I bought a copy of Bright Green Futures for my local library. Most accept book donations.

Communes can definitely be an important part of building and shaping community. They’re an appealing form for an intentional effort to base community around reciprocity and the commons. As long as the commune is reasonably open to the wider community and connected to other efforts (of course, with boundaries in place to preserve the basis of the commune), it can be an important place for education and mutual aid. But they lose their transformative potential if they’re closed off from the rest of the world. At that point, it’s just an exclusive club, and a breeding ground for a cult. And communes also are a common way to institutionalize settler populations, for example the Plymouth pilgrim colony and the Israeli kibbutzim.

I couldn’t find anything about Mendes by Galeano, but I did find this song by Sepultura about him: https://youtu.be/10OWU-wxuGc?si=vO1LRuJ-dbOR664H

Edit: Galeano wrote an article about Mendes: https://vermelho.org.br/2019/02/13/galeano-explica-chico-mendes-militancia-ecologica-com-luta-social/

Thank you.

The lack of attention this issue gets outside of astronomy communities is symptomatic of colonial capitalist state society’s othering and exploitation of the natural world. For the vast majority of human history, everyone lived by the stars, to navigate and to plan agricultural, ceremonial, hunting, foraging, and migration cycles. Many indigenous people around the world still do. But if you stop thinking of the stars as living guides who impart their wisdom and start thinking of them as future platinum mines and colonies, you don’t pay as much attention to them and you don’t notice their disappearance until it’s too late. Most settlers see more stars on TV programs about pop sci than actually looking up at them. We are a part of the universe, after all, not some outside observer unaffected by it. We should at least care about that.