Where to consume media?

Back to the roots: the best is always the non-filtered original.

You can read/watch directly on the media websites or in broadcasters’ media libraries. RSS is not dead!

In social media, you can follow your favourite journalists and media directly to get a news feed. But! There’s always a but: you will miss a lot of interesting stuff. On the big platforms, algorithms silence certain topics. And even the so-called RSS-bots can be quite selective. Original media often adapt their output to the politics of the platform: you won’t see everything they have on their website!

If you share something: Don’t share posts without a source link. Don’t believe every quote without context: ask for the source! Become that little fact-checker.

I have a mixed strategy: On Mastodon, I keep a list of journalists and media (without algorithms or shadowbans). At certain times of the day, I read the original websites of my favourite media. Leads directly to:

When to consume media?

Set dedicated and limited time frames for yourself and hide media at other times.

Social media and the real-time availability of news mean that we are bombarded with disasters round the clock. Whether we’re feeling particularly vulnerable or have other problems to deal with at the moment, the constant stream of updates in our feeds actually creates a strong dependency. Anyone who’s ever gone cold turkey on Instagram & Co knows exactly what I’m talking about.

During my training as a journalist, we still didn’t have internet. We worked on loudly ticking machines that spew out kilometers of paper covered by agency news from around the globe. And we had to decide quickly which ones were worth being printed. This job was strictly regulated: two hours at the machine, then a compulsory break in the canteen. Nobody was allowed to do it all the time; we took turns. Also talks with the more experienced colleagues about what it makes with us.

I saw colleagues who didn’t take it seriously, who let themselves get drawn in, and then needed psychotherapy. Yes, it does affect you when you’re bombarded with news of disasters! When you no longer have time for the beauty and positivity in the world.

Take a short break and become aware:

1. We have as many good news as bad news at this moment! The problem: good news don’t sell. You have to search for them.

2. The world won’t come to an end just because you’re taking a break from the media. And even if the whole planet were to explode at that very moment, you would have had a lovely moment beforehand.

Yes, I know that’s quite sarcastic. But you have the choice: reading about a new blackmailing by a certain president for the umptiest time. Or reading only about the most important blackmailings while preparing your activism for democracy in the rest of your time! These days, the politics of outrage is deliberately manufactured and rewarded by algorithms: it generates the most clicks – and therefore money and attention. And it keeps people passive: their nagging in social media doesn’t change the reality. They just sit at a screen and work as cheap echo chambers! They became part of the outrage-attention-economy.

My strategy: Fixed times for reading/watching media two times a day. On Mastodon, I can silence my media list for the feed. So I can read social media without the disaster. When I’m feeling tough enough, I read by that list directly.

Try to find your best way to silence media for certain times. And you remember the journalists’ obligatory break?! Talk with people in real life, drink a coffee, make something that you like very much. Everything is better than addiction of disaster news: hugging a plushie, watching a beautiful film, or hiking in nature.

And try to find channels for the good news. Try to find the positive articles in your favourite media (they exist).

How to find good news?

Make yourself a private constructive reading list! In social media, you can find hashtags like #goodNews. Your favourite media will have articles that give hope. Special media platforms focus on it, like Good News Network or Squirrel News. The magic word in our profession is Solutions Journalism. You can discover people and media e.g. at the Solutions Journalism Network. Depending on your topic, also NGOs may report about solutions and wins, e.g. in conservation of species or ecosystems. The bigger ones have journalists for that work.

And don’t forget the very small good news: when something nice grows in your garden or you have seen a beautiful butterfly. You know, one strike of a butterfly’s wings could change the world ...

Which Media?

This is the most controversial topic. On social media, you will often read blanket hatred generalised of all media and journalists without any distinction whatsoever. It’s propaganda program of the ultra-right, and you make them happy if you repeat automatically such narratives as a leftie. Constructive media critics is important (we journalists also do it!). But please learn to distinguish! Name mistakes and sources (don’t say THE media) but also link to people who are good in their job!

