Hey everyone! As part of a personal project I’m trying to brainstorm factors that would make communities/locations more resistant to climate change and the damage that it can cause to people’s lives. If anyone has any thoughts I’d love to hear them!
Just to clarify because there were a couple questions about what I meant I’m thinking along the lines of things that make cities safer from the effects of climate change
*puts on mortarboard*
- Create green spaces, especially ones with trees, to mitigate both heat and flooding, and reduce air pollution as well. They could be parks of varying size, swales, nature strips, wall gardens, rooftop gardens, etc. Increasing tree cover is probably the most beneficial though.
- Design urban spaces so that excess water is directed into green spaces, to mitigate flooding and/or make the most of rainwater. Swales, “sunken” gardens, and large green spaces where rivers are likely to overflow are all good ideas.
- Urban farming and urban gardening to mitigate disruption of food supply, as well as provide green spaces. Dig for victory!
- Diversify food sources as much as possible.
- Paint rooftops white to mitigate heat. I have also heard of painting road surfaces white.
- Where there must be a hard surface (roads, footpaths, etc.) use a porous surfacing material that allows water to seep through. That could be pavers with small holes or a new type of porous “concrete” (I’ve forgotten what it’s called).
- If you can grow mangroves, plant mangroves to mitigate storm surges, as well as improve biodiversity.
- Build large offshore wind farms to reduce storm intensity, as well as provide electricity. Yes, really.
- Build a modular energy supply to mitigate damage from natural disasters. Avoid large areas being reliant on one energy source or distribution network. Ensure backups for important resources like hospitals, communication, and transportation.
- Educate and inform citizens.
- Create and strengthen community networks. Community projects, community hubs, and buy nothing/food sharing groups are good places to start.
- Anticipate what emergencies are likely to occur and what peoples’ needs will be in that situation. Allocate funding, stockpile resources, and make plans accordingly.
- Install early warning systems if necessary, and make sure everyone understands them.
- Relocate people or important resources that are unavoidably in harm’s way.
- Enforce vaccinations. The last thing anyone wants to deal with in tough times (never mind an emergency) is a pandemic.
- Always account for supply lines!
These are all super great! Thank you!
These are awesome! Here’s a few more ideas:
- In flood-prone regions, have government buyouts of flooded houses and turn those areas into green spaces
- Change zoning laws where necessary to allow denser population (looking at California) while maintaining green spaces and flood planes
- Ensure that city planning takes into account making evacuation routes
- In drought-prone regions, subsidize homeowners collecting rainwater
- In fire-prone regions, restrict building on the forest margins where fires spread; bury power lines where possible
Oops this is my exact field actually… My city is a wretched hive of developers and property management companies at the moment, and I have lots of opinions about how to make it not one of that
- BUSES BUSES BUSES are the first step in getting us from the existing car-dependent urban sprawl to the user friendly low/no emission public transit network we deserve. They’re many times more efficient than cars (passenger capacity vs emissions) and much faster to implement than any kind of rail or streetcar. I would say test a route map on buses and later convert the most used routes to electric streetcar.
- Speaking of which, no-fare transit now. Public money already pays for it and most transit systems only get a small percentage of their funding from fares.
- Strong communities where people know each other. Makes the streets safer, gives people a network to help each other out when they’re in need, and
- Tool libraries, repair cafés and co-ops for people to trade skills and avoid just throwing out things that still have life in them. Doing stuff through the public library is a wonderful way to start.
- I’ll say it again, localize production! Mostly food, but everything else as much as possible.
- Housing First - and seize homes that are kept empty for long periods by real estate companies and rental managers who just don’t want to fill them below the “luxury” price point.
- Ban “for customers only” restrooms. Just give people a safe place to go, or to get water, take their meds, or whatever else. This and housing first are immediate necessary measures against the housing crisis in most big cities. Related - gyms and pools should be publicly funded and open to everyone.
- Neighborhood-scale electric grids. Again, decentralized production is more resistant to disaster, but not every single house is suitable for rooftop solar, and it doesn’t have to be. A lot of people install a solar rig and end up selling excess power back to the grid.
- A broad switch to sodium batteries over lithium- a “green revolution” that’s built on resource extraction and exploiting colonized countries ain’t shit.
- (Kill capitalist imperialism, but we knew that already.)
- Lower rise apartment developments, capped at like 4 floors. More than that actually starts to have an adverse effect on mental health as well as aforementioned community building.
- Multi use zoning. Dismantle the infinite suburb where you have to drive 20 minutes for gas and groceries. Bring back the corner stores.
- About those bioswales and greenspaces: even where city policies require developers to make space for them, most of the time they throw down some crabgrass sod and call it a day. Require them to design with hardy native and naturalized plants that can thrive
- Single stream recycling, as available as trash is now. And actually DO the recycling, not just ship it overseas. There’s already a plastic recycling system that doesn’t even require you to sort it by type and dissolves instead of melting it (which releases a lot of toxic particulates). There are species of bacteria, fungi and even insects that can break down plastics too. Anything that’s not being recirculated and used should be broken down.
