Author: Slingshot robot #1

By A Pack of Cats

Our future is at stake, quickly slipping through our fingers. Those in power have been trying to lull everyone to sleep with fairytales and false claims about how greenhouse emissions are going to start declining really soon — but they keep rising. They keep telling us not to talk about climate data because “it might depress people.” …or it might stir us to action!

  We are on pace to hit 5 degrees of planetary warming by 2100 — which would cause massive species extinction, human displacement and famine if not worse. Over the last 12 months, Earth saw the greatest output of CO2 emissions ever. We already locked in 1°C of warming back in 2012. We have got to create a zero emissions society fast if we want to avoid more warming, but this is going to require massive social pressure on those who profit from the status quo to rapidly replace technologies humans have used for the last century.

  Fossil-fuel-funded media outlets often present fake solutions that tell people to focus on individual choices rather than working together to end fossil fuel use and build alternatives. Perhaps the most common “divide and conquer” fake solution is the “carbon footprint” — designed by BP Oil. We need to stop just focusing on individual choices and focus on systemic changes.

  These two changes are necessary to get to a zero emissions society:

1)  Stop burning fossil fuels (this accounts for roughly 89% of global CO2 emissions)

2)  Stop deforestation (this accounts for 10% of all greenhouse emissions)

The pathway to fixing these two things is complex but we can pinpoint social-power structures that are causing emissions to accelerate. Some are overt — like the fossil fuel extraction apparatus — while others are more subtle — like the way fossil fuel use has been woven into the way we structure our lives, or the way governments have built deforestation and fossil fuel extraction into the funding of social programs. 

We can’t just address one thing. This is the most complicated puzzle ever created. Every aspect needs to be addressed at once, and no single person or single sector has all the skills to address it alone. We all need to work in concert, all doing very different types of tasks. 

If everyone works together, it is possible to get to a zero emissions society within five years. Here is a list of things that — if all done fast enough at the same time — would get us closer to a zero emissions society. The list below draws upon conversations with climate scientists, social scientists, and engineers who have taken time to break things down to members of the Slingshot collective.

Individually, we do not control these things which is why collective action is essential. Different folks need to work on different stuff, and to respect the work of those with different fields of expertise. This is a cooperative game.

Getting to Zero Emissions

1) Rapidly build solar panels and windmills. Electricity generation accounts for 1/3 of CO2 emissions. If we were to divert 25% of steel production into building windmills over the next five years, we could meet the entire 5 TerraWatt Global Energy Budget with windmills alone. Solar panels are also a great option. Solar panels with an efficiency of 20% placed over just 0.1% of the Earth’s surface would completely meet The Energy Budget. (See: tinyurl.com/UWClimateBook)

2) It’s time for an Energy Storage Revolution. A common excuse to continue to use fossil fuels to generate electricity is that they can provide electricity when the wind is not blowing or at night. Saying goodbye to fossil fuels means rapidly expanding secondary storage methods. There are two basic kinds of energy storage:

Bulk methods. Ways to store lots of energy in bulk include gravity batteries, flywheel storage, and pumped hydro. Lots of great bulk storage methods already exist and just need to be rolled out quickly.

Micro methods. Smaller, more precise forms of energy storage are also needed. There’s definitely a nuanced conversation to be had here, especially in terms of the way smaller batteries often use rare minerals with harmful mining practices. Presently, there are efforts underway to develop Rare-Mineral-Free batteries. These efforts absolutely need more attention and public support. (See: tinyurl.com/OSUbatteries)

3) Freeze new investments in fossil fuel extraction and combustion. Global energy investment was $2.2 trillion in 2022. About $1.1 was invested in fossil fuels — infrastructure that is designed to operate for decades. Net income for oil and gas producers was $4 trillion.  While renewable investments are rising rapidly, why is any money still being invested in suicide energy?

4) End Fossil Fuel Subsidies. Fossil fuel subsidies lock fossil fuel consumption in place. In 2020, $5.9 trillion was provided by the IMF and national governments to subsidize fossil fuels. These funds should be directed towards carbon-free energy alternatives instead.

5) Reduce the distance goods and food need to travel to get to us. Rapidly localizing production of food & goods would make a big difference in reducing the emissions produced from shipping. This includes developing robust local networks of urban farms and local means of producing goods. What if fabrication labs were like public libraries? Why not 3-D print & fabricate most stuff locally? What if there was a farm on every corner?

6) Make the built environment more habitat-dense & engaging. Biophilic design brings more habitat into urban spaces. Making cities greener and more inviting increases the likelihood that people will want to walk, ride bikes, or use public transit. 

