emsenn says end food apartheid @emsenn@ecosteader.com

As my computer use continues to evolve, it's less and less likely I'll be posting meaningful things here. :(

The current alternative is that I'll be sending out an email broadcast - once public, once for paid subscribers, talking about the various sorta stuff I talk about.

For now, I'll be using Substack, a proprietary service, since they provide the necessarily payment processing without unreasonable overhead.

https://emsenn.substack.com/p/coming-soon?r=9neis&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy

Since y'all have gotten access to all my rambling without any sort of gate so far, anyone who wants a paid subscription, just DM me your email and I'll hook you up.

Ive got a comrade who has been looking for housing since April; might remember me me posting because theyd spent all their savings on application fees (ended up spending $3200 on application fees!! (thats about 80 applications, we reckon.)

I'm gonna send any new money I get through kofi or paypal to them at the end of the month, to help with them with the security deposit. https://ko-fi.com/emsenn

(Yay! more local comrades!)

if settlers spent half as much time supporting indigenous peoples as they did trying to indigenize without leaving colonialism, maybe they wouldnt be avatars of genocide

Are you a selfish settler that only cares about other people when they're useful to you?

Than this is the perfect Indigenous Peoples' Day reading for you:

"The Importance of Indigenous Knowledge in Curbing the Loss 
of Language and Biodiversity"

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/6/499/2754233

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Not seeing it yet?

"Indigenous Knowledge, Biodiversity Conservation and Development"

http://www.ciesin.org/docs/004-173/004-173.html

How about this U.N.-backed report that says nature on indigenous peoples’ lands is degrading less quickly than in other areas"

https://ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment

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You rely on biodiversity for resource and knowledge extraction. Without indigenous peoples, that biodiversity would be even more at-risk than it is at-present, threatening your settler-colonial futures.

I hope that sinks in: Settler-colonialism relies on Indigenous peoples, yet exterminates them. Sound familiar?

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Don't worry, I'm sure Elon Bezos will invent a Mechanical Indian soon, right after the autonomous pollinator drones, and you'll all be able to invent your way out of this hole just like you've... never successfully done with any of the others you've dug.

(Fun fact, but modern European farms are sustained by petroleum-derived fertilizers imported from Africa and Asia, having previously been fertilized with deforestation-derived fertilizers imported from the Americas, since they've been steadily destroying their region's own biocapacity for like 10,000 years.)

Over the weekend, Biden recognized today as Indigenous Peoples Day.

Currently, anti-protest measures such as LRADs are being used outside his home, against Indigenous elders.

https://twitter.com/IENearth/status/1447570880276615175

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You got the day off? Take the time to go listen to Indigenous peoples, because ^--- literally your government is drowning out their voices with sirens.

What's gonna follow is yet another link dump. (Here's an earlier one, related to the child war prisons that were maintained prior to using adoption services and foster care to conduct genocide: https://ecosteader.com/@emsenn/106483402115361653)

(And here's a bunch of links about decolonization, for good measure, since some of yall white folk seem keep to call yourself decolonial even though you cant tell me whose land youre on: https://emsenn.substack.com/p/i-touched-a-nerve)

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- This Land podcast is a great crash course in land and family, from a native perspective https://crooked.com/podcast-series/this-land/
- All My Relations has been going on for a while: https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com/podcast
- Indian Country Today is a great news outlet: https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/celebrating-indigenous-peoples-day
- Ruth Hopkins wrote something great: https://www.mic.com/impact/slacker-syllabus-indigenous-peoples-day

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I might come back with more links as I find them. You can pay me for work like this at https://ko-fi.com/emsenn

its indigenous peoples day

landback

https://ko-fi.com/emsenn

(money goes toward reimbursement s for other indigenous folk who are sending me seed for my garden)

if you look at media from before 2020, a lot of it feels strange. people are in close groups, stores are fully stocked. that was only 2 years ago, and the rate of decline is increasing exponentially according to all research.

does today look like how you thought it would 2 years ago? what do you think 2 years from now will look like?

I bet my posts on limiting your dependence on colonial infrastructure will feel a lot different to the Europeans who make it through this winter. how many of y'all are prepared for your heating bills to be five times higher than they were last year?

be honest with yourself now:

Which do you think and complain more about:

- Jeff Bezos
- Global petroleum subsidies

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Now I want you to start now, and count the seconds until the first time you see something influenced by Jeff Bezos.

Do the same for petroleum.

I bet you couldn't go a second without seeing something influenced by petroleum (how did the material goods in your house get to it? How did the house get made?)

I bet whatever you saw influenced by Bezos... also involved lots of petroleum. His shipping containers are made with it, moved with it.

I talk a lot about how most people live in resource overshoot, more and more depending on how close you are to the hearts of settler-colonialism.

Part of why we, individuals, are able to do this is because the cost of our way of life is hidden from us to the point of being erased, by subsidies and market manipulation.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/10/fossil-fuel-industry-subsidies-millions-per-minute-international-monetary-fund-imf/

According to this report, fossil fuels receive an injection of roughly $11,000,000 a minute in order to maintain their low prices for our society.

