Deadline - Samhain 2026

I found this prompt interesting:

Could Pagans, Heathens, animists, and/or polytheists claim a religious exemption if we refuse to use AI in the workplace?

Even before history was recorded in Canada, First Nations, Métis and Inuit people practiced cultural burning, regular, carefully timed, low-intensity fires used to restore ecosystems, open travel routes, enhance food sources and reduce the fuel loads that now feed catastrophic wildfires.

Across B.C.’s Interior and Rocky Mountains, there were intentional fires “every five to 15 years” — “which meant that forests were much more wide open and they actually contained different species”.

“They are mostly sun tolerant species because you'd have a forest where the sun is actually reaching the ground beneath the canopy,” Grenz added.

However, settlers that first came to Canada brought with them colonial forestry practices that fundamentally altered those landscapes by suppressing cultural fire and transforming forests into dense, tree-dominated stands.

Buckthorn Removal Singles Club is a club focused on environmental and community restoration. The group is open to adults of all ages, genders, and sexualities.

Much as the capitalist landscape has led to natural spaces which are polluted, non-diverse, eroding, and choked by invasive species; capitalist management of our social environment has resulted in an online dating scene which is toxic, transactional, and unrooted in community. With online dating accounting for over 50% of new relationships (2025) and all other methods of meeting people in quick decline, it can begin to feel taboo to get friends to set you up on a date or ask out a stranger in public. The aim of this group is to bring people together in community over shared values and provide an alternative to the monoculture of online dating, where friendships and relationships can grow rooted in the nourishing soil of community care.

Retro, a new novel about time travel, is a tonic for readers who struggle with feeling hopeful about the future.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/40166386

What if hunger isn't a failure of the economy, but one of the ways the economy works? From work requirements and SNAP to food banks and political battles over who deserves to eat, we ask whether hunger is simply a social problem or an economic tool. We’ll explore this with co-host Pascal Robert and guests Tanya Denise Fields and Bertrand Cooper.

What if hunger isn't a failure of the economy, but one of the ways the economy works? From work requirements and SNAP to food banks and political battles over who deserves to eat, we ask whether hunger is simply a social problem or an economic tool. We’ll explore this with co-host Pascal Robert and guests Tanya Denise Fields and Bertrand Cooper.

About the author:

Justine Norton-Kertson (they) is an author, screenwriter, game maker, editor, publisher, producer, musician, and community organizer. They’re founder and Editor-in-Chief of Android Press and Solarpunk Magazine. Their books include Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology, Fighting for the Future TRPG, and the forthcoming Utopian Witch: Solarpunk Magick to Fight Climate Change and Save the World (Microcosm Publishing, July 2024). They live in rural Oregon with their partner, cats, puppies, bunnies, and goats.

Could the precise architectural form of your residence influence how much you participate in politics? A new study by MIT scholars finds this to be exactly the case—at least in Accra, Ghana, where many people live in semi-communal structures known as "compound houses," often sharing kitchens, bathrooms and common living-room spaces, while having private bedrooms.

The detailed study of homes in Ghana's capital finds that residents of compound houses are more likely to vote, attend rallies and take part in political campaigns, compared with people with more private forms of housing.

"The overarching pattern we find is that if you compare people who live in compound houses to residents of other housing types, like single-family homes or self-contained apartments, there is a pretty big difference in political actions," says Noah Nathan, an MIT political scientist and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study's results. "People seem to vote more, and there are more other types of political behavior, like going to rallies, participating in campaigns and contacting politicians."

While those differences could stem from factors other than housing, the highly granular study suggests the architecture itself really matters. The researchers examined the specific floor plans of compound houses and found variations in people's political information and social connections—key factors that existing studies show predict political activity—that map to differences in where people live within compound houses.

"We show that those kinds of social relationships and exchanges of political information seem to vary systematically with people's individual locations within the layouts of the buildings they live in," says Nathan, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Political Science. "That's consistent with architectural design leading you to have different levels of political participation."

The open-access paper, "Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Politics Is Embedded in Residential Design," is published in the American Political Science Review. Nathan's co-author is Paige Bollen, Ph.D. '23, an assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University.

Many years ago, I wrote an article entitled Is Veganism Ableist? A Disabled Vegan Perspective. And in regard to the ideas of veganism, the answer remains no.

However, I do think in the wanting and sometimes desperation to do all we can to save the animals (and to a certain degree, the planet as animal agriculture is one of the larger contributors to climate change), a lot of us took action to dispel the protein myth, and while in ways it was good, some of our actions had consequences that also caused harm.

It is a reminder that when we take action to fight misinformation, we must make sure that we are also not punching down in the process (whether intentionally or not.) This is something that goes far beyond veganism.

In the end, us vegans from marginalized communities must represent with as much realness as possible, not only so people know that vegans vary, but so other marginalized people who are perhaps ‘vegan-curious’, will know that they too are welcomed in the movement. After all, the animals need as many allies as they can get.

Native plants can transform your yard into a backyard habitat -- and Al Roker's reaction on the TODAY Show says it all. "Wow. Wow. 9,000."

That's how many caterpillars a mama chickadee needs to raise one brood. Most American yards have zero. Not because you did anything wrong -- the ornamental plants most of us grow (hostas, pachysandra, imported grasses) came from Asia and Europe. Native caterpillars can't eat them. The chickadee flies past.

Wildr CEO Jo Hall and Chief Naturalist Murray Fisher joined Al for National Garden Week to show how native plants for birds and wildlife actually work -- live on set, with live caterpillars. Big bluestem hosts 22 caterpillar species. Switchgrass hosts 15. One native oak supports 570. That's the difference between a yard a chickadee ignores and one she nests in.

They also brought a live Cecropia moth caterpillar on set -- the kind that becomes the largest flying insect in North America. All it needs is a cherry tree. Most people cut them down.

Founded in Italy during the late 1980s, the organization Slow Food believes that people should eat food that is “good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the planet.” This sentiment now drives a global movement that is inspired by Slow Food and closely aligned with the concept of sustainability.