When asking some of those hypercriticisers, I was surprised how many people nowadays don’t know the two extremely different groups of media outlets: On the one hand, there are the reputable ones, which are expected to adhere to journalistic ethics and are bound by the facts. On the other hand we have tabloid journalism, yellow press, and propaganda channels.

No. Not all journalists or media are the same. It depends for whom you work. As well it depends what you read.

You better avoid the tabloid and yellow press world.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you lists and it’s different from country to country. Sometimes it helps to ask someone if a newspaper or broadcaster is yellow press. The best is to look who owns the media. Wikipedia ist often a good source to find out their politics and controversies. Look on the media’s website if they have an About-page or a special mission statement. If they are independent and reader-funded or belong to a billionaire of the right wing. Or if they are reader-funded by the fans of a right-wing politician or a dictatorship.

Journalists are dependent of the conference editorial meeting, often their bosses. So look again at the owners. A journalist working for Fox News, the BILD Zeitung, or Daily Mail, will never write the same reputable stuff like the colleagues of investigative media.

And in times of AI, websites of pseudo-media come up that look like real media and are shared on social media. As a layperson, you can often only spot them because they lack all the information required by law, such as the legal notice, etc. Another test is to search the journalist’s name: if they are real, you will find a lot of material including informations about their person. A bundle of such AI slop looks “normal” but they mix in propaganda articles. So pay attention and stay informed.

Another point: So many people don’t know the reputable independent media of their country. Those existing media often decide as a cooperative about their topics. Most of them don’t have a hefty financial cushion, they have to ask readers for funding. Their teams are often too small for big social media work, so you possibly just don’t find them. And many are simply silenced on the major social media platforms because they ‘displease’ fascist platform owners (they exist even in the USA). In countries where the media are being silenced, some of these independent media outlets also take on the role of the resistance. And also left-wing media – which, of course, do not report objectively either, but rather in line with their political agenda – can become a force for resistance against fascism. (And look out for media that a rogue president bans or hates).

Another important source is investigative journalism. Those guys having a lot of difficult detective work uncovering what you usually can’t do as a single writer in your day-to-day work. Because it’s very complex and complicated to make fact-checks, find whistleblowers, and pay a good team of lawyers, this is where international teams comprising several media organisations usually come together to work collaboratively on a project. An example were the Panama Papers - often you find their research and articles on special topic websites. And then there are the investigative teams who write their own stuff and sell it. One help to find investigate journalism is the ICIJ.

And my last tip: Have a collection/list for your social media. And keep your list for real reading in the source as small as one human can or should read. My personal list is one source for short news about France, and one english media outlet for the whole world. Then I can dig deeper if I have the time and the spoons. That’s it. There’s still a life to live.

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"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly ... time-y wimey ... stuff."

The Tenth Doctor in “Blink” (Se 3 Ep 10, quote on Youtube)

He even built a Timey-Wimey Detector, an odd instrument looking like an old tape recorder built from a postcard, for finding time anomalies. Unfortunately, like all endeavors of artificial interactions with time, it never really caught on. You couldn’t use the device near eggs.

I’m sure that you all know this horrible feeling imagining to boil an egg just with your hand ...

Duration Dilation

It happens during extremely stressful situations: as well with bungee jumping or disastrous news. A stone crashes into your windscreen? You could see it coming in slow motion. You jump from a mountain, hold by the bungee cord only? Your flight feels longer than the stopwatch measures. You have a very stressfull crisis talk: already during the talk, you can forget which day of the week is. Afterwards, while you have to calm down, you imagine to have lost a big part of the day, or even several days. You seem to have expanded time so much that your Timey-Wimey Detector only measures a big Black Hole boiling all eggs in your fridge.

If you ask scientists, they will call it “duration dilation” and perhaps talk about the adrenaline rush causing the phenomenon. But the problem is like with all accidental egg boilers: we still don’t know exactly how and why we have these feelings.

