2020 mood · 2:08am Sep 13th, 2020
Bodging together makeshift air filters because the stores are entirely sold out and the air quality in your city is "Lol, have some cancer!" because the entire state of Oregon is on fire is very much a 2020 mood.
We have one excellent, huge air filter that's up to more or less keeping the whole house clear, but we also have a modern house with well-sealed windows and doors, so that's not hard.
However, my mother in law has a house that leaks like a sieve. I sent the goober over there for her usual Friday night sleepover, and I could smell the smoke inside the house. So she has my good air filter now, and we were going to get by on the secondary, small filter.
Unfortunately that turned out to not quite be sufficient? Like, it was loosely livable, but I was feeling a little raw-throated and coughing more. We went to the hardware store, but it was SO very sold out of anything that could handle small particulates.
So I rummaged through the fabric bins, found some cheap flannel (pretty dense weave fabric) that I was probably never going to use again, cut it up into pieces the size of our box fans, taped a double layer over each, and spritzed it down with water. Ta-da, very efficient smoke particulate filter. So long as it stays damp. It's a half-assed but not useless filter while dry. It'll dry out at night, which is unfortunate, but one does what one can. I have an alarm set so I can spray it down every half hour.
God, this damn year.
On the other hand, my DIY today also included plum liqueur? So it's not all bad. *sips* It came out pretty decent, though I already have ideas for making the next batch better.
Good trick! We may have to try that.
Hang in there!
5354402
I'm hanging, but only because I don't really have any other options.
I ended up setting up my box fan like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qr1Aj6Di7w
I feel quite fortunate to be on the other side of the country. Regardless, I hope this serves as a wake-up call to the governments and people of the affected areas. Large forests need to burn sometimes. It's natural. This wildfire, however, is a consequence of inaction. The natives were practicing controlled burns for centuries, long enough for the local ecosystems to become dependent on it. By ceasing controlled burns, we allowed such large amounts of fuel to sit and accumulate, where it only took a simple firework display to set it off.
This year has been very unfortunate, but I try to stay positive by attempting to learn from past mistakes that lead us to today. I have to hope that we can do better tomorrow.
The dark red sun glows through the depressed haze.
I feel you, this year has been nasty.
It's important to me that you know something.
It's a boy.
as a fellow Oregonian with a newborn niece, i can say i know your pain.
Ahh, yes. I got relatives in California, and some status updates have been coming through from them; they also got it pretty bad there
Plum liqueur sounds awesome, though. Right now we're just having an insane amount of apples, and thus apple juice, and my mom's making apple jell-o pretty much every day
I have been experimenting with mixing it with some alcohol I had lying around which is more or less something wodka-like that I find too strong in its pure form. With apple juice and a bunch of sugar it's actually a pretty good liqueur-like combination. Won't beat actual apple alcohol, but apart from a few accidentally-fermented bottles of apple juice, I don't think my mom will bother getting into that.
Looking after your old folks first.
That's what good people do.
Hazy, smoky air.
Indeed mate, the failure of government in the air.
My country was ravaged by fire not even a year ago.
I feel for you mate.
Stay alive over there.
Everything changed when the nation fire attacked...
Best of luck over there.
5354412
Works great...if you have filters! There are none to be had around here just now, for some odd reason...
5354447
Except what's burning now isn't the stable ecosystem the West Coast tribes dealt with for millenia. What is burning now is the massive overgrowth caused by abandoned clear-cut areas. Tens of millions of dead evergreens that had grown back so crowded that they couldn't get enough water to fight off bark beetles, exacerbated by forest management that was nothing but a sop to the timber industry. Healthy trees were removed in the name of "fuel reduction" while thick underbrush and sickly/dead trees were left standing.
This is the result of mismanagement that began in the late 1800s and has continued unabated to the present day. Climate change is a factor, but its effect on the forests is now irreversible. Careful and smart management is the only way out of this. Unfortunately, (when they're not desperately trying to blame their political enemies) everyone is looking for an easy and cheap solution, and there isn't one. It will cost an enormous amount of money to return the western forests to a healthy balance, as well as the political will to resist pressure from ignorant special interest groups and the timber industry.