7) Build reliable public transit and EV infrastructure. Burning fossil fuels for transportation accounts for about 1/3 of CO2 emissions, so decarbonizing transport is essential. Public transit helps. Making it easier to walk and bike and drive less also helps. But some folks will still need to drive and for that Electric Vehicles (EVs) are a form of harm reduction: it’s a less harmful replacement for a deadly behavior.

7) Stop subsidizing air travel.  Air travel is a heavy emitter and there is no good technology to replace it at this time. Less than 10% of the population flies in a given year, yet governments heavily subsidize air travel. Let’s use the funds for rail and other options. 

8) End Investor Ownership of Energy Companies. Presently, most utility companies are owned by Wall Street investors who also have holdings in fossil fuels. This means they have a “conflict-of-interest” incentive to promote accelerated burning of fossil fuels. This is partly why most of our grids haven’t switched to renewables. In 2023, around 60% of the U.S. grid is still powered by fossil fuels. All energy companies need to be immediately transitioned to co-ops or public utilities. (See: tinyurl.com/fossilfuelgrid)

9) Switch to Regenerative Agriculture (RA). Unsustainable agricultural practices drive 90% of deforestation. Switching to RA would mean building resilient ways of meeting food supply needs while protecting the ecology. More info here: tinyurl.com/RAfood101. 

10) Improve Gender Equity. Data continue to show that gender-based oppression is linked to ecological harm. Even when controlling for other factors, one study found that countries with better gender equity experienced a 11.51% decrease in emissions over a roughly four-decade period. Having better gender equity throughout society improves decision-making, and has been proven to accelerate de-carbonization efforts. For more on this: tinyurl.com/GenderClimateJustice

11) Dismantle structural racism. There are countless examples of how structural racism contributes to climate change. Racist forms of gentrification increases the distances people have to drive to get to work. Sociologist Julius McGee coined the term “energy racism” to describe how racialized wealth gaps prevent marginalized groups from owning energy efficient appliances, locking them into poverty while locking in higher emissions. Info: pdx.academia.edu/JuliusMcGee

12) Improve Indigenous Sovereignty. Analysis of satellite data shows that when Indigenous people have better control over ancestral land, ecosystems are more likely to be preserved, combating climate change by protecting carbon sinks and preventing deforestation. tinyurl.com/ICCAreport2021

13) Build the Cooperative Economy. Cooperatives are a form of business or housing project owned by those who use it, rather than outside investors. Since the 1800s, the co-op movement has slowly been growing. Building resilient co-op networks have been found to be better for the environment, since they factor out Wall Street algorithms and keep decision-making in the hands of real people who live on earth, rather than letting dumb math run the show. See 2021 International Co-op Alliance report: tinyurl.com/Coops4Climate

14) Diversify eco-aesthetics and rhetoric. Right now, ecology-positive aesthetics are pretty limited, and the rhetoric of getting to zero emissions tends to only appeal to some groups. There is a need for artists, designers, and media-makers to develop a full range of visions, eco-aesthetics and ways of talking about a more ecologically grounded society that appeals to all types of folks. 

15) Switch to renewable construction and fabrication supplies. Construction & fabrication materials can be sourced locally in a variety of ways, including mushroom bricks, hemp, bamboo, and more! Switching to renewable fabrication and construction supplies would make a big difference. (In 2021, 7% of global emissions came from the cement industry.)

If we take care of everything on this list, it would get us past a 90% reduction in emissions, while laying the groundwork for the social process that would get us to zero.

