Maybe the Angry Women - 5

art by Aaron Paquette,

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022...

Owl and the Moon on Facebook in 2022

"Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth.

Anger is the demand of accountability. It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It’s a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It’s a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope.

How much anger is too much? Certainly not the anger that, for many of us, is a remembering of a self we learned to hide and quiet. It is willful and disobedient. It is survival, liberation, creativity, urgency, and vibrancy. It is a statement of need. An insistence of acknowledgment. Anger is a boundary. Anger is boundless. An opportunity for contemplation and self-awareness. It is commitment. Empathy. Self-love. Social responsibility. If it is poison, it is also the antidote. The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun.

In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. Women, especially, will be told to set our anger aside in favor of a kinder, gentler approach to change. This is a false juxtaposition. Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful.

The women I admire most—those who have looked to themselves and the limitations and adversities that come with our bodies and the expectations that come with them—have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation. Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it."

~ Soraya Chemaly, "Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger"

Angela Yarber of Tehom Center, "Protest Goddess"

https://tehomcenter.org/prints

https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/npr-pbs-newshour-marist-national-poll-the-overturning-of-roe-v-wade-june-2022/

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And in 2024 many women (and many men) did put efforts to elect Kamala Harris to the presidency of the US.

We are members of the 8 billion humans alive today...

But did you know this?

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Today's Goddess:

800 BC, Aomori prefecture Japan. Dogū

We tend to look for greatness
always in somebody else
rather than yourself.
Go inside and
get your sound.

Carlos Santana

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Fun to watch map, and UN to reduce plastics

  Another great historical video...

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Plastics: NPR article from Monday, 11.13.23 

"... last year the United Nations set out to write a legally binding agreement to deal with the issue. That decision by U.N. member states "will clearly take us towards a future with no plastic pollution," Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, Japan's then-environment minister, said at the time.

This week, negotiators from around 150 countries are gathering in Kenya to start hashing out the treaty's details. Outside groups are there too, trying to influence the talks, including public health advocates, human rights activists, environmentalists and the oil and gas industry.

Oil and gas companies push recycling

Oil and gas companies have spent decades touting recycling as a solution to the plastic waste problem. Yet reporting reveals they knew that the economics of recycling don't make sense and that recycling wouldn't keep waste from piling up in landfills and the environment. Despite years of advertising campaigns and municipal efforts, less than 10% of plastic waste gets recycled globally.

The problem is that making new plastic is almost always cheaper than collecting and recycling used material. Recycling plastic also requires a lot of energy, and some plastic waste can't be recycled at all, says Bethanie Carney Almroth, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Yet the idea of a circular economy for plastic — using, recycling and reusing material — is central to the U.N. negotiations, in part because, for now, it's hard to imagine a world without plastic, says Winnie Lau, who leads a project at the Pew Charitable Trusts to keep plastic waste out of oceans.

But Marcos Orellana, the U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, says a circular economy is "wishful thinking" at best. "In the worst case, it's the design of a misinformation campaign intended to confuse the population," he says.

Oil producers will fight to keep their plastics business

What's clear is that oil-producing countries will fight to protect their business with the plastics industry.
Russia and China have argued that production cuts don't belong in a global plastics treaty. And Saudi Arabia said limiting the supply of plastics would "risk economic growth and stability." The countries are all participating in the negotiations.

"I am not a skeptic of business," Lau (of the Pew Charitable Trusts) says. But she says the solutions that companies are pitching to governments need scrutiny. "If you don't have the right accountability mechanism and oversight mechanism in place, they could be designed to not work at all."

The U.N.'s goal is to finish the treaty negotiations next year.

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Today's quote:

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. -Pablo Casals, cellist, conductor, and composer (1876-1973)

How we reached 8 Billion persons today

 and perhaps where we'll be at the end of this century.

Today's quote:

"We are Earth. We are the planet. We are the biosphere. We are not distinct from nature. Yet, at the same time, we are, as life — as living things: ourselves, the redwoods, the birds overhead — we are the pinnacle of complexity in the universe, from the Big Bang until now. It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to form this portal of self-awareness that is you. […] Given this ephemeral existence that we have, of self-awareness, what are you going to do with your moment? What are we, as a species, going to do with our moment? 

 Astronomer Natalie Batalha, who led the epoch-making discovery of more than 4,000 potential cradles for life by NASA’s Kepler mission and now continues her work on the search for life beyond our solar system with the astrobiology program at UC Santa Cruz.