This week’s noteworthy posts and a letter to The Guardian.

Following on from the theme of refugia for wildlife, The River Crow has written a great post on making your lawn wildlife-friendly. The title, Leave the Lawn Alone! is making a certain Pink Floyd song go through my head, though. As The River Crow says, why have a lawn when you could have a meadow?

I think that from a visual perspective, a meadow of mixed grasses, flowers and clover swaying gently in the breeze, festooned with golden dandelions, white and yellow daisies, as well as other unexpected joys (foxglove, marshmallow, forget-me-nots and violets all sprouted spontaneously in mine last year) is far richer and more exciting than the bland monoculture of buzz-cut bowling greens.

There has been a fair amount of discussion on what to do about the climate emergency in the Pagan blogosphere of late.

Beith at Wandering the Woods asked her deities how service to the gods fits in with the current state of climate emergency, and got some interesting answers.

What then, does it mean to be in service to the gods rather than to a group of people?

I count myself among those who have received such a call. I have made my oaths directly to them, in a private ceremony with no other humans present. I have promised to dedicate my life to further their goals. Now, that sounds all nice and deep and profound if you state it like that, but what does it mean? And so I thought that maybe it might be a good idea to let my gods have a say on this themselves.

One thing that has heartened me immensely is the climate strike by the kids. I think it’s awesome and I really hope it has an effect.

A group of the leaders of the new protest movement have written to The Guardian staring their goals.

Young people make up more than half of the global population. Our generation grew up with the climate crisis and we will have to deal with it for the rest of our lives. Despite that fact, most of us are not included in the local and global decision-making process. We are the voiceless future of humanity.

We will no longer accept this injustice. We demand justice for all past, current and future victims of the climate crisis, and so we are rising up. Thousands of us have taken to the streets in the past weeks all around the world. Now we will make our voices heard. On 15 March, we will protest on every continent.

We need for everyone to wake up and take climate change and mass extinction seriously. The young people who are striking are doing an excellent job of proving a wake-up call.

UPDATE

Just seen this amazing post from Guilaine Kinouani on internalized oppression.

When the default position is that we cannot write or speak intelligibly, we forever are covertly evaluated to prove that we can and, the policing of our words becomes kindness. It is for own on good. I know. I have the scars. Language policing is so often a relational way to reproduce power.

She also talks about being tone-policed by the people who are supposed to be “on your side”. I can relate to that. Having written about making Wicca more inclusive for LGBTQIA people, it hurts more when LGBTQIA people reject my work. I think it’s because having shaped and folded themselves to fit an oppressive mould, they are afraid to unfold themselves and stretch. I know my saying that is going to offend a lot of people (if they’re even reading this) but think about it and see if it applies to you.