Our capitalist owners are not interested in what happens to you or me. They don’t care what we think, what we say or do, whether or not we protest, or how we vote. None of that has any effect on them, and is beyond their concern.
“Their plan was simply to show up at the students’ common room and ask them to take off the grass skirts. But the meeting became a confrontation and quickly blew up.” — Katie Wolfe, on the haka party incident. #Māori#Indigenous#IndigenousMastodon#NativeMastodon#ManaMoves
@Bender@ABecenti
Aboriginal people in Western Australia provided insights about the origin of mysterious small patches of barren earth known as #fairycircles
#aboriginalaustralians scientists confirmed it by digging trenches in the patches, known locally in Western Australia as linyji, which revealed extensive termite tunnels.
⭕
The authors say the results offer a lesson for scientists who ignore the traditional knowledge of #indigenous people
Science.org April 7 2023
This burns. For a million reasons. It burns people. It burns souls, damages real Indigenous people. It steals $, it fetishizes, it appropriates for personal gain, it creates stereotypes, it burns.
@chema@thepoliticalcat
She is still at UC Berkeley, & still doing her thing.
According to a letter made on behalf of Indigenous scholars & former students "We demand that Elizabeth Hoover resign from her position as Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management (ESPM) & leave UC Berkeley."
1/
I've been trying to decide if I should turn commenting on, on the Indigenous Creatives web site or just leave it off and encourage people to comment on Mastodon.
Generally there are not a lot of comments on websites that moderate these days, most people preferring to discuss on social media shares instead.
With warming Pacific waters and declining sea ice, coastal communities face growing threats from climate change.
In Alaska, Indigenous communities have been battered by storms and are disproportionately at risk for environmental disaster yet are often left without support.
"#Indigenous people are guaranteed exclusive use of natural resources on these lands, viewed by scientists as a bulwark against Amazon deforestation - a major challenge in the fight against climate change."
May 5th is #RedDressDay in remembrance of our stolen sisters and survivors. Please, in remembrance hang a red dress, or wear red. Thank you for your participation...
Hello! I’m Marcia (she/elle), originally from BC and currently living in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. I’m a geneticist interested in #science policy (#OpenScience), equitable tech workplaces (#AntiRacistSTEM), and community organizing for #ClimateJustice in solidarity with #Indigenous peoples. Je fais aussi des « pouets » en #français.
From my perspective, the era of #BlackLivesMatter really cemented in the long brewing hope for the Native Nations and #Native people. That we could be who we are, that someday our cultures would be respected, and maybe even a world consciousness to respect treaties and Indigenous sovereignty would arise.
Alan Taylor on: ‘The Rediscovery of America,’ by Ned Blackhawk
'How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed #Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?'....A historian at Yale & a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone, Blackhawk rejects the myth that #NativeAmericans fell quick & easy victims to European invaders. Instead, he asserts that 'American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development'
This talk by Jon Corbett on translating indigenous knowledge into computing ideas, including programming in Cree using syllabics and prototyping keyboard hardware that maps to cultural knowledge
Whenever I look in the mirror, I see my Dad's eyes. The way he tilted his head and it warms me. He's there, and so are my ancestors. I wish I had more time with him - but I have the lessons he gave me and the tools he left behind.
Just added some headers drawn by yours truly, Mvskoke inspired, check it out. Thank you @Yehuda for the idea and for letting me design a header, I'm honored🖤
• Generative AI models learn from mass data scraped from web
• Indigenous groups fear losing control over their data
• Some move to protect their information from commercial use
"When U.S. tech firm OpenAI rolled out Whisper, a speech recognition tool offering audio transcription and translation into English for dozens of languages including Māori, it rang alarm bells for many Indigenous New Zealanders.
"Whisper, launched in September by the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, was trained on 680,000 hours of audio from the web, including 1,381 hours of the Māori language."