By Chris, Nikki, Julie
“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, who will lead, who will define, refine, confine, design.” – Earthseed, memories of the living
In Octavia Butler’s dystopian sci-fi Parable series, almost too real to read in 2023 California, protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina and her family and neighbors survive a drought, an uncaring government, and the ever-present threat of violence through the practical skills and knowledge they have shared with one another. Their society mirrors some of the world we know today, the world we struggle through, the world whose future we control. Many recognize that information-sharing can help us adapt to these adverse circumstances. However, the Left often concerns itself with academic knowledge and theory to the exclusion of practical knowledge: the building blocks in fighting for a more just future. In society, many life skills are passed down almost solely through family ties. That flow of knowledge has withered away as corporations stand to benefit from commodifying life skills into services. Things like car maintenance have been gatekept by gender; others like homesteading/land stewardship have been gatekept by race and class. Classes on basic life skills cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Complex intersecting identities, including queer and trans identities, make the concepts of family, community belonging, and generational skill-sharing even more complicated. That’s why Nikki and Micha started Queer Survival Skillshare (IG: @queersurvivalskillshare). It’s a group that meets on Sundays in different spaces around the East Bay, to equip queer folks with essential life skills in a free/ donation-based decentralized workshop structure. From and for the queer community, workshops they’ve arranged so far include pasta-making, changing car oil, weightlifting, bike maintenance, herbal remedies, firestarting, and growing microgreens.
“The title Queer Survival Skillshare is both in reference to the workshops’ focus on survivalist, homesteading, and permaculture type skills, and also the idea that acquiring these skills might better the chances for the literal survival of the queer community through times of upheaval that we find ourselves in,” explains Nikki, one of the cofounders.
Queer Survival Skillshare joins other community event spaces like 2727 California, the East Bay Community Hub, and the Long Haul (see the Slingshot community directory for a much more complete list) and free workshop series held by mutual aid groups and the PLACE for Sustainable Living in Oakland. In Nikki’s words, skillshares can become a “queer Yellow Pages” that provide a network of mutual aid, a support system to rely on, and a space for queer joy and fun. It is a re-imagination of a found family, of breaking capitalist cycles of having to purchase goods and services to survive. It is one of many potential solutions to the question: What does it look like to provide for oneself and for one’s communities?
Its founders are excited for what lies in the future. They hope to empower attendees to lead their own workshops, and inspire folks in other areas to start similar groups. It’s an iterative process, but they define success as “people coming out and leaving one skill richer, and seeing their knowledge as something to teach and be proud of.”
Great changes to our environment and our lives are coming, or have already arrived. We are all that we have, and sharing what we have with one another might be what gets us all through.

By Rotciv

In her book No such thing as a free gift, an investigation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Linsey McGoey argues that social justice ideals are now dependent upon the good will of billionaires and their foundations who gained an immense power over global health policies, agriculture and education among others. The Bay Area has experienced a surge in the number of foundations these last years. In 2014, there were 2,900 foundations while 5 years later, more than 3,600 operated in this area. They gave more than $8 billion in grants and donations, first and foremost to education which represented more than $2 billion of this total. 

A few years ago, I started studying philanthropy and capitalism as a master’s student in sociology because I was interested in the rise of foundations in France. In a country where the welfare state was (and is still) the center of all the discussions, the private gift for public purposes – it is a common definition of philanthropy – started to appear as a solution to the disinvestment of the state in the cultural and social affairs. It is in the realm of culture that philanthropists, building on family fortunes or on an entrepreneurial success, first started to intervene. But education remained at the time in the scope of the public. 

I arrived in California four months ago. I came here to study the impact of foundations, nonprofits, and philanthropists on education and how they were building a new vision for public schools, especially with the movement of the charter schools. Even if the Bay Area has one of the greatest concentration of non-profits and foundations in the world, the urban landscape did not reflect this “burst of generosity”. One can find almost as many nonprofit organizations as homeless people: there are 28,000 nonprofit organizations and about 35,000 homeless persons. So, I started asking myself: what are the nonprofits doing? How could a ratio of about one nonprofit to one homeless person be possible? I thought of an example which might outline the reasons for this gap. 

I work with a few nonprofits in the Bay Area which deal with the question of education. A lot of them have their headquarters in Oakland, so I started investigating this city and the relation of nonprofits to the exterior world, the street, the Bart, for example. And, I must say, they have an ambiguous relationship to this outside. For the ones who organize clubs, where students do all type of activities – games, podcasts, regular classes, – and develop new skills – confidence, entrepreneurship, the culture of the risk – the idea is not to improve the quality of public schools, to strengthen the community links or to democratize the learning of new technologies. Rather, they offer an escape route for the students who can then be socially mobile while the others are stuck with the bare means of public schools. The nonprofit spaces create new barriers between the inside and the outside. Thanks to specific resources, to luck or to a mentor, a few students are coached and have a chance to compete for the best colleges and the higher wages in the Bay Area. Once they have gone through the doors and the security of these shelters – rather than actual community spaces – they are as distant from the homeless people as the businessmen in the towers of deserted downtown San Francisco. Everything is done to protect these children from the violence of the outside. But in doing so, another form of social violence is re-created. Of course, nonprofits will argue, for a good reason certainly, that they use their means and do the maximum with these financial means. But what do they use these means for? They have massively funded the development of charter schools, a tool for the privatization of school whose flagship is Aspire Public Schools – it is ironic that they’re called public schools. They fund new digital tools and devices which extend the systematic report of the student’s activity and actually increase the ‘digital divide’. They promote a vision of school as a pathway to get a job, not a place where children can blossom. 

