🚨✨The Nexialist #0032
Code Red For Humanity | Indigenous Thinking for Troubled Times | Net Zero | Biomass Delusion | New Pollution | Doughnut Economy | Lido Pimienta | Kunumi MC | Jaloo
Welcome to my weekly attempt to tickle your brain, The Nexialist
This week I realized that the news and shocking images from the fires in Greece were giving me more anxiety and sadness than usual. I also noticed that, for some reason, I was less inclined to “quickly scroll” through these news.
So, of course, as The Nexialist being this therapeutic weekly experience for me, you will see some content related to that. On the positive side, I was so excited to see the vastness of indigenous content online. I think we have the opportunity to listen, learn and scale that ancient knowledge. I hope we can see (and do) that sooner than later.
🚨Code Red For Humanity
“Code Red for Humanity” has been all over the place, and every time I hear or read it, I get this feeling of a punch in my stomach. Especially when you are aware of the fires and floods happening all over the world. Miriam Nielsen from Zentouro defines that as eco-anxiety. Her channel has a great premise: “climate change is complicated, but getting answers shouldn't be. Let's talk about climate change, the environment, and how what we do every day impacts the entire world.”
In this video, Miriam explains what the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change brings. It is impressive to see the coordination of so many countries and scientists, and this bridge from academia to us. Here are some things that I learned:
There’s an interactive report to check the effects of global warming where you live.
This report is more focused on unifying data from decades of research from 195 countries. “It is just a roundup of everything we know right now, or more accurately, everything in the scientific literature published before January 31st, 2021. The vulnerability, mitigation, and adaptation reports will come in 2022.”
It’s the first time they are using words like unequivocal, as in “it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land… This is a big deal because normally the IPCC sticks to more cautious language like medium or high confidence, which is still their primary way of expressing uncertainty. But where the science is definitive, they're letting it be definitive.”
I learned about compound extreme: “a jargony way of making the nightmare scenario of two or more hazards happening at the same time or one after.” Which the report points to becoming less rare in the next decades.
She recommends the Gen Dread Newsletter as an eco-anxiety content. I haven’t fully read it, but it looks interesting.
👌🏼Net Zero
This is another term that has been used a lot lately and I think this video explains its complexity. While humanity has to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we emit to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we also have to capture the gases we are producing.
The conundrum that is, we need both massive reductions in emissions as well as a dramatic scale up and proving of the technologies for negative emissions. There is a tension between the two and it’s easy for governments and industries to kick the can down the road saying, ‘well let’s go a little slower on the cutting of emissions now which will be better for the economy or for our profits because we can always make massive negative-emissions reductions later when innovation makes those technologies cheaper and better'.
The dirty little secret in that argument is that it may come too late and it may well give permission for polluters to get away with polluting much more than need be rather than innovating ways to reduce emissions now.
👀Biomass Delusion
This is something I recently learned which shocked me: Biomass is NOT sustainable. Even in the BBC video shown above, they use it as one of the options in the Net Zero equation and it shouldn’t be. Apart from the fact that it harms forests, people, and clean energy transition, it is sold as a clean (bio?) energy source and it is done so consciously:
It is encouraged by flawed accounting – Current carbon accounting rules incentivise forest bioenergy by considering biomass combustion as a zero-emission technology, expressed as zero emissions in the energy sector. The assumption is that all emissions are instead to be accounted for when the biomass is logged, placing the burden on the forest producer rather than the biomass consumer. Yet emissions accounting of forests in the land sector is fatally flawed and generally understates emissions. The true carbon cost of biomass burning rarely appears accurately on any country’s balance sheet.
I encourage you to read (available in different languages) and share it to raise awareness.
😷New Pollution
When walking down the street, it has been almost normalized the sight of face-masks on the floor. I see them all around and every time I wonder how many of them are actually becoming litter and going to our oceans. Well, this infographic appeared in my inbox, so I thought I would share it here.
🍩Doughnut Economy
I could not stop thinking of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economy. I would love to see what indigenous people think about it and how they would compliment it (I would bet there are blind spots).
