The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“… the earth screeches, plates collapse,
the walls lose their grip on the paintings,
nothing is aligned like the planets we think we understand.”

— Antonella Anedda / “Historiae 2”

“I don’t know why
I keep forgetting the change in climate change. My grandmother

sighs as the sky darkens to the color of rum. Why I still think
that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.”

— Jacob Shores-Argüello / “The ‘Change’ In Climate Change”

“The beef industry in Brazil has consistently pledged to avoid farms linked to deforestation. However, the data suggests that 1.7m hectares (4.2m acres) of the Amazon was destroyed near meat plants exporting beef around the world.”

— Andrew Wasley, et al / “More than 800m Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand” / The Guardian

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

— Aldo Leopold / A Sand County Almanac

“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice … As scientists, we’ve been warning about the loss of Arctic summer sea ice for decades. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming. People didn’t listen to our warnings.”

— Prof Dirk Notz, University of Hamburg / “Too late now to save Arctic summer ice, climate scientists find” / The Guardian

“The death of all things. The sun will eventually burn itself out, leaving nothing, but not as we know it. It’s difficult for my meagre, mediocre mind to grasp the fact that the land under this hot tub will, in a few billion years or so, be no more. Not just that it will be transformed into ocean or desert or glacier, or be populated by creatures I cannot even imagine, but that it will not even exist, gone without a trace of me or them or it.”

— Mark Boyle / The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“Within the shock announced this morning by the howling dogs
their muzzles pointing toward an imaginary swarm of bees
the floor slides toward the void. We, too,
run away in the wake of a memory of the species…”

— Antonella Anedda / “Historiae 2”

What I’m Listening To:

“With the stars all glinting in the shiny chrome
Then I suddenly remembered what I left at home
Now I shan’t be peddling any higher
‘Cos a sharp sputnik has given me a cosmic flat tyre”

— Dukes of the Stratosphear / “Bike Ride to the Moon”