Saving bookstores and fireflies
Summertime tips for making the world a more magical place
Hey friends! I have not published anything here for a while, and I am sorry for that: I’m aware that a blog that focuses on finding hope and wonder in times of chaos should probably actually be active during the most chaotic times, so I am hoping I’ll be back to writing more regularly for you soon. I can only promise that this hiatus is necessary, as I am a one-man show over here, and this one man is trying to manage a lot in these dark days.
I came across a few things you can do today that’ll make our world a little more magical and a little less dogshit, so I wanted to share them:
Save the fireflies!
Homegrown National Park posted this article on how to make your yard more friendly to fireflies. Fireflies, like so many other critters globally, have been plummeting in numbers because of human interference in their ecosystem, but in my neighborhood in Maryland, they are everywhere. That’s because bringing them back is actually crazy easy. It just requires taking small steps like:
Turning off your outdoor lights at night
Reducing or eliminating your use of pesticides in the garden
Planting native plants for them to feed on or shelter themselves in.
Setting aside sections of your yard where you leave leaf litter and dead wood, as these are where firefly larva grow and hide from predators.
The reason we are getting so many of them in my neighborhood —1 and the reason my children are getting the wonderful childhood experience of trying to go out and catch them, which I once feared was an experience that was lost to them — is because in my neighborhood, many people have taken the Homegrown National Park project to heart.
Longtime readers of Better Strangers will be familiar with this project, as it is the brainchild of Douglas Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard. I wrote more extensively about that book at the article linked below, which I have removed the paywall to:
Fighting civilizational collapse with plants
One of the scarier monsters I’ve come across in my lifelong love of horror stories is the Wendigo. It’s a monster that is native to the same lands I grew up in, around the Great Lakes and the midwestern plains. It’s described as an enormous humanoid creature with a heart of ice which chills the air around it as it approaches. It has the ability to infe…
The TL;DR of this is that much of the work in restoring earth’s biosphere can be done by simply making our yards less hostile to life, by skipping the poisons, planting native plants, and saying no to the awful biological deserts that are the traditional lawn. It doesn’t fix everything, but it does bring back the fireflies and the birds, and oh, what a wonderful world it is with those creatures in it.
Save the bookshops!
A few months back, Amazon cynically tried to undercut national Independent Bookstore Day by running massive Prime sales on books at the same time. This surprised no one — Amazon is a truly cynical, evil corporation, and we’ve known that for years — but what was new was that the bookstores fought back. They got loud about this bullshit move in the press, and this week, they are fighting back.
One of the largest voices pushing back against Amazon’s attempted monopoly over our culture is Bookshop.org. Bookshop is an online platform that allows you to order books and send 30% of the cover price to a local bookstore of your choosing. In the past year, they also recently introduced eBooks as well, which you can then read on your computer or on a non-Amazon eReader (I’m a big fan of my Kobo).
This week is “Prime Day” which is when Amazon offers a bunch of deals and makes a lot of money in their never-ending quest to make the world shittier, and Bookshop.org is responding to Amazon’s dirty play in kind by offering free shipping on all books from July 8th to 11th this week. They are also offering a free ebook of Danny Caine’s How to Stop Amazon and Why.
Full disclosure: I have, for a long time, been using Bookshop.org as my main affiliate-linked site, which means that if you buy a book through Better Strangers, it throws a few bucks my way. I haven’t made much off of this (like, $10 over a few years, I think?) and I am certainly not making any money off of advertising it here. But I do hope you create an account with them this week, designate your local bookshop as a beneficiary, and then, I dunno, maybe buy some of my Book Rex, perhaps something from my Psychogeography Reading List, my TikTok-famous Anti-Despair Reading List, or the Mutual Aid 101 Reading List from my course of the same name.
I hope you are all weathering these dark times well, and are able to take some moments in between the constant chaos unfolding in our politics to spend some time in the sun, in the water, among the fireflies, and out in this wonderful world of ours which has managed to remain beautiful, in spite of everything.
I hope to be back writing to you more regularly soon!
-Hersh
As an aside, my regularly readers will be aware that I am obsessed with the em-dash. It’s in my top three favorite dashes, right ahead of 50-meter and right behind Santa’s “to the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!”
I should emphasize here that, in spite of what LinkedIn Influencers are saying — and is there anything bleaker than being an influencer on LinkedIn? — em-dashes are not reliable indicators of AI-generated content. I never use AI on this page and wouldn’t because AI writing is stupid and I hate it. But I will continue to make my dashes emmed, because I’m alive, goddamn it. I like the spaces they put between words, and I like how they allow me to be bitchy about sites like LinkedIn in the middle of a sentence that’s going in another direction.
I did wonder aloud recently— where have all the fireflies gone? Maybe I’ll build a sanctuary.