Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

 Just finished: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. What more can I say about this? It's stunning. When I walk through my garden, or I visit the little creek by my house, I have this heightened awareness of my connection with plant life around me. When I clipped some of the lilacs to bring inside, I felt monumentally grateful to the plant, and I thanked it. This is poetry and science and revelation all wrapped up in one book and it blew my little mind.

Currently reading: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. Look, we're all tired and stressed and overwhelmed and the best thing for that is dunking on libertarians. This is the true story of the libertarians who moved to Grafton, New Hampshire, in the hopes of founding their own community far from the reaches of the gub'mint what was oppressing their civil liberties with repressive measures like...paying taxes. The local bears (animals, not dudes) had other ideas. And because libertarians don't have the sense God gave a toddler, some of them decide to feed the bears and most decide not to call, like, animal control or whatever you do when there are bears (I don't know—I live in a city—but I know not to feed bears). It is hella funny.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I read the article about Libertariantown's infestation of bears. grand hilarity for all who have escaped libertarians!

[sabotabby]

I mean, Team Bear. Except for the bear that ate the kittens because that's sad.

[minoanmiss]

If only there were some steps that the local humans could have banded together to take to encourage the bears not to come into a place where there are kittens...

[lapinlunaire]

Except why would you even have kittens where a bear might get to them? I feel bad for the kittens but it's also not the bear's fault.

I could be wrong but I got the sense that the cats were allowed to be outside unsupervised pre-bear? Not the kittens, the other cats.

[sabotabby]

In fairness the owner learned a valuable lesson about not letting cats outside.

[lapinlunaire]

I read the bear book!

I feel really bad for the bears. Also, I know donut lady should have known better (feeding wild animals puts them at risk of humans who aren't as well-intentioned) but I also felt kind of bad for her. And for the non-libertarians who just wanted to use a library like normal people.

I loved the part where some people were living in a shoddy camp and trying very hard to keep the bears out of their lolbertarian utopia. I kept rooting for the bears stealing their food aka redistributing resources.

[sabotabby]

I felt bad for them too. Especially the poaching chapter, which I just finished. Doughnut Lady seemed well-intentioned but stupid af.

[naomikritzer]

I've been meaning to track down the libertarians vs. bears book but I forget its title every time I'm in a bookstore. It sounds AMAZING.

[sabotabby]

It's PRETTY GREAT.

[altamira16]

I don't know what happens in the libertarians and bears book, but I live in a place with bears. You have regular trash pickup if you do not want bears. You also have bear proof trash cans in the areas where there might be bears. A number of trash cans in the park are bear proof. The handles on those things can be hot in the summer.

Both of these sound like good books.

[sabotabby]

See the thing with regular trash pickup is that while maybe you don't need a state such that the modern state exists under capitalism, but you do need some kind of organized collective of people to do that shit when individual humans are fallible. But libertarians don't want to live in a society.

I like bears in the abstract but I do not want to live close to bears.

[kartoffeltorte]

LOL!! I love that! :D I would never feed a bear... even if they did venture into Newmarket like one did recently. LOL!! BTW I love that kitten in your icon ... that icon *points* is of my late fatty of a kitty Malibu. She was a feisty little b*tch. :)

[sabotabby]

Oh yeah, Newmarket gets hella bears!

Malibu was adorable. This kitten is not my kitten but she looks like my baby probably looked when she was wee.

[kartoffeltorte]

Yupp. Bear county we should be called. LOL!! Aww.. cutie!