- Also sexy: municipal composting, free compost and mulch, I’ve seen this in such disparate places as San Francisco and my suburban Georgia county. County extension services everywhere offer a ton of resources that are woefully underused.
More and better plant knowledge
Mortality rates for urban trees are super high. This could be fixed with simple education such as: don’t plant trees too close to buildings, don’t pile up mulch around the base of the tree, pick NATIVE species, pick only hardy pioneer species for stressful areas like parking lots, and avoid damaging the trees with weed whackers and lawn mowers. Give trees lots of space of dirt around them so water can soak in and reach their roots.
For smaller green areas, do native flowers and grasses, a good mix of them. And know their qualities and ways so they can be somewhere they are happy
For example relevant to Eastern USA- Purple Coneflower loves harsh, hot environments with poor soil, so put it on the edge of a pavement. There are also tons of flowers that grow specifically in rocks and gravel, so they would love that area bordering the concrete walkway that kills the lawn grass.
Flat-out ban pesticide use in lawns. That stuff hurts our health and our water supply and our ecosystems.
Also WIGGLE THE STREAMS. Straightening out the wiggly streams into straight drainage ditches means they hold less water. Imagine a pipe that is bent and wiggled stretched across an area a certain distance wide. Now imagine a perfectly straight pipe stretching across the same distance. NOW imagine stretching out the wiggled pipe so it’s straight. It’s much longer than the straight pipe now, so you can see how it holds more water.
Yeah so a book (I think it was titled Planting in a Post-Wild World but i forget the authors because it’s gone back the library) told me that purple coneflowers actively prefer hard, depleted soil and that lots of organic matter and fertilization will shorten their lifespan.
I thought, wow, that explains it! I rescued a purple coneflower last year and planted it right next to the front sidewalk in a spot that has awful soil and gets baked in the afternoon sun, and this summer it’s been thriving! It’s grown almost as tall as my waist and I’ve never seen a purple coneflower get that tall. It had like 20 blooms on it at once and got so top heavy it started to lean into the sidewalk.
So yeah. They love to be baked in the sun in hard, lifeless dirt right next to concrete, apparently.
Blackberries
by Margaret Atwood
In the early morning an old woman
is picking blackberries in the shade.
It will be too hot later
but right now there’s dew.
Some berries fall: those are for squirrels.
Some are unripe, reserved for bears.
Some go into the metal bowl.
Those are for you, so you may taste them
just for a moment.
That’s good times: one little sweetness
after another, then quickly gone.
Once, this old woman
I’m conjuring up for you
would have been my grandmother.
Today it’s me.
Years from now it might be you,
if you’re quite lucky.
The hands reaching in
among the leaves and spines
were once my mother’s.
I’ve passed them on.
Decades ahead, you’ll study your own
temporary hands, and you’ll remember.
Don’t cry, this is what happens.
Look! The steel bowl
is almost full. Enough for all of us.
The blackberries gleam like glass,
like the glass ornaments
we hang on trees in December
to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow.
Some berries occur in sun,
but they are smaller.
It’s as I always told you:
the best ones grow in shadow.
It’s solar and wind and tidal and geothermal and hydropower.
It’s plant-based diets and regenerative livestock farming and insect protein and lab-grown meat.
It’s electric cars and reliable public transit and decreasing how far and how often we travel.
It’s growing your own vegetables and community gardens and vertical farms and supporting local producers.
It’s rewilding the countryside and greening cities.
It’s getting people active and improving disabled access.
It’s making your own clothes and buying or swapping sustainable stuff with your neighbours.
It’s the right to repair and reducing consumption in the first place.
It’s greater land rights for the commons and indigenous peoples and creating protected areas.
It’s radical, drastic change and community consensus.
It’s labour rights and less work.
It’s science and arts.
It’s theoretical academic thought and concrete practical action.
It’s signing petitions and campaigning and protesting and civil disobedience.
It’s sailboats and zeppelins.
It’s the speculative and the possible.
It’s raising living standards and curbing consumerism.
It’s global and local.
It’s me and you.
Climate solutions look different for everyone, and we all have something to offer.
hope is a skill
hope is a weapon you are trained to wield
favourite additions
You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.
I’m taking pottery lessons right now… and my teacher said “the kiln gods are being kind to me right now.” And that made me stop and think. Is there a god of pottery? I tried to look it up but it’s hazy.
In Ancient Greece, Athena was apparently the goddess of crafts, which is a bit vague. Hephaestus was the god of sculpting, but that’s not right either.
In Ancient Egypt, I found Khnum who made the other gods and humankind on his potter’s wheel.
I found two gods of pottery in Southeast Asian cultures, Lianaotabi and Panthoibi.