In antiquity, Aristotle believed that we only have a feeling of passing time, if we experience a change of whatever. Bored school children know about what he talked. In the end of the 19th century, the founding father of embryology was interested in the question, if different organisms could experience time differently (MDZ, the original, 1862). I still learnt at school that such an expanding of time could have helped our ancestors to make better decisions, even if that usually meant running away. If a stone comes flying towards me and hits the windscreen, all I can do is duck out of the way in time.

I don’t want to bore you: depending on science or philosophy, or which academic discipline authors belong to, they have a lot of hypotheses and ideas to debate. (Wikipedia: Time perception) So let’s go back to Dr Who, the only real anchor in their fans’ imagination.

Fixed Stars

When I visit our museum and heritage center, I often become aware how important fixed points were for farmlife in ancient times. The rhythm of seeding and harvesting was mirrored in feasts. And this need was so strong that it was not only passed down as calendar knowledge in rural almanacs, but was also adopted by the churches. Pagan gods or natural phenomena were simply assigned corresponding saints; initially, the rites did not differ all that much. With very few exceptions, people were able to predict which feast day to wait for sowing which plant. Christmas and Easter became reliable markers in the annual cycle. And for any deviations, people had magical farmers’ sayings for the weather at the ready, or blamed them on demons and evil spirits.

Probably long before humans began to measure time by astronomic movements, they must have been aware of rhythms and regular movements in nature. Finding the first fresh herbs after a harsh winter, was connected with a special force of sunlight, with different scents of humidity, or the sighting of insects. The first clocks we shared with the pollinators and other animals: flowers, plants.

Then humans connected sacred space on earth to the lights in the night sky, and the sky became a guide for the year on earth. Today’s astronomers know that even what we can see in the night sky has changed over millenia – if it is still visible to the naked eye at all, given the space debris and light pollution in cities.

Do those ancient rhythms still work?

Watching the traditions of the 19th century and later, we already see changes so big that the old festivities don’t function anymore. I wrote an article about the traditions of the 15th August and the shift caused by climate change. Even if we are not interested in ancient beliefs and “magic”, it tells us a lot about changing biodiversity!

When Time Feels Broken

Then came the year 2026, with heatwaves in France following one another in such rapid succession that it was neearly impossible to keep count. Now it’s official: it was a maximum since 1900, the begin of measures in France. Writing this, we have more than 30°C … in September!

The news’ photo footage of wildfires raging with unprecedented ferocity seemed reminiscent of medieval paintings: like the fires of hell. And crop failures are hard to imagine for modern city-dwellers: with global trade, we take it for granted that everything should be available at all times. But at the moment, our village shop tells us that they can’t deliver leafy vegetables or salads. The price for a simple baguette climbs up in 10-Cents-steps much too fast. Plum harvest: not much and one month too early. The last blooming wild herbs in the meadows: too early. The end of Juin felt like an August. When I started writing some days ago, we were awaiting new heat up to 38°C in France, days after the “official meteorological start” of autumn. (BTW, that start is an artificial date for meteorologists, nature has their own rhythms).

Where did I lost my time between spring and autumn?

I don’t remember cycles of flowers in the sun-scorched meadows. Summer insects came in May already and then the Mediterranean species felt well. With the climate crisis, they wander North because naturally, all living beings migrate to places where they can survive. It is a year of grasshoppers and crickets.

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We experienced the silence of birds and the stench of putrefaction at the edges of the forest during the extremely hot days, and even a silence on the streets when no car passed. The latter reminded me of the pandemic - when wildlife from the forest took over the streets. But something was diametrically different.

The streets were empty during the extreme heat and during the lockdowns of the pandemic. But now, all animals seemed to be lost. They search for the deepest shade. If they weren’t burnt in the wildfires. We lost our anchors for time in space: the flowers, the animals, the crops talking about the rhythms of a year. Harvests are much too early. When the traditional harvest feats will start, we’ll already forgotten the fruits and grains. We got the feeling that time vanished. Vanished like us, fleeing into the cooler houses, closed up in rooms with fans.