Philanthropy and nonprofits rely on extreme wealth. It is no coincidence that the Bay Area has this concentration of start-ups, companies, and this proliferation of philanthropic gifts. I am still unsure if nonprofits are wrong in themselves or if they are only the surface of a deeper ongoing trend. But I am sure that most nonprofits’ workers are good-willed. It is not the question. Rather, I think that nonprofits will not solve any fundamental problems. Because they rely on financial fortunes, they are condemned to solve other problems like, let’s say, the digital divide. Or the educational divide. These are issues, for sure. But to answer these questions, we have to dig deeper, to the root causes of inequalities: private property and the ongoing racism. These are issues that nonprofits cannot address correctly because their existence is dependent upon the appropriation of the wealth. The capitalists are not going to shoot themselves in the foot. This goes back to a simple economic relation: a philanthropic gift can only take place if an individual or a company earn more than what they need to reproduce the means of their subsistence or the means of production. This means that the gift comes from a surplus. This surplus is the profit: contrary to actual grassroots organizations, the overwhelming majority of nonprofits rely on profit-making. And from this perspective, they contribute to inequalities and homelessness. 

I believe that the root causes of inequalities lie in education and in how resources are distributed from a very young age. And, in the Bay Area, the children experience, from this very young age, skyrocketing disparities. Nonprofits select a few privileged and help them race to the top. This creates an enclosed environment contrary to the ideal of an open education. And the people left behind seem not to be worth consideration. I think it is time to imagine another school, a truly public school, freed from the influence of billionaires and their innovative ideas. There is no need to innovate in education: we need a radical disruption from the entrepreneurship and all those ideas. As Linsey McGoey argues, social and racial justice cannot be optional. The good will of philanthropists will not be enough. 

By Lydia Burdorf 

Early December of 2022 in the middle of the night, I walked the 10 miles from Baker’s Beach to my apartment in The Mission District of San Francisco. It was a full moon and the clouds had just poured rain throughout the city. The moonlight reflected off the wet pavement and danced along the glassy storefronts. I cried to the moon like she was my mother and painted my name like a trail of breadcrumbs on mailboxes and streetlamp posts. I watched as the self driving cars repeatedly circled a block in the Haight. I bled my broken heart out into a pond in Golden Gate Park and patched it up with mud from Hippy Hill. A stranger handed me a can of spraypaint. I watched people drunkenly walk from club to club in the Castro. I finally found my street at 4 am. 

A year ago I would have never dreamed of doing this. Last year I was trapped inside my house with a fear that lasted a couple months, I only went out to go to work. Taking a walk around my block was a nightmare of men staring at my body and telling me what they thought of it. Everyday that I have walked down a city block since I was twelve years old I have experienced some type of harassment. Every woman I know would tell you the same. We are yelled at in the street, we are followed home, we are grabbed, we are exposed to stranger’s bodies. I am unable to exist in public without being reminded that I am an object for sex.

It seems like there are only a couple of options for women. One is to lock ourselves away, never to enter the commons without a chaperone, only going out alone to places with a fee to enter and taking a taxi home. This option is giving in to male dominance by submitting to a man for protection. It is giving in to consumerism as an escape from a world that degrades women openly in public, instead accepting degradation in a more private yet totally twisted way.

I lived my life this way for a long time, wishing I could walk to the corner store to get a cold soda on a hot summer night or giving into advances from men because I knew they were my ticket into the public sphere.

I believe that the world is this way for women because of the way we left the domestic sphere. It was not just scarily recent but also through work. We started leaving our houses because men in positions of power saw us as a means to make themselves more money. Women did not leave their position as the head of the home out of a newfound respect men had for women, but because we were seen as a commodity. So now everyday I walk down the street I am being consumed. 

I think the way to remedy this is to create an enitrely different position for ourselves outside of our homes. 

One day after my many months of self afflicted isolation, I walked into the Long Haul Infoshop. I was not met with arms wide open or by a community of women or anything simple or easy. I met a ton of neurotic anarchists who were almost entirely men many years my senior. I walked into Thrillhouse Records and met a ton of angry chainsmoking punks. I walked into Adobe Books and met painstakingly secretive graffiti artists and pretentious noise musicians. 

Its a strange thing, being known and knowing people is very different than being their friends. But I have learned that meeting a group of people at one of these community spaces and learning their names, asking about their lives; you will suddenly be invited to all of their projects, shows, or art parties. Artists and people who work in mutual aid need people to support them and also to help them do cool shit. Say yes and show up, be courteous, don’t cause drama and these people will love you and want to support you because you supported them. 

Walking around in public is suddenly a bit less scary when there is a chance of seeing a familiar face. Coming home late at night and seeing my friends scribbles on all the bus stops feels like a reminder that I am cared for and can be protected. Knowing that I have a place I can go to escape the chaos of the outside world for just a second gives me the courage to take it on. 

