Thispunk.

The farmers themselves have to come to their senses as well and support these government reforms or eventually the crime gangs might take the land and eat the owner. After that is done I hope we can return to a commons system of land use.

They help with slowing down, degrowth, a meditative life. Although the speed depends a lot on the motivation of the donkey. Towards home and a bucket of food they might reach ludicrous speeds temporarily!

Hmm, the farmer interviewed in the article farms 570 ha - maybe consider a restoration of smaller-scale farms and restoration of the commons before complaining about criminals roaming lands the size of an entire village?

The concentration of ownership into fewer and fewer hand means that smaller farmers had to sell out to the big guys, a process that has been going on for very long. When there is nothing left but large swatches of land owned by single persons what is normal folk supposed to do? Turn into serfs again? It’s not even possible anymore because most farmers will just import the cheapest farmhand from other countries because nobody can live a dignified life from the pittance they pay workers.

Not to forget, with large areas of land in a single hand comes monoculture and all the destruction associated with it.

Fuck it, distribute the land to the crime gangs and teach them how to garden.

My dream is to use the donkeys as my main means of transport. I’ve had so many cars broken recently, I don’t know why I bother anymore.

trying to catch trains, trying to find the correct room at university …

Where I live Mimosa kills everthing where it grows, so does Eucalyptus. But watching (and unsuccessfully fighting it) during two decades I find that it ultimately can’t outgrow the native species, it finds a more humble place in the landscape with time. Yes we shouldn’t stupidly introduce new stuff left and right, but the idea that invasives could be removed entirely feels entirely impossible (how? and where to draw the line?), and also frighteningly fascist, to me. Managing a landscape by building diverse ecosystems where the ‘invasives’ have place and function seems to be a more fruitful (!) thing to do imo.

Sounds too much like ‘the war on weeds’ only for humans. Still no thanks. We can grow smaller but lets take it easy. Also if we squash ourselves back who is gonna fight the invasives (/s because I don’t think the term even makes sense)

The idea of a slow and careful crafts movement aligns with a more sustainable society, because it slows things down. Best way of slowing down is like this: create things very beautiful, even out of broken stuff.

You decide which human is invasive? No thanks. As for invasive plants, are we going to take all our agricultural plants back to where they came from as well?

Every plant in the garden and in the surrounding landscape has a use. There is no weed. Learning how to use plants again is important!

Yours is just one of many versions of ‘why I personally don’t do anything’: I’m all for change, but the others don’t want!

Society will never be fully aligned on the solutions and you cannot expect everyone to agree with you, but you still can work for your preferred solutions in smaller groups?

I would take diagnosis around Neurodiversity with a grain of salt. I suspect both conditions might be the same brain differences presenting differently, and I don’t think science has really gotten to the ground of this yet.

I like them, and the place where they are. Glad you’ve got them taking care of you!

Society is collapsing as we speak and my best case scenario is this one because I do whatever i can to create a soft landing spot for me and my local community.

Yes, and also closeness changes with time. It has been like this in my family. I’ve felt more close to one or the other of my parents over the years depending on what I was doing but I don’t remember having a problem with it. That said, my parents made sure to treat us both equally as kids, and if they felt closer to one of us they didn’t let it show.

I’d describe my feelings around the current solar boom as cautiously positive with a good sprinkle of skepticism.

I’d like to see billionaires investing in education towards self-regulating communities. I’d like to see them heavily investing in funding coops, not buying up startups. Billionaires investing in renewables means more money in billionaire’s pockets, because they will just sell the clean energy back to you for a profit while remaining the owners of everything and then some.

I’d carefully agree that more solar panels are good, but I’ve now lived through enough eco hypes to not have at least a few concerns. In the worst case we will now quickly and thoughtlessly plaster solar panels over hectares and hectares of useful farmland, important ecological reserves, and poor people’s homes, just because line go up. And probably trash them all in ten years when maintaining them proves too costly, or the next hype comes along. In the best case we actually start polluting less and use the time we buy to seek for more energy-saving ways of living in general.

Do your friends have a website? I’m always curious to find good ideas to steal for other communities!

Haha insane, I swear this popped into my head out of nowhere yesterday.

Well not entirely nowhere, but I work with plant dyes. So far I’ve only dyed wool, but I suddenly had the idea to create some T-shirt printing process with what grows around here. A dye bath and ink are rather different things though, so I’d be curious for ideas how to turn plant pigment into ink, or where to look?

I’ve never even seen normal silkscreen printing done, but vaguely understand the idea. I’d try different fabrics stapled to a wooden frame as sieve, and maybe use wax to cover the non-print areas?

For a non natural method - could 3D printing be interesting for making sieves?

And what is an emulsion?

No. I don’t want one giant Billionaire-backed project. I want a million small scale projects backed by local communities.