During the lockdowns, on the other hand, nature flourished, and conquered Humanland. We couldn’t visit other humans but walk along animals. The roe deer, basking in the warmth on the empty streets in the evening, had lost all their shyness. Our lives often slowed down. People suddenly had time for making their own sourdough or art. From the homeoffice, not only did families benefit, but the staff also seemed less stressed.

Dr Who’s Timey-Wimey Detector could measure the opposite of now: we expanded time. Time suddenly felt as though it could stretch on indefinitely, sometimes to such an extent that some people experienced what they had not seemed to know before: boredom. Boredom is a fantastic time expander!

But what happens, if we increasingly lose touch with our natural rhythms, when we not only experience more and more extreme weather events, but also extremes in our perception of time?

Fixing That Timey-Wimey Anchor

Time is deeply connected with memories. Even though we will have long since lost our short-term memory, we can still remember an early birthday as a child, or the smell of a cake baked by an aunt who has long since passed away. We remember the song of blackbirds in our childhood and the colours of meanwhile extinct butterfly species. Memories are strongly connected with taste and smell. We remember better if we connect stuff with other things: a colour for a number or a gift with a feast. An event with a favourite song. A game with a place. Or the season with the colours of trees.

What happens with our memories if we lose fixed points in the cycles of nature and space? Can we find ways to create something like our own maps when conditions change? An unassuming Advent calendar in the museum got me thinking: the days can easily be wiped away, but the rhythms of the markings remain. Standing stones saw different climate, vegetation, and animals during thousands of years but still work to define astronomical points for the changing seasons.

My late dog Bilbo had collections that looked like art. While I was fascinated by his colour compilations, he seemed to connect his “fix stars” of a dog life by smells and textures. It was a ritual to walk and smell, touch and smell … until he chose something for playing. And he had 3-D-maps of the landscape in his brain, built from notable points on the horizon, urine marks and rising objects. Even if a tree had been felled two years earlier, he found his familiar key points. Perhaps, Standing Stones were not invented by humans but by urinating wolves?!

Build Your Own Big Ball

This is exactly where we have our starting point. We don’t need to go to the trouble of marking our garden fence right now. But we could choose a tree that we can easily reach. No, not for urinating, of course. Connect with that tree and their rhythm: note or scribble when the first green leaves come out, or when the leaves are burnt by the heat. Learn to read their visits by ants or pollinators. What do the mosses and lichens on the bark tell you?

A diary of a tree. A friend to visit. When I relearned to walk after a severe tenosynovitis, such a tree was my goal. Before, the tree was only one station on my way. Now I knew, after a lot of exercises, I’ll caress their bark again. Too near or too far away: always the same tree. The tree talks about the rhythm of nature but also about my memories, and even my body. I feel connected.

Try to find your favourite anchors in landscape and time. A certain corner you have to pass every day: look how it changes with the seasons, with your mood. First, you will see only ants on the tree and people at the corner. One day you will recognise how the ants differ from one another. How the people change their outfit or their smile. Your personal fix star, your Standing Stone starts to talk to you about this big ball of timey wimey stuff!

In a time of destruction, try to see the good things and collect them. That doesn’t mean that you have to deny reality! It’s an exercise to change the focus, to learn how to see a different perspective. We often have lost that power by social media where simple polarisations and simplfications win. And often we are overwhelmed by the picture flood in media.

Yes, it needs a lot of griefing while watching the pictures of a wildfire and total destruction. And we need to see it to wake up. But then we can also change our focus: In a burnt forest which was not only a monoculture plantation, not everything is dead. Mosses can survive extremes - and they will be the helpers for new growth. If we had the time and not a wood economy, forests would regrow by themselves, without humans. After a heavy rain, our brown meadows get some timid green stains. First comes some yellow and red clover, preparing the soil with mycorrhiza. One more rain, and you will find more plants, who benefit from this preparation.