Depending on one's degree of cynicism, one can imagine how well that will go.
5354678
The dead material and thick underbrush is exactly what fires clear, leaving behind fertile ash and clearcut areas. Often times, the best thing to promote healthy ecosystems is to let them sort themselves out. If we do nothing, and instead let nature take its course, only intervening to prevent large human costs, we will be in an excellent place in only a century.
There are a lot of problems with our ecosystems, one of the cheif problems being that we have nearly eradicated most of our apex predators. People don't need to do anything to the environment, as most efforts to help heal it tend to cause more damage in the long run. Think like a mountain.
5354684
Well, that's exactly what's happening right now: Nature is taking its course. Its course is to burn and suffocate us to death.
The Naturalistic Fallacy at its most sublime...
5354622
I got lucky and picked up the next to last filter of the right size at my local store. It is so cheap that I'm not sure it is helping much. But it makes me feel like I did something.
It's supposed to rain here Monday or Tuesday, which should help. In the mean time, let's all not strain ourselves.
Stay safe everyone!
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I'm sure a botched firework display is not nature taking its course. Regardless, I would like to take now to explain some seemingly contradictory statements from my comments. I mentioned how our inaction caused this, yet later said inaction is often times the best course of action for nature. I was referring to two subtly different things. In terms of inaction being the proper course of action, this was simply about how mankind does not fully understand nature, and should not mettle in her machinations. By adding and removing pieces, we will wholly alter the balance and stability of an ecosystem, and therefore, we should cultivate what is natural. Protect the flora and fauna by enforcing our absence.
My comment about being able to do things is different. There are times where society can do things to improve nature, but more often, we need to replace the pieces we remove. This is not explained anywhere better than by Aldo Leopold, who said "So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolfs job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and
rivers washing the future into the sea."
What Leopold is saying is that we take responsibility for nature when we decide to mettle. Nature is a delicate balance, and one that must be maintained by nature.
And then there's a third type of action society can take to protect nature. Society can revoke the power of these political committees, corporations, and bad actors. By growing your own food, such as eggplant and squash, killing your own meat, raising your own animals, buying local, and relying on hand tools and light equipment, society can remove these groups from the field, all the while becoming a helpful part of nature. And by society, I mean you.
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There are seven and a half billion people on this planet. Subsistence farming requires about an acre a person. There is not enough farmable land for this to work. So unless you're either planning on murdering most of the population right at the start of your lovely ideal, it's simply impossible. And to minimize the murder, we'd need to burn down most of your precious nature in order to make space for people to grown their own food. There's a reason populations exploded after the industrial revolution began, dude.
Even if your weird idea were possible, it would require every single person's everyday job to be "farm food". I can barely keep tomatoes alive. Trying to grow enough things to actually feed myself all year round is my idea of hell.
So your ridiculous, absurd, bizarre, and completely divorced from reality idea would result in most people being miserable. And that doesn't even get into the other problems with it! (I mean, are we talking about giving up all modern tech and all modern society here? If everyone has to grown their own food, who makes absolutely everything else? Who maintains the internet? Who makes furniture? Who teaches in schools?)
Do YOU raise all your own food right now? Do YOU currently eschew all unnecessary equipment? (I suspect not, given you're, you know, on the internet right now, and a computer is hardly necessary for subsistence farming.)
Idealizing the pastoral is something the rich and privileged get to do. People who actually farm their own food generally know better.
5355202
So that makes it not even worth trying? And why is it that when I mention striving for self-sufficiency, you immediately jump to assuming murder is the only solution? Besides, overpopulation is not an issue. If it was, do you think we could sustain ourselves with the food we have? There are millions of hungry people, yes, but also millions of tons of food waste yearly.
