Civilization/Politics Archives - Macska Moksha Press

Blind Spots in the Climate Movement

November 25, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Topaz photovoltaic power station in San Luis Obispo County, California [Sarah Swenty/USFWS, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

In the media and in activist circles, Climate Change is generally presented as a problem with one cause—carbon emissions—and one solution: a “green energy transition.” But this narrative is far too narrow, and unless we expand our collective perspective and responses, the already grievous consequences will worsen.

Many well-meaning people, some of whom dedicate much of their time and energy to the Climate Change cause, take part in disseminating this misleading narrative but I’m not throwing shade on them at all. The narrative is so dominant it’s basically exclusive, and most people are unaware of anything else. My goal here is to broaden the discourse—and the action we are taking—by pointing out what I see as the big blind spots: a) it’s not just carbon and b) a “green” energy transition is not the only response. A third blind spot that relates to both is that “green” energy is freighted with its own environmental impacts, some of which—it must be emphasized—are novel.

A Brush with Trophy Hunters

November 17, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Another recollection from my summer in Paonia, Colorado

Above is a photo of a five-point buck in the greenhouse at the farm where I worked this summer. (See “Cows, Coal and Peaches: My summer in Paonia, Colorado.”) This wasn’t the first time he or one of his brothers bedded down in the aisles. Why didn’t we chase them out? Because we were trying to keep them safe. Here’s the story.

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Reminder: Another World is Possible

August 12, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Graphic from Poeta de Alba

Today I want to talk about something that frustrates me about how talk about civilized humanity’s relationship to the environment. I’ll also explain how I see my role as an activist writer.

Everyone who’s paying attention to the state of the environment can agree that things need to change. We are collectively depleting the planet’s “resources” (I don’t like that word but it’s convenient here) faster than they are being replenished, and are producing immense amounts of pollution of various kinds. Wildlife habitat is being diminished and extinctions are increasing. Poison is infiltrating water, air and soil. Eventually, our own survival as a species will be in question. In the meantime, quality of life for us and more-than-human creatures is in sharp decline. It’s a bad road we’re on, and we must get off it.

Where people part ways is in how to do that, which is readily apparent in the many discussions that take place online and IRL.

What frustrates me is how such discussions are often derailed by where people are coming from in terms of what’s possible, what’s probable and what’s needed. Or put in other words: what we can do, what we’re likely to be able to do, and what we must do. These are three different things but are often thrown together haphazardly.

This happens no matter what the subject is, whether it’s the genocide in Gaza, politics in the US, economic systems, social justice, or the environment, the last of which is my current area of focus.

The Planet Can’t Afford AI

March 19, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

“Artificial Intelligence” (AI) is a broad subject that can be approached from multiple directions: economic, political, cultural, creative, and environmental. Over the last couple years, I’ve read articles, listened to podcasts, watched videos, and spoken with friends about their experiences with it. Among the most helpful sources have been Robbie Martin at the Media Roots Radio podcast (which he co-hosts with his awesome sister, journalist Abby Martin), and Brian Merchant , who puts out the Blood in the Machine Substack.

Wikipedia includes the following under the heading of “Artificial Intelligence”:

advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go).

The “generative and creative tools” have been getting the most attention lately because they have the most potential so far to replace human jobs en masse, including artistic work.

The Cruelty We Inflict on Ourselves & Nature is not Inevitable

February 19, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

American sailor with the skull of a Japanese soldier during World War II. [Unknown photographer, Public Domain]

American sailor with the skull of a Japanese soldier during World War II. Look at that leer. [Unknown photographer, Public Domain]

If I had to pick just one word to describe the culture of the United States, it would probably be “cruel.”

From my perspective, cruelty is manifest everywhere, in our institutions both governmental and private, and in our social relations, including families.

The origin of the word “cruel” traces back to the Old French cruel/crudel, to the Latin crudelis for “rude, unfeeling” or “hard-hearted” (which is related to crudus, “rough, raw, bloody”), the Greek kreas, “flesh,” and the Sanskrit kravis- “raw flesh.” The hypothetical Proto-Indo-European root word kreuə- means “raw flesh.” Related words include crude, creosote, ecru and pancreas. The word is both emotional and visceral.

