A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE is full of stories about communities uniting to preserve brainpower. And ends with What you can do, now.

As she writes, denizens - meaning a person that lives or is found in a particular place - the mind is a wonderful thing to save ❤️🧐

Read it. #loveisclimateaction

From injuries caused by lead poisoning to the devastating effects of atmospheric pollution, infectious disease & industrial waste, Americans of color are disproportionately harmed by environmental hazards. These deadly environments rob communities of color & America as a whole of intellectual power.

So good talking about radical imagination and the role it can play in redressing the injustices of the climate crisis. As well as what we all hope readers will take from our stories!

Thanks Selina & Joycelyn for sharing, and to the BBBF for bringing us together to talk climate justice 💪🏾📖❤️

They both dedicate chapters to Imagination. I love Selina’s “Part of the work of the writer is reimagining the futures we're heading towards, using words to help heal past wrongs and set us on a clearer path towards them. But creativity can't be rationed to only a few of us, it belongs to everyone."

Visited with @hope_reese, author of THE WOMEN ARE NOT FINE - a perfectly dark, truecrime tale of Hungarian women in a poisonous sisterhood ☠️

Whatever your romance vibe, London friends get your fix at Saucy Books 🥰 Great shop. Great reading recommendations.

Can’t wait to go again!

Drought also means tress will get drier and more stressed.

With an increasingly warm climate, the Ips engravers are going to be very, very busy.

Thank you Mary for sharing your story!

#loveisclimateaction

But trees stressed and weakened by drought can't keep up with the invasion and fight off the pests. By 2022, Mary’s Colorado cabin sat in land categorized in extreme drought, which means large fires can develop, reservoirs are extremely low, and water temperatures are increasing.

Like the other species of bark beetles that are killing 100,000s of acres of forest in Colorado, the Ips beetle has always been around. It's part of the forest ecosystem and healthy trees can fight off its worst effects, like humans dealing with common colds.

Why are the pine trees are dying?🌲😭

As Mary writes: The culprit is a tiny pine-bark beetle no bigger than a grain of rice: the Ips beetle. Its common name is deceptively charming: engraver beetle, for the elegant, curving galleries it munches in tree bark.

Six factors form the happiness: social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, absence of corruption in government, healthy life expectancy, and per capita income.

Most factors can be maintained, or even improved while reducing fossil fuel use.

#loveisclimateaction

Life was not perfect then, but the basics of a healthy life were already in place at a much lower level of fossil fuel use.

If we look to comprehensive measures of happiness, we find that our increasing consumption of fuel over the last decade has not made us happier - quite the opposite.

The good news is that energy conservation will not necessarily reduce our quality of life: life expectancy in Switzerland back in 1965 was similar to that of today’s America and much higher than the current global average. Workdays were shorter, as were commuting distances.

I’ve seen pictures of Switzerland then, and you know what? It doesn’t look so bad. People in train stations wearing thick wool coats or sitting at small tables drinking from tiny coffee cups.

The extreme imbalance in energy consumption inspires a simple algebra: if all the fuel and electricity were redistributed equally to each of Earth’s 7+ billion people, each person’s energy use could equal the average consumed by people living in Switzerland during the 1960s.

Americans are the world’s heaviest energy users, consuming 15% of the world’s energy production and 20% of the world’s electricity, despite making up only 4% of the world’s population.

There's no magical technology coming to save us from ourselves. Curbing consumption will be the ultimate trial of the 21st century. Using less and sharing more is the biggest challenge our generation will ever face. It's also the only surefire way that we can start to get ourselves out of this mess.