I couldn’t find anything about Mendes by Galeano, but I did find this song by Sepultura about him: https://youtu.be/10OWU-wxuGc?si=vO1LRuJ-dbOR664H

Edit: Galeano wrote an article about Mendes: https://vermelho.org.br/2019/02/13/galeano-explica-chico-mendes-militancia-ecologica-com-luta-social/

I’m trying to shift away from transactional approaches. I don’t want to replicate markets and debt in my community, and I worry that asking for a share of the harvest as a “price” for lending out tools could perpetuate that instead of breaking away from it.

Thank you.

Ooh, this is a good one!

I imagine something really corny and on the nose. Something that shows stereotypes about anarchists and absurdly bad, unrealistic anarchist praxis “working”.

Like, Biden sitting in the oval office, moving a pen through the air over a blank piece of paper (“signing” it), and he says in a posh English accent, “I hereby sign this bill to make all food and water illegal.”. A big mob of rowdy anarchists with spiky mohawks, piercings, and grommeted leather jackets with circle-A’s spray painted in red on the back shows up out of nowhere and starts clamoring outside the White House. One of them says, “We need food!” Biden shouts “No!” out the window. They shout back, “Then we’ll eat the rich!” Biden says, “Oh, no, but I’m rich! Let them in!” They all come in and give Biden a kindergarten-style lesson on the work of Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin. That lasts two hours of the play. Then, at the end, Biden says, “Wow, you’re right! I guess I’m not going to make food and water illegal after all.” and walks out the door.

I admit I felt kinda guilty just writing that.

The lack of attention this issue gets outside of astronomy communities is symptomatic of colonial capitalist state society’s othering and exploitation of the natural world. For the vast majority of human history, everyone lived by the stars, to navigate and to plan agricultural, ceremonial, hunting, foraging, and migration cycles. Many indigenous people around the world still do. But if you stop thinking of the stars as living guides who impart their wisdom and start thinking of them as future platinum mines and colonies, you don’t pay as much attention to them and you don’t notice their disappearance until it’s too late. Most settlers see more stars on TV programs about pop sci than actually looking up at them. We are a part of the universe, after all, not some outside observer unaffected by it. We should at least care about that.