Contemporary definitions of “cruel” include:

Merriam-Webster: “1. disposed to inflict pain or suffering: devoid of humane feelings; 2. causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain; 3. unrelieved by leniency.”
Cambridge Dictionary: “(of a person or action) extremely unkind and unpleasant and causing pain to people or animals intentionally.”
Wiktionary: “1. Intentionally causing or reveling in pain and suffering; merciless, heartless. 2. Harsh; severe.”

For “cruelty” we have:

The Law Dictionary: “The intentional and malicious infliction of physical suffering upon living creatures, particularly human beings; or, as applied to the latter, the wanton, malicious, and unnecessary infliction of pain upon the body, or the feelings and emotions; abusive treatment; inhumanity; outrage.”
Wikipedia: “The intentional infliction of suffering or the inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily available.” [my emphasis]

“Rude,” “unfeeling,” “hard-hearted,” “merciless,” “harsh.” That’s the US. Especially the “reveling in pain and suffering” part. My childhood in Catholic schools in reactionary Nebraska was full of grief and pain, intentionally inflicted by the adults in my life, as well as my peers, and the cruelty of this upbringing, though it had its own regional and religious qualities, was hardly atypical. (And now I fear the whole country is becoming Nebraskafied.) For the most part, children in the US are raised in abusive conditions. Capitalism is an abusive condition. So is techno-industrialism, with its estrangement from nature. So is Patriarchy, which poisons our family structures.

I find the bolded portion of the Wikipedia definition—“when a clear remedy is readily available”—to be the most important: the essence of cruelty is that another—not cruel—action is not taken. To be cruel is not merely to inflict suffering; it is to choose to do so when one has the opportunity to do otherwise. Cruelty is never inevitable, though many voices and forces in our society portray it that way. The most frequent justification for cruelty is probably the tiresome, “That’s just how it is.”

How is our society cruel? Here’s a few ways:

Emissions Are So Not the Only Problem with Cars …And EVs won’t solve them

January 8, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Massive cloverleaf highway interchange with surrounding car-centric landscape, aerial view

Cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) spew an array of pollutants from their tailpipes including carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen monoxide, sulfur dioxide, various volatile organic compounds and particulate matter (not a complete list). All these substances inflict many adverse health effects on humans and other living things, and environmentally they contribute to air and water pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion and climate change (also not a complete list).

As bad as all that is, emissions are only one negative aspect of many. In fact, I’m going to list twenty harms altogether. I’m spelling them out because the push to replace ICE vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs) typically focuses exclusively on emissions, and if we continue to pursue this goal blindly, we and the planet will still be stuck with all the other downsides, a few of which will actually worsen.

Because it’s not just about the car as technology, it’s about the car as culture-shaper. Car-centric values and policy have manufactured physical landscapes designed first and foremost for driving and storing cars. These places are hostile to anyone or anything not inside a car, whether that’s pedestrians, cyclists, animals or other more-than-human life. Such places make up most places in the contemporary urbanized environment, from downtowns to suburbs to exurbs to small towns. It’s a tyrannical infrastructure and the only reason most people don’t think about it that way is because they don’t know anything else, which totally isn’t their fault. As I’ll lay out here, so much of what’s wrong about cars has nothing to do with their mode of propulsion.

“Invasive Plants”: Immigrants Who Nice People are Allowed to Hate

November 11, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A Salt Cedar / Tamarisk tree (genus Tamarix, species unknown) at an undisclosed location in southern California. (Photo by the author)

When I first started hearing the rhetoric of the “invasive plant” narrative in the early 2000s, I was living in the progressive bastion of Portland, Oregon. I was taken aback by the vitriol being dished out by people who were otherwise prided themselves on being accepting and nonjudgmental. I concluded that many secularists, lacking a religious dogma, needed a Devil to hate, and “invasive plants” fit the bill.