Of course, those good news should never lead us to downplay the climate crisis! The impacts are occurring too frequently and are too severe for us to turn a blind eye. But shifting our focus to the hopeful can teach us a great deal about nature and about our thoughtless, indifferent destruction. Humans protect what they love. Learn to love that scorched meadow. Perhaps with a photo of the first little wildflower blooming!

Get active, even in small steps. Perhaps with such a treasure box of good news or memories (write them down on scraps of paper, collected in a bowl) you feel strong enough to get active, to connect. We are social animals. Try to find a way out of the virtuality into reality, as much as it is possible for you. Perhaps it’s just a smalltalk about a wild herb with a neighbour. Or you ask for that yummy confiture recipe. Perhaps you can do more. In a local group. Or with real-life-meetings of social media friends. Or you find a volunteering place for something you love?

Step by step. Don’t overwhelm yourself. You don’t need to be perfect or save the world alone. You can’t save even your region alone. But if you can connect, you all can have the power of a river grown from teeny-tiny drops. And you will feel that you can do something, even if it’s wibbly wobbly! People can also be an anchor in time.

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I want to tell you how it happened and for what I’m inspired now. But let me place a disclaimer before: If you are an cult adept of the popular LLMs and image generator AI models, please unsubscribe. It’s better for your wellness. And me. If you know the important differences of machine learning in science, and are interested in ethics and environmentalism, you can stay. (Haha, hope that’s tough enough to work).

The Attack of the “Killer Bots”

It all started with me feeling overwhelmed. I’m a carer for someone, and I’d reached my limits. Especially as support for carers has been cut back drastically. And then certain other developments took place so quickly that they turned my entire profession upside down. Probably only other creative people can understand the full implications for our existence. I speak about a part of AI: the popular forms of the hype, driven by obscenely rich billionaires into every pore of our lifes.

Rocket Stage 1

All began with my website sending an alarm several times daily because scraping AI bots induced so much traffic that it crashed. Scraping bots are this criminal stuff stealing every text and every image of your work to train AI models. Criminal, because we authors were never asked. Because it’s us who have to pay that traffic, not their superrich companies.

I did what I could as a non-expert: I looked forward to using Steady, where at least the legal scrapers are blocked now. I removed almost all the artwork from my website. Even so, it crashes so often that I’m already thought of giving it up. Than they hit my podcast. Fortunately, that’s no reason for it to crash. But if 80% of the traffic no longer comes from real people, who am I working for then?

Rocket Stage 2

At first, things escalated slowly. You may well have noticed this: more and more content is becoming invisible on Google. And I can’t count on people making the effort to use other search engines just to find me. So the number of real humans interested in my work dropped yet again significantly.

Rocket Stage 3

was the worst. It’s about the people using LLMs and diffusion models after those were trained with our content. I don’t want to talk about the datacenters’ immense use of electricity (often produced with fossile fuels) and drinking water (you know about the droughts and heatwaves).

I talk about the glittery, hyped possibilities, promised to people who are too lazy to think beyond a prompt. The promises to people who pretend to create so-called texts or “art” by, either indifferently or deliberately, exploiting that of others.

First came the fakes. Meanwhile, fake websites, fake media outlets, and even fake shops are flooding the search machines with websites that are pure AI slop. Even their “authors” are pure inventions. Often it’s quite hard to recognise the differences when image generators copy real artists’s styles. Especially Amazon sells slop books: fake biographies of real authors, fake books with nearly identical titles of real books. It’s the pure Wild West, without regulations, or with US protagonists simply flouting European laws.

Result: even less visibility for human-made stuff. And they don’t stop only doing websites, they create fake social media accounts. You can sometimes recognise them because they never communicate but collect crazy amounts of followers.