Leaving my house and doing the scary, yet oh so simple thing of speaking to a couple of strangers gave me the ability to become an active community member. This gives me a place in public where I am respected, have my own power, and can be unafraid. And when I am treated terribly by men in these spaces, I have people who back me up. When you find spaces outside of your or your friends homes that empower you, eventually you will get to a place where you simply are empowered everywhere you go. 

Yes all of these places are crawling with older men, I totally can’t stand it half of the time. But, the dream of a girl gang that slits the throats of men who dare to look at us the wrong way isn’t coming true fast enough (and has so much potential for terfdom). Surprisingly, I have found, being the youngest person and also the only woman in the room I am able to hold quite a bit of power. So I am asking you, reader, if you are currently locking yourself away from the outside world out of fear of harassment please come outside. Find communities to be a part of that will offer you the respect and empowerment you deserve. The more of you who answer my call the less space older entitled men will have at these places. It is hard work to turn a strange place into a known one but I promise it is worth it.

I hope to see you sometime! Maybe at a record store, the library, or maybe just walking down the street. 

By Michelle Everette 

After years of working racist, spirit killing jobs, I’ve finally settled into a work environment that’s not perfect but is purposefully collaborative, a place where the excessive energy I’ve been anxiously compelled to give each task is not expected or demanded of me, and now I’m actually starting to like myself again. Still, It’s been difficult to let go of the complicated feeling that I don’t deserve some grace, or even ease, unless I overextend myself in every possible way for zero personal gain. Yesterday I stayed late to finish some things I hadn’t been able to get to during the week and ran into one of my co-workers, who could sense I was on edge. After asking me why I felt the need to stay late, since I was definitely not getting paid for it, she told me something I deeply needed to hear from another oppressed woman: “you are valuable to the team not solely because of the work you do, but because of the person you are.” 

What a wild concept. Up until the fall of 2022, my working life had been marked by a relentless feeling of alienation. Deeper than loneliness, alienation is feeling the wet, heavy and biased boot of exploitation penetrate your skin and saturate your entire sense of self. The ingenuity of individual workers, as well as any cooperative worker effort under this system, particularly in the service industry, gets manipulated, erased and or undermined purposefully, as it serves many companies well for bosses to be divisive and take sole credit for each day to day success. Work in retail or food service for long enough and you’ll start to measure your value in this world not by how effectively you’re helping the members of your community, but only by how efficiently you can perform the most mundane of tasks, how accurately you’re able to follow arbitrary directions and how small you can shrink your emotions. 

While I was accumulating massive debt during college, I also worked in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s dining hall as a temp, regularly washing dishes alongside an older Black woman named Miss W. Dishwashing in any large cafeteria is a brutal way to earn survival: there’s the consecutive minutes of tiny but quick and intense movements it takes to get a crusty pan clean enough to rinse, there’s a lot of bending and the involuntarily smelling of soaked sponges tinged with unyielding spaghetti-like sauces. Yet dishwashing jobs tend to be low paying in the South compared to other service jobs, and the majority of workers in the dish pit at the restaurants and cafeterias I’ve worked at were Black like me or Brown, and severely overworked. 

The situations that our employers constantly put Miss W in truly pissed me off; when she was assigned to the dish pit in the University’s catering kitchen, they would often schedule her to come in at three or four o’clock and expect her to do the dishes that had piled up from the morning rush by herself. Some co-workers and I believed they screwed her over with that particularly cruel act simply because they didn’t want to pay another worker for the day. Miss W stayed late a lot, and regularly walked home because she would miss the last bus of the night. 

Why stay employed at a place where the management doesn’t respect your time? Why not demand more from your employers, why choose to suffer? My sister, half Black and relatively poor, felt the need to rapidly fire a variation of these concerns when I told her about a particularly long day in Miss W’s life. I’m still ashamed of the fact that I never asked Miss W how she felt about the way she was treated, though I tried to help lighten her workload when I was available to do so. Mostly I was her selfishly unaware coworker who’d been imprinted by fear. 

What if this is how to gauge how thoroughly you’ve been poisoned by late stage capitalism: can you understand the connection between this exploitative system and your identity? Can you feel your inner freedom, or easily identify it? Assuming that to be free involves being able “to surpass the given towards an open future” as my sort-of ally Simone de Beauvoir insists, then maybe low wages and unreasonable employer expectations — among many other structural oppressions — have severely stunted the Black worker’s perception of what’s possible in this country, and maybe being a woman on top of all of that means few will automatically remember to deem you worthy of a free existence. 

