1. CS Workshop: Green Thumbing with Billy. A two part workshop on growing cactus from seed and grafting techniques: Limited space, tickets here

2. We just added some new clothes and things to our little bazaar in the sky, please take a gander and buy your favorite high school teacher a gift. 
   
   ***Newsletter Special: use code UNCARINA at checkout for 10% off your order***

The Sixth Day, Eden:
“And God said, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth… And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
 

300 BC, Greece:
Aristotle, who made MENSA’s short-list for World's Brainiest, believed that Earth was made FOR humans. In his argument, he distinguished between three kinds of “souls.”

1.  Vegetative Soul- Plants have this kind of soul.
2.  Animal Soul- Animals contain both vegetative and animal souls.
3.  Rational Soul- Humans possess all three, plant, animal, and rational.

In Aristotle’s view, because humans are superior, we can do whatever the heck we want with other lifeforms, having no ethical obligations connected to their well-being.
 
*Fun Fact: Aristotle also believed that women are “deformed monsters” with fewer teeth than men, that men have hotter blood, that eels don’t reproduce, and that some people deserve to be slaves.

 

1641, France
Descartes (the “I think therefore I am” guy) takes human superiority past its logical conclusion when he argues that plants and animals are not lifeforms at all, but natural automatons that function mechanistically, like clockwork. For Descartes, when an animal screams in pain, it’s the squealing of a noisy machine.
 

So embedded is human superiority (aka human exceptionalism, aka anthropocentrism) in the western worldview, that today it goes virtually unnoticed as a default ethical position of modernity. 

But there’s a Copernican twist. Not every human places Homo sapiens at the center of Earth’s story.

Jainism
Jainism is an ancient Indian faith that believes plants possess independent souls encased within their cellulose that can feel karmic emotions such as anger, passion, and pride. Some trees might even contain multiple souls which can then be reborn into the body of an animal or a human (which of course is also an animal). Likewise, Janists have a strict do-no-harm policy when it comes to their nonhuman friends. 

Shinto
Shinto is the indigenous faith of Japan and is said to be as old as the country itself. Unlike other major religions, Shinto doesn’t base its faith on leaders, on a book, or on dogma. Rather the Shinto “gods” (kami) are spirits that take the form of natural phenomena such as wind, trees, rivers, and fertility; the sun goddess, Amaterasu, being its most important kami.
 
Janism and Shinto are just two of countless examples of Animism, believed by some to be the world's oldest spiritual tradition. Animists contend that all living and nonliving beings possess something akin to a spiritual essence, and that the world and everything in it constitutes a living interconnected mesh. 
 

If you happen to be one of those humans, an animal who thinks more ecologically than EGO-logically, then you’ll enjoy these beings who in various ways challenge the notion of human superiority.

Euglena
claimed to be a plant by botanists because it photosynthesizes, and an animal by zoologists because it has an eye, moves, and hunts prey. Because this clearly nonbinary lifeform pushes simplistic Linnean classification past its ambiguity threshold, the Euglena has been dubbed a “protist,” which seems cockamamie given that protists are neither plants nor animals and the Euglena shares features with both! Alas, for all our superior grey matter, it seems that we are incapable of abiding grey areas.
 

Cephalopods
What has 9 brains, 3 hearts, blue blood, and can shapeshift? Cephalopods are interesting little suckers. We’ve even sent some of these colorful calamari to space (most likely where they originate) to study the effects of microgravity on living organisms. Yet for all our primate curiosity, at the end of the day, our puny one-brained operating system simply has no way of computing what life is like as a 9-brained aquatic alien. 
 

Mushroom Forming Fungi
Notwithstanding having humanlike phallic morphology, mushroom-forming fungi are the beau ideal of nonbinary sexaholism, boasting having up to 36,000 sexes, all of which can, and do, compatibly “bump uglies” in a mysterious process involving underground fronds. For those of you who subscribe to the neo-Darwinist notion that evolutionary fitness is sexual fitness, mushroom-forming fungi put you and your entire human family to shame.
 

The Immortal Jellyfish
Jellyfish are the real ancient aliens, with a history that stretches back HALF A BILLION YEARS (modern humans are only a few hundred thousand years old). This means that jellyfish have outwitted ice ages, predation from sea monsters, meteors from space, and whatever other cataclysmic events have plagued Earth over that time. One of our faves of the jellyfish kingdom is Turritopsis dohrnii, the Immortal Jellyfish. This biological misfit has devised an ingenious strategy for cheating death by growing younger instead of older. If you have a few procrastination minutes, google “immortal jellyfish,” to learn how it is done. 

Find Nonhuman Teachers 1: Lichen Shirt
The phrase “Find Nonhuman Teachers” comes from a note that a friend of ours, a researcher from Harvard, found scrawled in the late ecologist, Peter Warshall’s, journal after he died. A list of loosely connected thoughts: 

-Backyard biodiversity
-Start anywhere
-Learn about power
-THC insect repellent
-Animal soul
-*Find Nonhuman Teachers*

We hope that Peter doesn’t mind us borrowing it.

Note: T-shirt is reversible, so no tag.  Find text printed on the inside. 

Find Nonhuman Teachers 2: Butterfly
The phrase “Find Nonhuman Teachers” comes from a note that a friend of ours, a researcher from Harvard, found scrawled in the late ecologist, Peter Warshall’s, journal after he died. A list of loosely connected thoughts: 

-Backyard biodiversity
-Start anywhere
-Learn about power
-THC insect repellent
-Animal soul
-*Find Nonhuman Teachers*

We hope that Peter doesn’t mind us borrowing it.

Note: T-shirt and sweatshirt are reversible, so no tags.  Find text printed on the inside. 

Price: $52 & $120
PURCHASE

Tax Shirt 12: The Living Rocks of Texas

From the land of beer, BBQ, and belt buckles, a tip of the hat to one of our fave geophytic cactus plants.

Thank you for reading,
Feel free to drop us a line with any questions, comments or compliments: boss@hotcactus.la

Wormly,
C.S.