But I wasn’t able to find anyone else. Pottery being such an important part of daily life all around the world, it seems like there would be more. Does anyone know of any other gods of pottery?
kiln gods are also A Thing!
they're little sculptural critters that potters make and leave on or around their kiln for good luck. a lot of them have to do with fire or are holding pottery (Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle is one I've seen multiple times) but a kiln god can be anything
I share a kiln so I don't want to take up space on or near the kiln, so I just put a kiln god through with every batch of pottery
here's a selection of mine (all holding pottery)
the head of the ceramics dept learned his wood fire techniques in Japan, including a Shinto take on the kiln gods.
wadding is a material glaze doesn't stick too, and it's used to prop up pieces in a wood fire kiln because otherwise the wood ash would weld them to the shelves.
everyone has to make a little wood fire idol out of wadding and place them on top of the kiln
and unlike a gas or electric kiln that can be programmed and then left alone aside from a few checks, a wood fire kiln needs to be babysat for the full 2-3 day fire (for our size kiln anyway).
cool thing is there's an external pit where we burn thin pieces of wood to get a good ash layer on the pieces, and you can cook in said pit while you're watching. but our prof required us to throw a little bit of whatever we cooked into the main fire as ordering
he also opened the firing by sharing some sake with the kiln before lighting it
we have so little control
the kiln can finish our work
and make them functional
or it can destroy it all
so we make offerings
and protectors
and pray
- Clay Pigeon
So @susanontherocks, as someone who nearly dedicated my life to studying the history of porcelain, I love this question!
I'd argue that ceramics are so important for humanity that they're often connected directly to creator gods more generally. Even when there aren't Kiln-Gods specifically in some mythologies/cultures, that gap is often filled less directly by having Gods-as-Potters (in place of, or in addition to Kiln Gods).
actually for an example I'm familiar with as a Jew, this is definitely a running theme in the Hebrew bible! It's one of those things that I think a lot of people haven't thought about, or don't realize when they read in translation but it's sort of everywhere and enough that I would say YHWH is - if not specifically a god of pottery, then definitely a God frequently titled as a potter!
The earliest positioning of YHWH as a creator-potter is Genesis 2:7, where YHWH forms the first human from the "dust (clay) of the earth." The verb used is וַיִּיצֶר֩ which...literally is the word for forming/molding something out of clay as a potter! And that is hammered home by the first human being 'adam (the word for ruddy red, like clay) made from ha-adamah (the soil). In psalms, the first time the word "golem" is used is as "golmi" ("my golem,") which is referring to the unfinished human before god's eyes as like, raw material (which is what golem means and why Golems are made of clay!).
Then this continues:
But now, O ETERNAL One, You are our Father;
We are the clay, and You are the Potter,
We are all the work of Your hands.
Isaiah 64:7
Plus in Jeremiah 18:6 "just like clay in the hands of the potter..." And again in Isaiah 45:9 which compares YHWH to a potter and humans to a potsherd of earth.
Job 10:9 refers to YHWH fashioning him from clay, echoed again in Job 30:19. And in Job 33:6, Job makes an argument for the basic equality of humanity, again comparing God to a ceramicist: "You and I are the same before God; I too was nipped from clay."
Isaiah 41:25 implies that the kinds of power that YHWH can grant those who invoke their name can "trample rulers like mud, like a potter treading clay."
This parallels with your example of Khnum, even with the implication that unborn humans are first formed in clay by the deity before they end up like...in the womb).
Other creator deities as potters would be like:
- Enki making humans of blood and clay. Also sumerian mythology is the mother goddess Ninhursag making humans from clay.
- Some Prometheus myths involve him making humans from water/earth (or making a statue of Athena from clay that is then given life from a stolen sunbeam)
- The mother goddess Nüwa forming humans out of the mud of the Yellow River
- Zoroastrian creator deity Ahura Mazda forms the primordial human from clay
- The Yoruba Orisha Obatala makes humans from clay and is the god of the earth.
There's a billion more - I think loads of creator gods are potter-Gods, but maybe aren't necessarily the same as Kiln-Gods although arguably a potter might have historically valued a potter-God all the same, since ceramics and pottery are often directly tied to the mythology of the most fundamental creation of humanity. These also sometimes overlap in the domain of fire or lightning gods. The Italian Renaissance artist Picolpasso does describe christian ceramicists praying specifically before lighting the fires of a kiln.
Also related: there ARE demons of pottery in Greek myth! The Daimones Keramikoi: Suntribos (the Shatterer), Smaragos (the Smasher), Asbetos (Charrer), Sabaktes (Destroyer) and Omodamos (Crudebake).
Someone wrote a dissertation on the influence of Chinese Kiln-Gods on American ceramicist rituals: Pathways of Transmission: Investigating the Influence of Chinese Kiln God Worship and Mythology on Kiln God Concepts and Rituals as Observed by American Ceramists by Dr. Martie Geiger-Ho, but I'm not familiar with them or their work, tbh.
I have read William Fairchild's writing before though, and he has an article from the 60's which argues that Japanese myths replaced clay with metal in relation to deities of fire and lightning, which could be related/interesting.
And in Chinese, a pottery/kiln God is called 窑神 (Yaoshen, literally Kiln God). I'm having trouble verifying specifics with simple online searches and it would take me a looonggg time to go through all my book-PDFs but I suspect there's a fair amount of overlap there with Chinese folk religion, and especially daoism since there's a concept of the internal furnace, and alchemical concepts often overlap with ceramics in various ways.
passionpeachy