Preorder: Mutual Aid Is the Future

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LISTENING: to my husband play Rocket League
FEELING: happy after a nice bike ride today
SEEING: my kitty sleep in his window hammock

What does mutual aid mean to you? Is it about sharing resources? About rethinking how we protect the most vulnerable? About sowing revolution, together?

Issue 9 of Loam is all about mutual aid. I'm its first-ever guest editor, collaborating with Climate Futures Studio to bring the magazine to life. Preorders are now open and offered on a sliding scale. These preorders help the publisher print the right number of magazines, so get yours in if you want to support independent media.

To entice you, we're giving you an exclusive first look at my interview with Rebecca Solnit in this issue. The real ones will remember my edition teasing the interview back in March, but I've got an excerpt for you all today.

Get your preorders in before it's too late! Your support means the world.

YESSENIA FUNES
Rebecca, one of the things I love the most about your writing is your clarity over the present and the past. In Hope in the Dark, my favorite book of yours with a new sequel out, you write, “Authentic hope requires clarity.” I'd love to hear a little bit about why this historical clarity, in particular, is so important when we think about how we want to imagine our future.

REBECCA SOLNIT
Something I say a lot is that accuracy and precision are forms of respect. We're in the age of AI slop (but also all kinds of informational slop), so when people — who are so eager to have opinions that they don't really do the work to have the facts — they're having opinions, and it leads to all kinds of trouble. Clarity is one of the things you try to achieve as a nonfiction writer: What happened? How did it happen? What is the ancestry of this?

For example, I just wrote about the former Prince Andrew getting arrested yesterday. Thank you, feminism. Because were there no feminism during the surge of women speaking out around 2012 and 2013, there would have been no Me Too. Journalists were able to get on board now that the public was more informed and ready to listen. And the people who control information, the editors and producers, were more ready to air stories about sexual abusers who had gotten away with it for decades. That led to journalist Julie K. Brown doing her incredible work for the Miami Herald, which led to Epstein being arrested. This expanded to so many different things, including the discovery of emails that led to the arrest of a member of the royal family. So thank you, feminism.

Whether you're a billionaire or a homeless person, the rules of gravity, the rules of science, and the historical record are the same.

I quote this wonderful statement by the mystic and activist Simone Weil a lot lately: “Attention is the deepest form of generosity.” That quality of actually caring about something enough to really know it. That's part of loving nature: You want to know. And I'm not particularly good at identifying birds, but at least I know some of their patterns. I check the tide charts and weather reports. I’ve lived most of my life in the Bay Area, so I know the seasons and the plants, which don't move around like birds. I think clarity, attention, precision, and accuracy are really things to aspire to, principles and values to hold, particularly as Silicon Valley finds out that misinformation and disinformation, AI slop, conspiracy theories, propaganda, lies, and attacks are really profitable. All of which corrupt our information environment.

One form of resistance is to just not be like them. Be committed to the truth.

One thing I learned from writing my book Orwell's Roses — about George Orwell and his passion for gardening, his insistence on retaining pleasure, joy, and beauty in his life (even while he fought fascism) — is that authoritarians see science, history, fact, and truth as rival systems of power, which they are. They're deeply democratic. Whether you're a billionaire or a homeless person, the rules of gravity, the rules of science, and the historical record are the same. Authoritarians, like Trump, Putin, Stalin, and Hitler, attack and undermine the truth and try to become the only source of information. This commitment to accuracy, precision, clarity, truth, and fact is a form of resistance to authoritarianism — and a really important one. 🌀

Preorder the magazine to read the full interview when it comes out in September.

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Rest in Power

While we can't say for certain that climate change led to these specific weather events (we need attribution studies for that), we do know that the Earth's rising temperatures are already creating more frequent and/or stronger disasters like these.

Since June 26, at least 109 people in Pakistan have died due to the monsoon rains.

West Virginia was struck by flash floods last week, leaving at least two dead.

Another firefighter in Colorado has died as a result of his injuries fighting flames back in June.

Eastern Europe has also been experiencing deadly wildfires that have killed three Greek firefighters, too.

Currently Reading

I worked on a cool story about mycelia as a metaphor for living infrastructure for Neighbors Magazine, where I'm editing these days. Tap in!

Another reason to hate AI? Data centers are relying on more dirty gas to power them, Sarah Sax reports for The Lever.

Emily Atkin isn't an optimist, and man, these days? Neither am I: "I’m a pessimist, but I’m not an asshole. A lot of people use their pessimism as an excuse to not do anything, because they don’t think anything’s gonna happen. Even if I think it’s probably not gonna work out, I’m still gonna work towards what I believe in. I hope I’ll be proven wrong. I want to be proven wrong."

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- Yessenia