My point is simply that you will live a better, healthier life if you try to rely primarily on yourself. Removing luxuries and returning to simpler lives often results in happier people, manual work and farm labor are extremely healthy activities and will result in strong bodies and healthy lives.
To improve the environment, there are things you can do. I never said to do everything yourself and never buy anything, no. I said that you should grow some staple vegetables and kill your own meat, be it small farming operations or hunting. That isn't always possible, so you should buy local instead. Go to the butcher for your beef and the farmers market for produce.
This will have the effect of keeping your money in your community, instead of sending it off so some suits in a room that care more about your money than your health or ecosystem.
If you want to change nothing, do nothing. But I would like to rely less on globalization and focus on my community. A return of community is another thing this country desperately needs, but that's another thing entirely.
5355304
Hi, I spent most of my late teenage years and early twenties working both on plots of land tended by my own family and doing work-for-hire for a couple of local farms raising livestock, so I want you to know this is coming from someone who has had some experience doing the exact things you recommend.
This is the dumbest, most ass-backwards argument for the expansion of local agriculture I have ever seen.
First of all, "healthy bodies" can be maintained by any number of things. We can do that by just working out regularly. Martial arts and tai chi promote healthy bodies, but those were things literally invented by humans, for humans, and are often seen and treated by our society as luxuries. Meanwhile every farm hand I've ever met has been someone with no medical insurance, an addiction to some kind of carcinogen, and really bad teeth because it turns out working the land kind of kicks your ass and in some cases can get your arms, legs, and extremities broken.
And it does not pay well for most people.
The only healthy person on the average farm is the owner, and I've never seen a healthy owner who wasn't working a separate job of some kind and farming as a hobby because he's rich, and rich people can just afford to get enough land to do that.
I'll grant that my own family's farming was pretty nice. We grew some of our own vegetables, and raised our own meat chickens. But we could not do that sustainably. Growing the vegetables required us to buy seeds, which means we're buying from industrial farms. The meat birds we raised in groups of fifty were Cornish Cross, a breed specifically bred for industrial factory farms. Even though we were raising them effectively free-range, we were still using an industrial breed of chicken so ill-suited for nature that if we left them in the field after eight weeks instead of killing them, they would have started breaking their own legs from the weight of their bodies. This is when they're not being kept in cages and force-fed.
The act of farming - even subsistence farming, even growing your own vegetables - is an act with a rippling impact. It's not as simple as "start a vegetable garden". Okay, sure, assuming I live in the country or suburbs and have a yard to do that in, I actually think that's a great idea. But where do you think the system that allows for the spread of seeds and fertilizers for that comes from? You're still relying on industry and often industrial farming, specifically.
And nothing is less natural than industrial farming, for better and for worse.
Welcome to MIssissippi, friend. If I have a butcher, I will never find him. And I live in the part of the state that actually has money.
I used to live in a smaller community that had more amenities, and sure, if you live next to a butcher and they happen to have actual locally produced beef or pork or chicken (and the thing is, they often don't, unless by "local" you mean "200+ miles out"), buying it actually does help lower your carbon footprint and reduces the impact you, personally, have on nature through your interaction with farming. Not as much as giving up beef or pork altogether might, but reduced nonetheless. Thing is, local butchers are often boutique. They are more expensive than buying cheap cuts at your local grocery, they may not have the cuts you need, and having one nearby is kind of a privilege.
Look, I sympathize. I'm an anarchist, I also would prefer communities have more self-determination and more local ties to themselves. I don't like that so many places are divorced from each other through the alienation that comes with capitalism. But the thing is, trying to make every community self-sufficient with food is not necessarily a good idea. Not all areas are equally fertile, the food waste created right now isn't actually fixed by people farming more of their own food (again, if you pay into the industrial farming system at all, you probably keep its impact going), and frankly big farms that feed lots of people are kinda neat.
