Light cycle

Yes, more pictures from London, all the same trip. This was the winter festival thing in Hyde Park.

Did you know that solar farms are bad for bats? I am not sure why... but there are fewer bats where there are solar farms. Ah, here's an article from more than two years ago. Seems like renewable energy id often bad for bats as they also get killed by wind turbines. Nothing is free.

On which note, I am in awe of Val Plumwood. Reading an article by her on what she calls "ecological animality". She argues that what she calls "ontological veganism" is not a solution as a)we maintain a dualism about what can (plants) and can't (animals including humans) be eaten and b) it makes all predation undesirable unless we make the claim that human predation is bad because it's culture and animal predation is OK because it's nature, thus reaffirming the nature/culture or animal/human divide. Instead, Val posits that all our bodies are eatable. And we should appreciate that all we eat is also much more than food. She does add that a largely vegetarian diet is preferable in order to negate the economic viabilty of factory farms. Essentially, she is making an ecological and largely animistic case. Brilliant.

She writes, having rejected 'ontological veganism':

An over-emphasis on personal conversion and individual abstention has meant to focus on a vanguard politics of individual moral purity. Other forms of popular action based on a politics of coalition and political alliance with other social movements have consequently been under-developed and under-theorised. Recovering a liberatory direction would mean replacing the over individualised and culturally hegemonic vanguard focus on veganism as a politics of personal virtue and self-denial, with its demonstrated potential for fostering self-righteousness and holier-than-thouism, by a more carefully contextualised vegetarianism, a more diverse and politically sensitive set of strategies for collective action, and by a stronger focus on the responsibility of systems of economic rationality for the atrocities daily committed against animals, especially in the factory-farming framework.

Oh, bats - I just attended a bat talk. 89% of wounded bats brought to rescue were harmed by cats and cats kill 250,000 bats a year in the UK.

No!!! This is not a contradiction to the Val thing: the cats in these numbers are not what bats adapted to AND cats are not eaten by anyone in this country, despite various people crazily thinking foxes or red kites might threaten them.

Plus my small cat is being a pain. I have little sympathy left for felines.