I find that conclusion overly simplistic now, but it certainly contained a big nugget of truth. Through my research into the topic of “invasive plants” over the last few years—which has included a deep dive into the scientific literature, my own field observations, and many discussions with other people with varying views on the subject—I’ve come to see that the “invasive plant” narrative is more a product of culture than it is of science.

Patriarchy is an Environmental Issue

October 22, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

March in Portland, Oregon, 2017. Photo by Karney Hatch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Patriarchy” isn’t a very common word in mainstream US American discourse. When it does come up, it usually refers to the inequities of power between women and men in terms of rights, opportunities and outcomes within our socio-economic system. Such inequities are very real, and issues like access to safe abortion are vitally important.

However, Patriarchy goes deeper than the particular struggles of our time and place. Patriarchy is not only the oppression of women as a class by men as a class—and the resulting abuse of individual women by individual men—but also the suppression of that which is considered feminine by that which is considered masculine. Patriarchy is a framework of values. Everything is gendered—qualities, ideas, objects, living things and even colors—and anything feminine is relegated to secondary status. Competition is elevated over cooperation; authoritarianism over agreement; muscle over emotion.

So, Nature itself—because we perceive it as herself—is debased.

The Environment & the Election

October 7, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Photo by Missvain, CC BY 4.0, via WikiCommons

[Important autobiographical note: I’ve never voted for a Republican for any office, but I haven’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1992. Which is to say, I’ve been an outside observer for three decades, and that’s the perspective I’m drawing from for this piece.]

No matter whether Trump or Harris wins the White House, those of us who oppose ecocide will face daunting challenges during the next presidential administration. There’s no “lesser evil” between these two; just different evils.

Okay, some folks just clicked away and that’s fine. For those who stayed, I’ll spell it out.

How Will Communities Handle Troublemakers? [part 3 of a 3-part series]

August 6, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

“?” courtesy Khaydock, CC BY-SA 3.0. Landscape: the Coast Range in Sonoma County at sunset.

Part 3 of a 3 part series. In part 1 of this series, “Farewell to a Garden,” I shared photos of my veggie growing this year at a farm in Sonoma County that I just left. In part 2, “Why I Hate Market Farming,” I explained my departure. In this final part, I discuss some big picture reflections highlighted by the experience.

An increasing number of people are collapse-aware. They see that the United States is in decline, economically, politically, socially and otherwise. The systems that provide for our needs are at once decreasing in quality and increasing in price. The status quo serves fewer and fewer people even as its ecological footprint metastasizes beyond the finite limits of our planet. Sooner or later, something will give way that reveals our system as the house of cards that it is. Whether this is gradual or quick is unknown, but regardless of the timeline, the collapse aware know that the time to prepare for other ways to live is now. This is why I got into farming in 2005. The disaster that struck New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed me that we cannot count on big institutions to take care of us; my anarchist friends who traveled there to help out reported that the localized, community-based efforts were much more effective than FEMA or the Red Cross. Hurricane Katrina was but a small taste of the wider-spread challenges we will face as the big institutions either fail or turn openly authoritarian (perhaps simultaneously) and as climate chaos becomes more intense, so we need to build alternative means of support based on mutual aid now. Metaphorically, the time to plant a vegetable garden is not when the grocery shelves have just been emptied. You want that food in the ground already, and if this season is just a drill, you’ll have some nice meals anyway.

Margaret Killjoy talks about the triangle of prepping: gear, skills and relationships. Gear includes physical resources like tools, blankets, camping supplies, first aid kits, plus food stashes like buckets of rice and beans,or boxes of canned goods (and a can opener!). Skills include knowledge and experience in how to do practical things, including how to use the gear. Relationships are about people to cooperate with when times get hard (and to learn from and have fun with in the meantime!). I’d say that, in the end, having trusted, reliable people around would be better than going it alone with a cache of firearms and ammo, though I know folks who are prioritizing both friends and guns, and I don’t have an argument with them.

The first two, skills and gear, get the most attention, and there’s plenty of resources out there about those topics, so I won’t be addressing them here.

Relationships/Community are my focus today, and specifically the question of “How do we deal with assholes?” (I put “troublemakers” in the headline in case people share this post on social media.)

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