Really if you want local communities to be more food-sufficient, get really into greenhouses rather than trying to get everyone to grow their own veggies (I live in an apartment, where exactly am I supposed to be growing these?). You can grow more kinds of food in them on average, they can be set up in more biomes (including urban ones), and while they require actual skilled professionals to run, they can put out a hell of a lot more food with a hell of a lot less impact on surrounding biomes than most other forms of cultivation.
Tl;dr, your advice isn't necessarily bad, but it's only good for people in the specific circumstances that allow you to easily cultivate or have access to the kind of resources you're talking about. As a universal mandate, it's useless unless your other mandate is "unmake the cities".
5355304
Well yes? I fail at doing even a small-scale version. Oh boy! A thing I am bad at! And can't do! That means it's worth trying to depend on it for my survival? NO! God. Of course not.
I have, in fact, tried growing my own food. I get some tomatoes. Some. Not as many as I should. The end. And the COST of everything I bought in order to get those "some" tomatoes means I should have just gone to the grocery store! It's a hobby. It's fun. It's not sustainable or scalable or something I can do.
"Just try!" Just try to live on something I'm bad at as a hobby?
Here, why don't you just TRY to make enough by only writing to pay your rent?
I do go to the farmer's market! Where it costs TWICE what it does at the grocery store, so I do that as a luxury. Insisting everybody do that is classist, ignorant, regressive, and repressive. Back when I had a $10 a week food budget, I bought everything I needed to survive at Walmart. Or, you know, I could go to the Farmer's Market, get three eggplants, eat two meals, and be out of money, not eat for the other six days, and starve to death.
Again. ARE YOU A FARMER? DO YOU ACTUALLY DO WHAT YOU PREACH???? Do you kill all your meat, raise all your food, and eschew Big Business in all forms? You are putting forth a profoundly ignorant ideal that has nothing to do with what real people living real lives can actually achieve. All this local, sustainable, farmer's market, artisanal, whatever is great, IF YOU HAVE MONEY. If you are poor it's unattainable nonsense. You CANNOT run the world on the "best" practices of the rich!!!!!
Oh, if you do practice what you preach, how, again, are you online without using Big Business? Please, explain it.
5355496
Some of what I said was a first step, some of it was a goal on the path. Never did I say that right now, you should just drop everything and change your entire life. Perhaps I accidentally implied it, which was not my intention. I lack tact, and speak from the assumption that I perfectly explain too much, and that has bitten me more than a few times. Regardless, my point was that we all need to reduce our reliance on these massive corporstions that put money above all. It will improve the heart and soul of the country if we do. The best way to do that, to improve all aspects of this country, is to become as reliant on yourself and your community as possible. So where am I on my path to being self sufficient? I'm near the start. I'm still learning and expiramenting. I've never had issue with growing stuff, and I can prepare meats just fine. I don't know everything, and I never will, but I do know that self reliance and community oriented habits will ultimately save the spirit of this country. I know the land can survive everything we throw at it, and if not, it will come back. This world is a jewel, and one that needs to be protected from those who see no beauty outside their banks.
Getting back to my original point from my earlier comments, the immediate issue on everyone on the West Coast's mind is the fire. We should do everything we can to prevent another one. Not right now, not tomorrow, but start working towards it soon, Even if it means breaking out a needle and thread instead of a new shirt, making pasta with eggs your neighbor's chickens layed, or just simply picking some of your own berries, small actions lead to larger ones.
Are there things I haven't considered? Almost certainly. Should I have started these comments? Probably not. Should I have worded my comments better? Absolutely. My point is that we aren't powerless. We can change the world through simple means, and we don't have to change all at once.
5355509
Since you're still dodging this, lemme repeat myself: Do YOU grown your own food, or buy it all from local farms? Do YOU butcher all your own meat? "Near the start?" You don't, do you?
You know what's worse than somebody preaching their supposedly superior way of life at you? Somebody who's preaching a supposedly superior way of life they're not even living.
So yes, you shouldn't have started these comments.
Walk your fucking walk first, don't just talk the talk.