Here's how you can help Palestine!!

Educate yourself and spread awareness with the help of these sites:

• Al Jazeera
  - This is a news site that gives constant updates and information on Palestine.
• Decolonize Palestine
  - This is a website that informs you about the history of Palestine, debunk myths, and gives out a lot of resources to look into.
• Visualizing Palestine
  - This site creates infographics that can help people visualize the statistics from data collected about Palestine. They are free to download and share around.
• US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
  - This website includes numerous campaigns and resources you can look into and support.
• The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
  - This site features a collection of many things from Palestine that archives documents, letters, and other items that show the lives and experiences of Palestinians.

Ways you can donate to/support families in Palestine:

• Arab.org
  - Just do your daily clicks and you get to donate for free. Please take the time to donate to all of the causes.
• Gaza Funds
  - Every time you refresh the site, it leads you to a different GoFundMe page for the people who need help.
• Care for Gaza
  - This is an organization that sends aid out to Palestine, you can find more in their Twitter/X account. They also have a PayPal.
• eSims for Gaza
  - You can send an eSim to people in Palestine to help them connect and reach out.
• Emergency Relief for Gaza
  - This is a campaign that gives food, medical supplies, and other humanitarian aid to families from donations.
• Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)
  - They also give medical aid to the people in Palestine and you can also support by donating to them as well.
• Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF)
  - Donate here to give funds and support to the children in Palestine as they specialize in pediatric care.

Google Docs/Spreadsheets:

Make sure to look at the other tabs within the spreadsheets as they lead to more options/resources!

• Help Gaza
  - This is a spreadsheet with a list of fundraisers for different families/causes that need support! Look through and donate when you can!
• Operation Olive Branch
  - This is a spreadsheet with many links and ways to help in the project! There are campaigns, fundraisers, volunteer work for other parts of the causes and such! Make sure to check it out!
• ★RESOURCE LINKS AND INFO★
  - A google document made from Twitter/X user: para_docx. This includes links, resources, and information for the other ongoing genocides as well.

Some of these documents intersect and have similar resources and links, but I'm adding them just to make sure as they may also have some that aren't listed in this post either.

Free Palestine.

more fucking petitions because this clown car country cannot stop with the bigotry for 30 seconds

uk people it takes 5 seconds and you checking your email to verify

everyone else: rebloge please

Some aliens.

Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

Duckphone

🐱 Domestic Shorthair

📸 Greg Murray

🎨 Blue with White

Otra víctima del Chupacabras

that "like what's up pronoun" tweet has ruined me it is constantly in the back of my brain

you are the one who took my place

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