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That number seems big but think about this:

Jeff Bezos is really harmful to society, right, even though most of his money is just in investments, not like, actively being used to burn oil as fast as possible?

He's only receiving about $150,000 a minute, or roughly 1.5% of the resources oil gets.

Put another way, oil receives 66x more in funding than Jeff Bezos... just in donations from governments and banks!!

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Our dependency on petroleum, as a conglomeration of societies, cannot be over-emphasized.

In short, fuck "land reform," which is just thieves deciding how to divvy up their stolen wealth.

Land back, fuckers.

Now, the discussion is on "land reform," which seems to argue that rather than return the stolen land, it be given out to the folk who - well, they certainly didn't steal it, they're not culpable at all for colonialism! But, they are entitled to all its spoils. And after all, as people raised in and supported by the system (except not at all, they aren't privileged! Stay focused on the billionaires only!), they are more capable of using it to maintain the land than these Indigenous people would be. After all, they got tricked by Bill Gates or someone into... asking for the same thing they've been asking for since long before Gates was born.

What tired old rhetoric: Native people are naive and ignorant: in a word, primative. It is only the civilized who can properly maintain the resources of this continent. That's /literally/ Manifest Destiny, with the reforms of the 19th century stripped back.

That's where white American leftists are, right now, discursively, when it comes to Indigenous people: about 1850.

Well, certainly ain't the only thing about white American leftists that's stuck in the mid-19th century.

Over the past few weeks there has been a growing trend from popular white American leftists on Twitter to criticize LandBack as an idea, because the NDN Collective accepted funding from... Bill Gates, or someone similar.

These leftists are basically following in the footsteps of white conservatives of years past, who worked hard to raise concern about Black Lives Matter, because one group acccepted funding from... George Soros, or someone similar.

If I were a billionaire, I would find this mutation of the one-drop rule into the realm of philanthropy about as useful as olden colonials found the sociology of one-drop.

In order to completely invalidate... any resistance to colonialism, all a colonial of certain wealth has to do is support the resistance, and then disclose that they supported it. That funding, like a drop of ink in a glass of water, contaminates the whole endeavor.

Then, white leftists (who live in the liminal philosophical frontier of colonialism) can rely on their dualism to say, "if X isn't resistance, it must be a part of colonialism!"

So, based entirely on the actions of a white billionaire, the praxis of almost all indigenous people is dismissed as being an Astroturfed campaign meant to distract us from...?

This has spread way past Twitter, quickly. In nearly every online space I'm in, and every material space, there are new conversations about how LandBack is impossible, and that Indigenous people - poor, naive Indigenous people, with no experience at all in fighting colonialism! - were tricked into thinking it was possible by our mutual enemy: a rich white person.

Grace Lee Bogg passed on, on this day 6 years ago. Read this memorial tribute to her contributes to revolutionary ways of living: http://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/thinking-dialectically/

But these spaces can be reclaimed, in part, by... I don't want to say "going off-grid," but... Gloria Anzaldua talks about how the further you are from a border, the more clear and definitive the border looks. And things that are invisible, like our dependence on colonialism to have water come out of the faucet, seem very far away. So in the abstract, leaving colonialism, when you're completely enclaved by it, seems very easy. But as you try to cross the border, it becomes clear that what is seen as the border from far away is a lot murkier up close.

My hope is that by keeping a ledger, not only can I keep an eye on my resource overshoot (and think about ways to change that), but also by keeping an eye on when those resources come from colonialism (and think about ways to change that.)

In the past - as recently as last winter - I was using Org-mode to help keep a ledger for myself. But I've lost all that configuration, as near as I can tell. What I can remember from it, I was using Org-mode capture templates, which aren't too complicated to set up, but as with any sort of variable templating, they can be kind of finicky to get working properly.

A few beliefs intersect to motivate me toward keeping a ledger, these days. There's so much evidence that Western lifestyles require significantly (exponentially) more energy and resources than would be sustainable, thanks to their dependence on oil. I think /Homo colossus/ will go extinct, and I think the process toward that extinction started before I was born and is accelerating.

So it's important to my sense of survival to try and personally move out of resource overshoot. But it's hard to know how much resources I'm using if I don't keep track of it. And in many ways, what we use is obfuscated.[fn:: An interesting piece of information that seems relevant: while FEMA recommends people keep 1 gallon of water around for each day they expect to be without water service, the average U.S. resident uses 80-100 gallons a day. That's a big discrepancy.]

One important part of liberatory praxis is making spaces that are liberated. In the heartland of the kyriarchy, with all its infrastructure, it is hard to make spaces that aren't in some ways dependent on that infrastructure. We all use the roads. And these days, those roads run into the bones of our house, bringing in energy, connectivity, water, and hauling away waste.

it is wild how many white settlers talk like indigenous people and instead of promising land to indigenous folk, promise it to the proletariat.

It ain't y'all's to promise any which way. shit. landback.

I dropped using Org-roam because it is too heavy for a little phone, which means there's also no longer going to be backlinks on every page. Which apparently is fine - I never really used them and apparently most readers to the site don't either, preferring the manual linking I was doing in addition.