I Think Whats On A Persons Nightstand Is Very Telling So Reblog This And Put In The Tags The Things You

i think what’s on a person’s nightstand is very telling so reblog this and put in the tags the things you have on your nightstand

You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is?  I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off.  Woopie. 

I was forwarding these to a friend and figured it’d be worth sharing them all here too so enjoy some free books and essays and things in no particular order:

Jeanette Winterson - Art Objects

Does Your Daughter Know It’s Okay To Be Angry? - Soraya Chemaly

Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Zami, Sister Outsider, Undersong - Audre Lorde

Garments Against Women - Anne Boyer

Laziness Does Not Exist - Devon Price

Learn Socialism Resources

Do Economists Actually Know What Wealth Is? - Nathan J. Robinson

Love Dialogue: CÉLINE SCIAMMA on Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Carlos Augilar

Teaching To Transgress - Bell Hooks

Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson

Sinister Wisdom Archives

Why Pop Culture Links Women and Killer Plants - Amandas Ong

How To Suppress Women’s Writing - Joanna Russ

Women’s Voices Now

The Life of Tove Jansson

Unbearable Weight; Feminism, Western Culture and the Body - Susan Bordo

‘A Simple Favour’ and That Whole Lesbian Psycho Thing - Ciara Wardlow

OUTWEEK Archives

AirPods Are a Tragedy - Caroline Haskins

Devotions - Mary Oliver

Go Tell It On The Mountain - James Baldwin

Nevertheless, She Feasted: Why Girls Get Hungry in Horror Movies - Francesca Fau

Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson

Sula - Toni Morrison

Not Vanishing - Chrystos

The Fever - Wallace Shawn

Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma: ‘Ninety per cent of what we look at is the male gaze’ - Alexandra Pollard

Minimalism Is Just Another Boring Product Wealthy People Can Buy - Chelsea Fagan

AIDS, Art and Activism: Remembering Gran Fury - John d’Addario

In the Day of the Postman - Rebecca Solnit

Blood and Guts in Highschool - Kathy Acker

Mark My Words: The Subversive History of Women Using Thread as Ink - Rosalind Jana

Exploring Frida Kahlo’s Relationship With Her Body - Rebecca Fulleylove

Ravens have paranoid, abstract thoughts about other minds - Emily Reynolds

The Lady in the Looking Glass - Virginia Woolf

Angela Carter talks beauties and beasts with Terry Jones

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - Eimear McBride

Why Female Cannibals Frighten and Fascinate - Kate Robertson

Lesbian Herstory Archives

Bartleby

Guggenheim Books

We Are Lisa Simpson: 30 Years with the Smartest and Saddest Kid in Grade Two - Sara David

On Beauty - Zadie Smith

Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation - Anne Helen Petersen

day 1 🕎 ✨🕯✡

An electric toothbrush and an escalator are two things that can stop working and still accomplish their original goal.

day 4 ✨✨