The last stanza of the Black, lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival” reads: “So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive.” Lorde’s sentiment echoes an overlooked reality for Black and Brown women in service positions, and maybe all unnurtured members of the proletariat class navigating America — this place was designed to antagonize us, to obstruct our open futures by demonizing our empathy and exploiting any instinct we have to transcend individual interests. Of course, this place actually kills us too, because it is threatened by us, because it doesn’t want us to seize the wealth we’ve created and carefully maintained.

Though it may be better for our souls to speak out against this country’s constant injustices, since we’re currently so oppressed that we have nothing to lose according to Lordian logic, it’s certainly not easy for us to fully believe that we are worthy of liberation. Another memorable coworker of mine called M from another low paying service job, a young woman of color with a Bachelor’s degree in studio art, once told me that she’d intentionally asked for less money in her hiring interview because she was afraid she wouldn’t get the job if she asked for more. M’s confession sparks a connection: deserve as a communal feeling, as a collective responsibility. 

Worthiness, wherever it truly springs from, is a feeling that’s either nurtured or damaged by the conditions of our lives, by the systems we work under and the people we grow with. I, you, we, don’t exist in a bubble; our individual lives are defined by our relationships to the earth and other individuals. Capitalism will continue to exploit this natural interdependence in a way that ultimately leaves us landless, cultureless and isolated, wondering how in the hell we work so intimately with other people everyday to create and maintain things that end up inculcating our children with fear and hatred — soulless shit that grants maybe a few people a ridiculous amount of money and power. 

I don’t have a foolproof solution or a replacement for this system that’s both swaddled and stunted me. What I will suggest is radical unity: a total reorientation toward each other. As of January 2023, there are 272 unionized Starbucks locations, and as the globe keeps warming and the price of everything continues to go up, I suspect there will be a lot more unionized workplaces. Americans are getting scared and want to start shaping these inevitable changes, and our intuition is telling us that we are stronger together. 

In the fall of 1968, when nearly all of the University of North Carolina’s non academic workers were Black according to the University’s archives, food service workers in Lenoir Dining Hall sent a memo to their employers with a list of 21 suggestions for a better work environment, including but not limited to higher wages. After the suggestions weren’t taken seriously and administrators refused to meet with employees, the food service workers asked the majority white students frequenting the Dining Hall for help, and a walk-out of 100 workers was organized and led by seven main Black women workers. The initial strike evolved and went on for over a year, and then another strike happened after the agreements of the first strike weren’t upheld, but eventually the Dining Hall workers and helpful students won, inspiring many different movements across the state. 

All of that is to say I believe in us, and I’m tired of wanting to die. I think I’ll try wanting freedom now. Freedom is a feeling that deserves flexibility in our hearts — it’s communal. “The function of freedom,” said Toni Morrison, “is to free someone else.” I like that, need to believe it. Miss W does not deserve our pity, she deserves freedom, she deserves a community dedicated to freeing her. Will clocking in again ever thoroughly save her, though?

By Seedling

I remember the first time I set foot in a forest that had been clear-cut, in so-called Canada. We were walking through a quiet and moist forest, when suddenly the trees just ended. An entire mountainside had been killed; the green canopy was replaced by gray sky. Only stumps and stray branches were left. The dead trees were loaded onto barges and floated down the coast, probably to be processed into lumber.

We hear a lot of stuff about “save a tree — go paperless!” But the digital era is hardly green. The already-out-of-date design of modern devices creates rushes of toxic mining, soon followed by dumps of toxic waste, for the global South. 

It’s true that commercial printing isn’t so green either. The push for profits and automation has led us towards destructive and short-sighted ways of putting pigment on paper. I want to live in a different kind of world, where we can create together and meet our needs in meaningful ways – without participating in forms of destruction sometimes marketed as ‘progress.’ Communicating with somebody shouldn’t mean gigabytes bouncing around silicon in a company’s data center, or forests being chopped far away. In order to get there, we need infrastructure to support ourselves outside the profits-over-life system.

That’s why last year I put a lot of energy into starting an independent printing space here at the Long Haul! It’s been operating on a pay-what-you-can basis, with me and others volunteering our time to print zines, posters, and flyers. I bought a used Risograph duplicator which had previously been used by a church. With some technical help – and a harrowing ride clutching the machine in the back of a box truck! – we set up shop in one of the Long Haul’s tiny little closets we call an office.

Risograph printing is kind of an old-school method of duplication. It involves making a stencil for each original, kind of like a silkscreen, which gets wrapped around a drum. Then, the stencil is flooded with ink and rolled over each page.

Unlike a digital copy machine, which can print every page with unique content, the Riso can only work with one original at a time. So if you have multiple pages in your document, you’ll get a stack of each which need to be put in order with a mechanical collator or by hand.