That was the time when it actively damaged my work. You talk about nature, do a long human-brain-made search for interesting studies, and research backgrounds for your stories. Comes an AI-entity with a social media account like AllAboutNatureSlop, steeling from every media they find in the internet, also your content. They scrape texts, videos, podcasts, with fake and false quotations, with mistakes. You remember that snail slop?

The immense follower numbers of those accounts are often faked too, or bought. The accounts exist only to be later sold for much money: “Look at all our followers and the traffic of AllAboutNatureSlop. Are you interested in buying the account?”

The bad news: they make real humans invisible, especially in a world of algorithms. And why the hell should I work hard for one month to get a podcast episode ready when the enshittifiers do a fake-story with some clicks only?

Meanwhile, they can copy voices. They need only some sentences and can steel your voice, an important part of your identity. Mainly they still look for real actors who often have to sign abusive contracts that allow copies of their voices. If they use yours, they don’t ask. Not all are nice. It opens up a paradise of fraud for criminals.

Then a school child showed me how to change my podcast into deep fake Youtube video. A school child. It’s even easier to turn a written text like this into a fake podcast. I. Was. Shocked.

Why should I work anymore?

Writer’s Block

This was the moment of despair. Because my job involves fact-checking, I was feeling rather gloomy. Even for investigative journalists, the workload is getting heavier and heavier, and the tools are becoming increasingly complex. Aunt Erna and Uncle Erwin don't care about any of that; they don’t see or hear the differences. Nor do they realise how much this gets to the very core of creative people. It’s our existence in a double meaning: the economic one and the part coming from our soul. It can crack you to be surounded by such a slop and enshittification of the internet.

It’s so bad that at the moment that in short term, I see no future for my podcast. Too many of my topics are faked. You can produce a fake podcast with some clicks, or a video on youtube. And if you do one, the scraping bots will be your main “listeners”.

I don’t say that I would never produce an episode again but I need a pause. I can’t live from working into the void.

Anger Sparks Creativity

When I get angry enough, I swear revenge: I get creative again! I won’t give an inch to these rotten companies that are destroying our environment and other people only for their greed and the fascist cults of their owners. I do want to tell my stories.

But at the moment, in this situation, I prefer the quickest method: blogging! More blogging. (BTW, this blog has RSS: here).

And I discovered some different art: the big comeback of zines comes at time! Look at my drawing for this article: wobbly. Hand-made by me. It also has a wonderful side effect: these kinds of drawings, which I colour as if they were in a colouring book, are wonderfully relaxing. They help me to wind down when I’m feeling particularly stressed. You need not to be an artist to make such images.

You can, of course, prompt such things. Then you’re nothing but an empty shell who takes from others just to make yourself feel somehow greater. But in doing so, you stifle your last remaining synapses and miss out on the meditative effect. You miss out on the joy.

It’s the other - human - way:

You can easily learn to make such little images. I’ve created a mini zine for you here. Free during the week-end, be quick!

Then Came The Heat

Since May the 5th heatwave in France, a horrible draught, poor harvests and a rise in prices, even for bread. The wildfires: climate change turned even the smallest fire into raging infernos. You’ve seen the images on TV. In France, climate change is having the worst impact with extreme weather. And this is only the beginning.

Reality changed so much. A problem that we know from the pandemic is repeated: People only stare at the news, a lot of people feel helpless, or are only nagging and whining in social media, without acting. That’s also because we don’t talk enough about what those situations make with us, with our families, the landscapes, biodiversity. We often don’t allow us to grief. Eco-grief, climate-grief. The sense of helplessness in dealing with this is slowly becoming so overwhelming that there are not enough psychotherapists. We need to talk about it.

My writing will change in this regard, too. I’m going to try to do what the daily news media often fail to do. I want to reflect on issues independently of the day’s headlines and research the background. One of my journalism teachers once said: Learn how to write anachronisticly, against the daily timeline.

I don’t want to shy away from such uncomfortable topics like eco-grief, I already did it in my podcast. I’m firmly convinced that it is precisely in such topics that we can find hope. I’d like to counter the ‘gloom and doom’ whingeing with practical ideas about what we can do. How we can find like-minded people. Or how we, as activists, can avoid burning out.

