What is the world we want to see?
I'm reading a book called Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country by a man called Courtney White (or possibly Joseph Courtney White, depending on whether you believe the cover or the interlibrary loan sticker; and admittedly part of the reason I'm reading it now is that I've run out of renewals and have to take it back to the library tomorrow.) It's structured with alternating long and short chapters, each showcasing a different kind of newfangled or newly studied carbon sequestration. Cool, useful, actually workable stuff (in a world where you can convince people to believe in it instead of Monsanto, at least) including interplanting cool season grain crops with your warm season native pasture grasses, or mixed cattle & sheep in what's called a "flerd." (Flock/herd. Their browsing preferences are different-- cows prefer grass; sheep prefer forbs; if you put in goats they'll prefer brush/woodier bits-- and then you rotate them through your pasturage properly and everything gets a beneficial nibble and several sorts of manure.)
I've seen a bunch of essays over the last few years talking about modeling (or spectacularly failing to model) the social/societal change you want to see in fictional universes, but my social networks are probably disproportionately high in social activist types. I've culled my twitter list more than once of people who spent too much time retweeting a hundred different angles of Awful Things People are Doing to Each Other. They generally are awful things, and worth yelling about, but my tolerance is very low at the best of times and even more so at present. And then there's the bit where I get so fed up with our anthropocentric universe, because the rest of the world deserves to keep on living too.
[rant goes here about ecosystems and habitat and horrifying outbreak populations, and how we are not more deserving of health & happiness than the songbirds or the oak trees just because we're the only ones who can talk about it]
Anyway. So Maryland appears to have sorted out its chicken poop debacle (the CBF's overview; I was not one of the 15k people who wrote & told the governor he was an idiot because I have no brain right now, but I'm so glad everyone else did) and so we muddle onward.
As a naturalist, I'm utterly terrible at outreach. I don't like managing groups or standing at an outreach table talking to strangers. I have no idea what "normal" people know (or think they do) and I hold strong and non-standard opinions about things like lawns. I've twice managed to give away native plants to neighbors, but at the moment the Megatherium is inexplicably terrified of people who live in the houses around ours so I can't even talk to them. (Seriously-- as soon as a neighbor comes out of one of the houses across the street, she runs sobbing for the front door. I have no idea what to do about that besides push her boundaries gently & wait for her to get over it; so far she'll put up with the next door neighbor to watch their dog run around in the back yard, but that's it.)
As a writer, though, these are tools. Why can't my pseudo-medieval society practice responsible land use? Many of them actually did: the traditional coppicing practices in English woodland, or the bit the guide at Salisbury Cathedral told us about the sheep grazing in the water meadows all day & then being driven up to poop in the wheat fields overnight are what come to my mind immediately. But there's no reason I can't have the manor lord grazing mixed livestock, with an end-note if there's space for one, and maybe someone will read my story first and when they hear about the range wars of sheep vs cattle ranchers they'll find that as weird and unnecessary as maybe it was. Or maybe I'll just draw a little more attention to the bird singing in the hedgerow and set someone up to listen to the next voice suggesting they put out a feeder or keep their cats indoors. Because that's how effective conversion works-- the little moments add up, all setting up your brain for the voice that actually gets through.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
I've seen a bunch of essays over the last few years talking about modeling (or spectacularly failing to model) the social/societal change you want to see in fictional universes, but my social networks are probably disproportionately high in social activist types. I've culled my twitter list more than once of people who spent too much time retweeting a hundred different angles of Awful Things People are Doing to Each Other. They generally are awful things, and worth yelling about, but my tolerance is very low at the best of times and even more so at present. And then there's the bit where I get so fed up with our anthropocentric universe, because the rest of the world deserves to keep on living too.
[rant goes here about ecosystems and habitat and horrifying outbreak populations, and how we are not more deserving of health & happiness than the songbirds or the oak trees just because we're the only ones who can talk about it]
Anyway. So Maryland appears to have sorted out its chicken poop debacle (the CBF's overview; I was not one of the 15k people who wrote & told the governor he was an idiot because I have no brain right now, but I'm so glad everyone else did) and so we muddle onward.
As a naturalist, I'm utterly terrible at outreach. I don't like managing groups or standing at an outreach table talking to strangers. I have no idea what "normal" people know (or think they do) and I hold strong and non-standard opinions about things like lawns. I've twice managed to give away native plants to neighbors, but at the moment the Megatherium is inexplicably terrified of people who live in the houses around ours so I can't even talk to them. (Seriously-- as soon as a neighbor comes out of one of the houses across the street, she runs sobbing for the front door. I have no idea what to do about that besides push her boundaries gently & wait for her to get over it; so far she'll put up with the next door neighbor to watch their dog run around in the back yard, but that's it.)
As a writer, though, these are tools. Why can't my pseudo-medieval society practice responsible land use? Many of them actually did: the traditional coppicing practices in English woodland, or the bit the guide at Salisbury Cathedral told us about the sheep grazing in the water meadows all day & then being driven up to poop in the wheat fields overnight are what come to my mind immediately. But there's no reason I can't have the manor lord grazing mixed livestock, with an end-note if there's space for one, and maybe someone will read my story first and when they hear about the range wars of sheep vs cattle ranchers they'll find that as weird and unnecessary as maybe it was. Or maybe I'll just draw a little more attention to the bird singing in the hedgerow and set someone up to listen to the next voice suggesting they put out a feeder or keep their cats indoors. Because that's how effective conversion works-- the little moments add up, all setting up your brain for the voice that actually gets through.
Xposty from dreamwidth.