Governments in every country are almost addicted to citing GDP figures as if this was proof of success and yet it's so clearly not. Because we have climate breakdown and covid lockdown and financial meltdown, we have to pursue something far richer to move from this pursuit of endless growth which we can now see as hitting us with crisis after crisis. Moving to a goal of thriving and the donut is absolutely possible to turn not into a single number but into a dashboard we could hold policymakers to account and say every year you need to talk about how you are making progress on these different dimensions of the doughnut.
🌎Indigenous Thinking for Troubled Times
Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an art critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland and the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. He describes the book as “taking that indigenous knowledge standpoint and using that as a lens to have a look at what's going on in the world… it's like reverse anthropology.”
In this 45-minutes conversation with Rebel Wisdom's Alexander Beiner (which I highly recommend watching) your brain will go through some bolts and lightnings. At first, I must say I was not understanding Tyson’s humor, but then it made a lot of sense as he laughs (sometimes REALLY laughs) at our face to make us understand some of the absurdities we have normalized. I took some quotes from the video:
Where you used to have family and community you're gonna have the economy and government... “We're going to provide all the things for you that land used to provide, but you have to sell us a third of your life. The trade-off is you have to give us a third of your life, like you're gonna have to spend the other third sleeping and by the way a sizable chunk of the third that's left over, you're gonna have to spend commuting, life maintenance tasks, paying your bills, make sure you account it. Oh and and you're not going to be getting any exercise anymore, bro so you need to set aside an hour for that. Yeah, that's all right, we're going to provide you with these little shitty indoor spaces where you can lift heavy things that don't need lifting and pedal on a bike that goes nowhere and run even though nothing's chasing you and you're not chasing anything and you're not in a hurry you're gonna do all those pointless tasks and you're going to do them over and over and over until you f*cking die and that's progress.”
About complexity and contextuality of systems and theories:
From an indigenous perspective, post-modernism is placeless. It's ethereal, it's floating in space. All indigenous knowledge is grounded strongly in place and it's very spatial, it always is… Postmodernism is not a good tool for that, however post-modernism, deconstructivism and particularly post-colonialism have been a very good tool for us to be able to enter the academy and to assert our standpoint and to to make sure that we're able to think and inquire from our standpoint.
Post-modernism, critical race theory, all these things, they're really just trying to bring an awareness of power to the table… power is a variable in all of these things that you want to study and if you ignore that variable then your findings are invalid.
About the Law of Nature:
Aboriginal culture, at its foundation, never separated society from nature, so it didn't have to separate all those abstracts and name those things and then come up with rules to put that the law is natural law. The law is in the land and it's all around you and you have to follow that and and those laws are inalienable. You can't change it like a bill of rights or a charter.
🌳Kunumi MC
Thanks to the internet, today we can see the faces and hear voices that carry ancestral knowledge and it is so exciting and beautiful. I decided to share some of these here, so feel free to share more things like that with me. This was shown to me by a colleague in a workshop, so thank you Jonathan)
Kunumi MC is from Brazil and he sings in Guarani about the indigenous struggles in Brazil, which have been getting worse. The videos have subtitles in Portuguese and English, which I have to acknowledge. It is such an important part of music today and I see even bigger artists that never add subtitles. Needless to say, the quality of the video and music are great. In his last launch, Jaguaté Tenondé, he also created three NFTs to help raise funds for indigenous communities. Below a part of the lyrics:
Our people have been oppressed and decimated for not allowing them to enslave us. They have ignored our science and technology, thousands of years of our knowledge about the forest and now we see on TV concerns over Global Warming, major mass extinctions, and they carry on destroying our rivers and forests.
Read: Kunumi MC, the indigenous rapper protecting his people's land
🌶Lido Pimienta
Lido Pimienta is a Colombian Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter. I think I have shown something from her before, but I have to do it again. She’s a full artist.
Read: Out Loud: Lido Pimienta Is the Queer Artist Making Latin Music of the Past and Future - them
🌧Jaloo
Jaloo is from the northern region of Brazil and I am so proud of his work. Beautiful music and aesthetics. This song is a modern take in a rainmaking ritual. Reading the comments you can see teachers that use the song to teach about the different states of water.
Read: What It’s Really Like To Be A Queer Musician In Brazil - The Fader
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