les deserts de l'amour,

January 23, 2013

Chernobyl’s Wildlife Survivors

When Mary Mycio tells people she visited the radioactive fallout zone around Chernobyl to study the region’s animals, the questions are always the same. Do the animals have two heads? Do they glow?

Actually, according to Mycio and photographer and field biologist Sergey Gaschak, the animals are thriving. The 1986 explosion, the worst nuclear accident in history, forced 300,000 people to abandon the highly contaminated area around the wreckage of the power plant. Communal farms turned to wetlands and forests, and the animals came back. The area is now the largest, if unintentional, wildlife sanctuary in Europe.

Gaschak has been photographing animals near Chernobyl since 1995. He uses camera traps with motion detectors to capture some of the animals, but he sees and photographs plenty of them in person: lynx, otters, eagle owls, Przewalski’s horses, several species of bats, and footprints of brown bears.

Read Mary Mycio’s story about Chernobyl’s wildlife here.

Actualize Industrial Collapse !

(via liberationorstarvation)

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(Notes: 5,402)

January 22, 2013

"I’ve got my theories. My theory is that a vigorous, free, outdoors life is good for people. It fills them with cheer and high spirits, leading to health and a long life. Despite the claims of medical technicians such as Lewis Thomas, official spokesman for the cancer industry, it is not more and newer drugs we need, not better living through chemotherapy, but rather clean air. Clean water. Good fresh real food. And plenty of self-directed physical activity."

— Edward Abbey on why the boatmen on his alaska river trip were such cheery, lively folks (excerpt from Down the River)

(Source: liberationorstarvation)

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(Notes: 87)

January 22, 2013

"King you are done. The American public, the church organizations that have been helping — Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

Letter sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King in 1964, trying to persuade him to commit suicide.

via notsoterriblymisanthropic

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(Notes: 3)

January 21, 2013

“I am afraid that this setting bird will realize that I am a man, a being that has lost the confidence of birds.”

-Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (quote via batarde)

Image: Roni Horn

via mythologyofblue

(via 50watts)

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(Notes: 209)

January 20, 2013

(Source: myarmisnotalilactree)

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(Notes: 38)

January 20, 2013

snubbs:

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages” -Angela Y. Davis

(Source: ankh-kush, via theoceanwithin)

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(Notes: 6,188)

January 18, 2013

The last poem in Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s notebook, via the Writers No One Reads Tumblr. The niece of Paul Celan, Meerbaum-Eisinger died at the age of eighteen of typhus in the Mikhailovska labor camp. Fifty-seven poems survived in a notebook titled Blütenlese (Harvest of Blossoms).

Tragedy:
Dec. 23, 1941
This is the hardest: to give yourself
and know that you are unwanted,
to give yourself fully and to think
that you vanish like smoke into the void.

Translation by Pearl Fichman.

(Source: theparisreview)

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(Notes: 535)

January 14, 2013