Fixation How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet by Sandra Goldmark, 2020
Our massive, global system of consumption is broken. Our individual relationship with our stuff is broken. In each of our homes, some stuff is broken. And the strain of rampant consumerism and manufacturing is breaking our planet. We need big, systemic changes, from public policy to global economic systems. But we don't need to wait for them.
In the 1880s, the mark of consumption among elites was replacing gaslights for electric ones. Today it is the replacement of electric ones for useless decorative gas lights that constantly burn. We see these in many wealthy neighborhoods in Chicago.
I really don't know about the mechanics of this system. Nor do I know anything about the people. Just always find such fixtures strange.
The Story is in our Bones: Excerpt By Osprey Orielle Lake, originally published by Resilience.org March 22, 2024
"...Our extractivist, colonial economic model demands that humans endlessly take more and more from the Earth without long-term considerations. By design, it requires that we exploit Mother Earth and turn her gifts into a commodity. This exploitive economy also takes activities that people used to share and exchange with each other without money, and runs them through this same predatory economic system.
...“Collectively, the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest. They are rules of sorts that govern our taking, shape our relationships with the natural world, and rein in our tendency to consume—that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own..."
I tried an extreme day trip to Barcelona and back — in 24 hours
Sun, sea, city and 38,000 steps: our writer sets out on social media’s latest phenomenon with a whirlwind visit to the Catalan capital that cost less than £150
Conspicuous carbon consumption at its glitziest most profligate worst. And yes I can ‘afford' to do it monetarily - the question is can I, we, the plant (as we know it) do so?
Y'know, there's an easy way we can fight back against the enshittification of everything, both online and off. I never realized it, but i've been fighting back all my life.
Never click an ad and consciously avoid spending any money on a company that successfully managed to fling its advertizing feces in your face.
If ads didn't work, the entire capitalist structure of the internet would collapse. Do your part. Make them not work on you.
Yes, our entire world is directed toward promoting #consumption and #profit, with the aim of obtaining, maximising, and retaining #PersonalWealth (mostly for #Billionaires and the #SuperRich). It's that that is causing all of our problems, I think?
"From Marvel and Pixar to 21st Century Fox and Searchlight, Disney now owns an eye-watering number of media companies. In that sense, if you watch The Simpsons or Star Wars, you are a Disney adult."
Something that worries me avout sustainable operations is the self-complacency with resource consumption because they are sustainable, without considering that the more we use, even if sustainable, means that more production is needed. And production always implies more resources: more solar panels, more windmills, increases on prices taking sustainable resources from people that can't afford them and then have to go for cheaper less sustainable resources, more recycled paper needed, 1/2
More energy to produce them, more of everything. So, even if our operations or life consumption is sustainable we should also think of efficiency. The better resource is the one not used.
2/2 #ClimateEmergency#Sustanability#Energy#Consumption
I'm very excited to announce the first column of my "Decay Theory" series for Atlas Obscura. This one's about the death of the suburban American shopping mall. It's easy to write off the closure of malls as the result of online shopping - but their fate was likely sealed years before Amazon became the brick and mortar shredding juggernaut it is today. Here's the link! https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-life-and-death-of-the-suburban-american-mall
@AbandonedAmerica This is a very original article and topic. Thank you and congratulations.
These abandoned temples of consumption should remind us about how the decadent economic system we live in makes everything disposable, even multimillion dollar shopping infrastructure.