What does winning mean to you in our lifetime?

We all know what losing looks like. We've all seen the gates to the camps. Most of us have read 1984. Utopia is vague. I'm 33 years old. I want to know what winning means to my comrades in the 40 years to come.

@anarchiv finding healthy habits and enacting and keeping them up on the personal scale, fighting for overcoming poverty and unjust distribution of the cost and load in the ongoing polycrisis on the societal scale?

@anarchiv winning in my lifetime is not losing and have some people carry the flame into the future.

cc @_rya_

@anarchiv My grandchildren genuinely thinking I'm exaggerating about how bad the world used to be.

@anarchiv Ultimate win?

People could choose if they wanna work or not and still eat.

@miiamustang So fucking on board with this one

@werdahias "Activism" can go take a long hike off a short pier imho. I'm here for building the new world in the cold dead shell of the old

@anarchiv
figuring out a course against ecological, social, and economical collapse

i tend to think about it in terms of food (something like agroforrestry, but more just eating forrest products), navigating collaboration in a world where i kind of hate what most people have going on (failing hard), increasing utilisation of resources (like libraries/usufructian property relations, community care), killing production overgrowth but keeping "innovation" going

@anarchiv
reforestation, rewilding in general, but also not losing sight of the fact that we are going into a huge disruption event, so "literal" preservation will most likely fail, i do think we should still attempt it though, and try to keep the "structure" of the ecosystems going, also something i might call eco migration acceleration, important ecosystems like forrests can migrate, but at a speed that probably won't cut it, so it might make sense to attempt helping that along — tricky topic

@anarchiv
basically trying our best to keep whatever can be kept of our ecospheres carrying capacity for us and everything we directly depend on, but since everything is so deeply interconnected, basically the whole ecosphere

all of this is so theoretical, so gargantuan, and honestly apart from theorising from a pretty much laypersons perspective i don't do much, and then ofc the powers that be aggressively oppose all of it

but i also feel that there is no other way at all

@anarchiv
idk, all of this is vague and hopeful and society scale and honestly kind of just wishful thinking, its just, idk, i for myself tend to consider me locked in an i have already lost state and am just waiting out to end it, with the occasional little jerk of "i should probably try, but why, and how, and for how much longer still" sprinkled in

i don't see myself achieving much, if i somehow do, i hope it helps cool people to win

@anarchiv @miiamustang

+1
care for a discussion on the specifics?

@roy_calum @miiamustang
Yeah def. Wanna do a podcast episode?

@therealkuu There's so much of what you're saying here that deeply resonates with me, I don't think we can avoid collapse, I believe we have to build a new civilisation as independent from the one that's about to collapse as we can, but I'm generally with you.

@anarchiv
one of the core issues i see is the decision on usage of land, in germany pre settlement one of the most common apex ecosystems (apex in the sense of ecological succession) was beech forrests in basically everything that wasn't wetlands or mountains, and they are incredibly productive

by now we have turned a lot of that area into annuals based monocultures, or into permanent cultures of pioneer species (pines birches poplar etc) for wood production or just due to repeated disruption

@therealkuu Yup yup yup. Rewilding is key to everything we're trying to do. Also the permaculture principle of "use edges and value the marginal"

@anarchiv
in terms of ecology, food production, top soil production, i think there is no other way than to undo this shift and go back to these more productive and stabilising ecosystems, pine plantations make acidic top soil that only experts really like (for example blueberries) and other than that they *love* burning down aggressively, which obv. we have a strong worsening trend with, bogs and wetlands, even prairies are very good carbon sinks but we destroyed them everywhere and they burn

@therealkuu It's kind of funny that you're saying this to someone who lives in a bioregion where pine trees and blueberries are cornerstone species

@anarchiv
in brandenburg we struggle each summer with burning pine plantations and dessicated bogs that are prone to runaways or very hard to extinguish respectively

and all of that is traced back to industrial choices, pines as a pioneer species capable of highspeed wood production, drained bogs as peat fuel sources or land for settlement (nudge nudge berlin)

all of these are choices that can not be kept this way and have to be turned back, but against economic interests which makes it hard

@anarchiv
pines and stuff have ecosystems where they are apex, that is true, in scandinavia, but also in places in south america, where they get replaced with (drumroll) even more burn lusty and even more ecologically out of place eucalyptus or fir for paper pulp and lumber production, or,, soy to feed livestock which is an even huger fuck

@therealkuu You know I'm from the beech forest part of Europe too, and there is this place right outside Kristiansand where they've planted a whole bunch of beech trees 200 years ago, and it's so weird for me every time I go there and suddenly feel like I'm back home

@anarchiv
i never grew up around beech forrests, i grew up in the pine plantations, im always struck with awe in old growth pine and chestnut forrests (real chestnut, which is basically just bigger beeches btw) they are magical places, one of the better ones (the hainich) is unfortunately deep in nazi territory and i haven't been there ever again haha

there is some north from me i might visit if im ever in brighter spirits, also for ancient oaks, or small pockets of beech around berlin

@anarchiv @miiamustang

sure, what do you have in mind?

@roy_calum @miiamustang
I'm gonna launch my podcast very soon, it's called Compost in Training and it's about all the things that feed us, both literally and metaphorically. Would be nice having you on some time

@anarchiv

that sounds great!
count me in and let me know when you get it going

@roy_calum hell yeah :)