Bharat’s pocket scraps Sep 22

Finally getting to The Stone Sky, the exciting conclusion to what I think is the best fantasy series in a long time, N.K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, expect to find it intense, emotional and difficult, woohoo!

Octlantis is a just-discovered underwater city engineered by octopuses

Like any urban environment, Otocopolis and Octlantis can be tough places to live. Citizens must be scrappy. The company and food are abundant but all the activity in the cities also attracts predators, including sharks.

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I am very late to octopus love, but, it’s starting to hit me hard.

India is about to embark on the most ambitious electric-car transformation in the world

The world’s fifth-largest auto market is readying for a stupendous transformation: moving completely towards electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030.

I wish India would invest more heavily in transit, because driving in India is miserable and clean cars will not solve this problem, though it will greatly improve air pollution. Also, most of India’s vehicles are two wheelers, which this article curiously just glides over. Electric scooters/motorcycles are more likely to be adopted than electric cars, but, we shall see…

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BC’s ‘Wild West’ Political Fundraising Ends

The B.C. government introduced legislation Monday to ban corporate and union donations to provincial political parties and cap individual donations at $1,200 per year.

Read BC’s ‘Wild West’ Political Fundraising Ends

About time, this is one of multiple electoral reform measures we need to improve our democracy. There has been a lot of conservative pushback around public funding of elections. Somehow, people believe that politics and political parties are separate and outside our system, and “should not be subsidized”. I find this argument to be rather silly. Politics and political parties are how we are governed, and public funding is our skin in the game, our way of ensuring that the politics happens within our rules and frameworks.

Starving Killer Whales Are Losing Most of Their Babies | Hakai Magazine

When the whales don’t get enough to eat, they start to burn their fat reserves, which releases the stored toxins into their bloodstreams. This hurts the health of the developing calf, and the effect is particularly pronounced late in the pregnancy when the fetus is growing rapidly.

N and I had delicious Pacific salmon for dinner these last two nights, but I couldn’t help think of our beloved Salish Sea resident orca, affected severely by depleting salmon stocks. So much to do to restore our salmon runs, where to start? Better management of quotas, removal of salmon farms along the wild salmon’s paths, protection of habitat, climate change mitigation, reduction in the levels of persistent organic pollutants, the list is long, and I fear for my orca neighbours.

Read Starving Killer Whales Are Losing Most of Their Babies | Hakai Magazine

The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society

The nature and meaning of work, as it pertains to a future society, has deeply divided ecological, socialist, utopian, and Romantic thinkers since the Industrial Revolution.

I love me a good ol’ fashioned socialist essay once in a while :)

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How Communists and Catholics Built a Commonwealth

“It’s a very unusual for-profit model,” says Ruth Arnold, Colorado Recovery’s chief executive officer. “It’s not really profit-driven. We’re charging as much as we need to survive.”

Cooperatives are a strong and sustainable model, too bad there are not enough of them around, though I guess I bank with one, and do shop in a few others. As the article points out, they are no utopia, they do need to function in a market capitalist system, and all the moral compromises that entails, but still, progress…

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Sea Turtles Appear to Be Bouncing Back Around the World

They were surprised to find that with adequate protection, even small populations of turtles have a chance of survival. In an area called French Frigate Shoals in Hawaii, for example, green sea turtles increased nest numbers from around 200 in 1973, when the Endangered Species Act was signed, to around 2,000 in 2012. This species is now considered of “least concern,” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The sea turtle transformed me from a clueless and unmoored engineering student to who I am today. And, it’s heartening to know that small populations are amenable to conservation work, I worked with a fairly small population in Chennai and while I loved them creatures, always wondered if there was a point to our work, well, I’ll still wonder that because I never stop wondering about the effectiveness of my actions, but, I’ll go to sleep tonight wondering  a little less.

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