The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted … Everyone is fixated on 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5C.”

— Alain-Richard Donwahi, President of the UN’s desertification conference / “Global heating likely to hit world food supply before 1.5C, says UN expert” / The Guardian

“All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.”

— Sylvia Plath / “Morning Song”

“By digging up millions of years of biology and setting it on fire, in the course of a century or two, we’ve managed to overwhelm the world … We’ve poured heat into the air and especially into the oceans, and now that heat is beginning to dominate life on our planet. We can still back off some: every pipeline we shut down and every solar panel we install contributes … But as Florida found out again on Wednesday morning, and the world rediscovered this brutally hot summer, we’ve already shifted our earth in the most fundamental fashion.”

— Bill McKibben / “Hurricane Idalia’s Explosive Power Comes from Abnormally Hot Oceans” / The New Yorker

“She sits inside a viewfinder while
the horizon scans her brain for fires. The sky sags
into a blue body cast. What is the meaning of a
mountain of masks?”

— Lauren Russell / “Exposition”

“Hence extinction credits.

Today, if you were a company like Brahmasamudram Mining and you proposed to wipe a species from the face of the earth, you basically just had to hand in a voucher to do it. The name for this voucher was an extinction credit. An extinction credit could buy you bulldozing rights to any species on earth…”

— Ned Beauman / Venomous Lumpsuckers

“i want to have something to say
about my own destiny
something i care about
something of value
something important”

— Jennifer Karmin / “work: an ode for the human micropoem”

“[Look at] the effects of droughts on food security, the effects of droughts on migration of population, the effect of droughts on inflation. We could have an acceleration of negative effects, other than temperature…”

— Alain-Richard Donwahi, President of the UN’s desertification conference / “Global heating likely to hit world food supply before 1.5C, says UN expert” / The Guardian

What I’m Listening To:

“And the car reverses over
And his body rolls over
Crushed from the shoulder
You can hear the bones humming
Singing like a puncture”

— Coil / “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)”