Gassing Up the Homies

Building community is a revolutionary act

I was reading Mark Meadows “How to Do a Coup” PowerPoint this morning and getting pretty despondent about the ongoing collapse of democracy in the U.S., but then today’s Lorem Ipsum arrived, and reminded me that after we made our Tabs mixtape last week Margot grabbed the idea and did one too, and it’s also great. Then New Yorker content influencer Delia Cai texted me a link to a this story about Blackbird Spyplane, which of course Delia herself covered back in July. And I realized, not for the first time, that there is real community in newslettering right now, in the same way that there was community in blogging circa 2000. And the only thing that’s going to sustain us all through the darkness of authoritarianism, as Jonah & Erin and Suzanne Simard teach, is to LINK & BUILD underground like the wood-wide web:

“The wood-wide web” refers to Suzanne’s landmark discovery that plants across different species actually “speak” to each other, sharing nutrients, sending distress signals, etc., via subterranean fungal pathways known as mycorrhizae… For example an alder might slurp up more water than a nearby pine, but it generously blesses the pine with nitrogen… or a birch might soak up more sunshine than a fir sapling, but will make up for this by sending boo koo carbon over to the fir… (she proved this by researching on land that once belonged to indigenous people who, she acknowledges, intimately understood nature’s interconnections.)

In other words, nature loves to “LINK AND BUILD” on an inspiring level !!

So today I’m shamelessly gassing up the homies in ‘slettering, sending them boo koo carbon via the mycorrhizae, and I hope you’ll do the same for your own networks in the Open Thread.