The reason is because digital copiers have a nasty secret, which is euphemistically called ‘toner.’ Toner is a bunch of pigmented microplastic particles in a tube. Essentially, the petroleum dust is electrostatically attracted onto a roller and transferred to the page. The plastic is then ‘fused’ to the paper under intense heat. There is no ink, just tiny pieces of plastic which get melted into the paper.

Working in the copy industry for years will expose you to the negative effects of toner. The plastic particles are so small they can cross biological membranes, and studies show prolonged exposure can cause lung problems. When the particles don’t properly fuse, or need to be rinsed off hands, clothes, or floors, they can enter the water supply. We should be composting many of our paper products, but if they’re printed with toner, I worry about the microplastics entering the soil.

Toner machines are energy-hungry, needing to constantly generate heat for the fusing process. And they are designed for short lifespans, often leased to the copy store bosses, constantly requiring replacements of cheaply made parts.

Unfortunately, this technology has been thoroughly greenwashed by the printing industry — mainly because it requires less water and generates less waste paper than certain types of offset printing. I work with these digital presses at one of my jobs. My co-workers are sometimes surprised to learn what that funky burning smell is. The technicians, many near retirement, grumble over the way these new machines burn through parts. Meanwhile, the bosses tell the customers our operation is as green as it gets.

Unlike digital copiers, Riso machines use real ink. The inks have three parts: oil, water, and pigment. The oil – made from rice bran – carries the pigment into the paper fibers, and the ink “dries” simply as the water evaporates from the page. Rather than using CMYK inks, you can pick from a series of brilliant ink colors – some of which are far brighter than those possible with color copiers.

You can probably create a radical print shop, if your neighborhood needs one. It takes some money to buy equipment and supplies. With creative sourcing, you might be able to pick up a free or cheap printing device locally — perhaps from a school or office that’s closing or upgrading. Purchase prices for a used machine tend to range from $500-5,000. Make sure the model is still supported by the company, so ink and other supplies will be readily available for years to come. You can get this information by contacting a local dealer as a prospective customer. If the Riso duplicators don’t meet your needs, maybe you’ll consider different printing technology, like an offset duplicator or inkjet.

The biggest hassle and expense by far is finding paper. Most of our printing paper now comes from re-use/junk stores, of which we have several in the Bay Area. We’ve also been lucky with getting many cases from a bankrupt print shop, government surplus auctions, and a truckload saved from the dump by clever scavenging. A recent visitor from the Unter/Druck print project in Germany says they have also had good success finding paper in bulk from defunct print shops.

Paper has become very expensive. In recent years, the paper industry has consolidated rapidly, much of it into the hands of an awful conglomerate called APP Sinar Mas, which is notorious for clear-cutting Indonesian land. Greenpeace recently revealed that Sinar Mas was secretly behind the purchase of Domtar, North America’s biggest paper manufacturer.

I wanted to check out a paper mill for this article, but all the mills that once made printing paper in the Bay Area have shut down. Of two defunct mills close by, one is now a police station and jail; the other is a parking lot for limousines.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer walks the polluted banks of the Mohawk River, which has been polluted by chemical waste — some of it from turning trees into paper.

Kimmerer writes, “A sheet of paper is a tree’s life, along with the water and energy and toxic byproducts that went into making it. And yet we use it as if it were nothing. The short path from mailbox to waste bin tells the story. But what would happen, I wonder, to the mountain of junk mail if we could see in it the trees it once had been?”

The situation is pretty dire. Forests around the world are being depleted. It’s important to understand that old forests usually aren’t getting cut to make printing paper. Deforestation usually happens to get lumber for building, or to open the land to other uses like agriculture, mining, suburbs and cities. Once the forest is gone, that land — once biodiverse and wild with life — sometimes gets converted into paper tree plantations where only a few trees are grown: pine, fir, poplar, birch.

At the mill, logs are converted into fiber and bleached. Many pounds of chlorine, ammonia, lead, and other toxins are released each year to create consistent, smooth, and white sheets by the pallet load. That’s because making good paper from trees is challenging. In other papermaking traditions, paper is made from rice, cotton, flax, and all sorts of other plants.

If buying new paper, I would encourage you to look for paper certified under a scheme called Forest Sustainability Council (FSC). It’s far from perfect, but it’s better than paper which is untraceable or certified by the logging industry’s knock-off (SFI). Recycled paper remains elusive (and expensive) in the formats we use.

Our collective fight for survival depends on overturning capitalism and reversing de-forestation. Print is one of the most powerful tools we have to reach people and make the case for change and a new type of society, outside the endless grids of social media. Billionaires and their corporations control the infrastructure of content delivery. There’s no way to graffiti over a newsfeed or throw stickers up on a banking app. But in the real world, we still have the ability wheat-paste any underpass or lonely ATM. I’ve enjoyed making quick posters for actions, events, or to get information out to algorithm-saddled college students. I’m still hopeful we can overthrow this bullshit system in my lifetime. I hope others will find ways to educate and organize against systems of hierarchy and control.

Write to Reprographixxx Print Room c/o Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley CA 94705 or baygraphix@protonmail.com 

SOURCES FOR CLAIMS ABOUT TONER:

“Oxidative stress and inflammatory response to printer toner particles in human epithelial A549 lung cells” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23201440/

“Capture and characterisation of microplastics printed on paper via laser printer’s toners” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34020184/

“Toner can cause critical contamination once it enters the soil. Therefore, this focus is directed towards that how to control and deal with such a large amount of potential discarded toner particles”

“Controlling measures of micro-plastic and nano pollutants: A short review of disposing waste toners” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29859943/

“Chronic upper airway and systemic inflammation from copier emitted particles in healthy operators at six Singaporean workplaces”pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35559961/

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988 — March 9 will be 35 years! 

Slingshot is like a mirage. We’re publishing and mailing out tens of thousands of organizers and papers, but a lot of times the collective making this stuff is very tiny. Again we are pleading for your input.  If this publication inspires you, then bring us your fresh and shiny motivated energy. A collective without enthusiastic new members can’t help but bend its process to the preferences of those who stick around the longest, becoming accidental authorities because of familiarity with protocol / procedure — preventing others from exercising autonomy and accountability.

During the art party weekends there’s a lot of broad-based participation but between the frenzies of work sometimes the group is just 2 people. It seems like most voluntary, non-paid projects are always under-staffed.  It is why our loft is messy.  Yet when we’re together the collective spirit burns brightly. How do we convince more than 2 people to sit through the boring editing meetings — with a fuckin’ bull whip!?! Shall we serve the dumpster-dived chocolate earlier? 

There’s always so much we want to include in each issue but articles on some topics don’t arrive. Military escalation in Ukraine increasingly diverts scarce resources that should be available for disaster relief in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria…and to transition to a sustainable way of life in the face of climate emergency. Only the arms merchants, imperialists and multinational corporations benefit. Meanwhile, each new police snuff video breaks our hearts with no real change or accountability. The system exploits fear of crime to divide us and obscure the scarcity and vulnerability most people face — while the rulers enjoy obscene wealth. The answer is to come together in love for ourselves, all of humanity and the Earth.

Slingshot author in the 1980s Natasha Kirsten Kraus died in December, 2022.  She was a fierce direct action radical as well as a brilliant academic radical feminist. She survived a decades-long struggle with multiple severe illnesses that left her increasingly disabled.  She also wrote A New Type of Womanhood: Discursive Politics and Social Change in Antebellum America (Duke 2008). 

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers and distributors.  Even if you feel you are not an essayist, illustrator or whistleblower you may know someone who is.  If you send an article, please be open to its editing. We’re a collective, but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this: Andrew, Andy, Eytan, eggplant, Elke, Jack, Jesse, Ken, Lydia, Lola, Marilyn, Mateo, Rachelle, Robin, Ryan, Stella, Stone,Sylvia, Tal & all the authors and artists! 

Slingshot Article Submission Info

Slingshot has always published the deadline for the next issue in each issue because when Slingshot started coming out, there were no internet or email lists so other than publishing the deadline in the paper, there was no way to tell anyone the deadline. But now, Slingshot has a website, an email list, and also indybay, instagram and facebook to announce the next deadline. So this time we’re not going to set a deadline for the next issue. We encourage you to submit articles for the next Slingshot anytime you want. When we’re ready, we’ll announce a deadline and publicize it on-line, or send us an email if you want to be on our email list. Actually, just do that anyway.

Volume 1, Number 137, Circulation 23,000

Printed February 17, 2023

Slingshot Newspaper

A publication of Long Haul

Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA 94705

Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

510-540-0751 slingshotcollective@protonmail.com 

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Circulation information

Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income, or anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or $1 per issue donation. International $3 per issue. Outside the Bay Area we’ll mail you a free stack of copies if you give them out for free. Say how many copies and how long you’ll be at your address. In the Bay Area pick up copies at Long Haul and Bound Together books, SF.

Slingshot free stuff

We’ll send you a random assortment of back issues for the cost of postage. Send $4 for 2 lbs. Free if you’re an infoshop or library. slingshotcollective.org