I will do it in a strictly human way: imperfect, sometimes brief, sometimes meandering through my thoughts. Free and lively. I don’t tell you a LLM-like resume at the beginning because I never know what I will write after my first sentences. My texts are sometimes like breathing larvae, which pupate whilst being written and do not yet know whether they will become butterflies or beetles …

This method, the blogging, takes a lot of stress out of my work because I don’t have to do alone what big studios do with a whole team and good money.

NatureMatchCuts is still a good title even with these changes! And you would make me happy if you stay … or if I get more human readers than bots! (And perhaps, one day I have the strength to do my podcast again, against all that slop and abuse by AI).

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Unlike the tragedy of “Timmy the whale”, owl Sunny is healed and nurtured by a specialised scientist, and not for becoming famous. Veronica Konkova stands for the silent volunteers and scientists persuing their work for an unknown future despite every day’s dangers and difficulties. And so the story talks about the impact of a modern war on nature, on the natural base of food, and ecosystems. Even when all sides will sign a peace treaty, the waste and toxic products of weapons will endanger food security. Nature reserves will recover in parts but they will never be the same as before.

Why do you care for a forest, an animal, while humans die?, many will ask. It’s because the forests, the animals, and plants will decide about human’s future. And all these unknown people caring for nature, doing science during war - they are a living sign of hope. They show humanity in a world that seems to be increasingly brutish. But we should not forget that these people actually make up the majority. That is what it means to be human, not what a handful of aged world destroyers are trying to talk us into believing.

Read: “Blinded and broken, Sunny the owl becomes another casualty of Russia’s war” (The Guardian)

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Tired Of The News

Back then, I was still a young trainee journalist and had to learn to keep cool in the face of endless ticker news. We still wrote on mechanical typewriters and secretaries typed them again into typesetting machines. For articles were printed in phototypesetting, and our final editors worked with razor blades and glue to get a prototype of the next newspaper. We had no internet.

Anything that hadn’t been glued on by the end of the final edit at night wouldn’t make the news the next day. And because the number of final editors was limited, the world would have had to be on fire for extra space to be made before printing. The room with the tickers – as we called the teletype machines – was a clacking, rattling inferno of noise. The staff on duty didn’t linger there for long. We tore off metres of paper and already skimmed through it as we left the room. In a flash, we had to weigh up 20 deaths on an Indian bus against a famous scientist missing in the Amazon, or a quote from a German politician.

I only remember that I was extremely tired at that time. The year had already started off with excitement and extra work: Spain and Portugal as new members of the EU, Gorbatchev discussed with the West to dismantle all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Spain left the Nato. Philippine’s dictator Marcos was peacefully overthrown by the people - and invited to the US by President Reagan. France was holding elections, the US attacking Libya, and the news about Gorbachev’s glasnost kept coming. I desperately needed a break. I took some free days from Saturday, 26 April 1986 until 4 May. A news-free period. I vowed not to read the papers, listen to the radio, or watch the news on TV. I switched off radically.

Meanwhile, I was sweating. I’ll never forget that long-awaited, refreshing spring shower, for which I actually left the house. It was a wonderfully peaceful walk through the fields, and I let the rain soak me, feeling the wetness on my face and arms. You don’t see radioactive radiation. You don’t smell or feel radioactivity. And if you don’t listen to the news, you don’t know why you are walking alone under these heavy clouds.

Propaganda Meets Repression

My colleagues on duty didn’t know either that a “super-GAU” had happened in Chernobyl* on 26 April. It’s the German term for a full reactor meltdown and steam explosion. The world was on fire, but the news was kept secret by the Soviet Union. It was only after Sweden and Finland had recorded significantly elevated radiation levels that the Soviet Union finally agreed, on 28 April, to report an “accident” (and a lot of lies). It took another day for the incident to be reported in Germany. Federal Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann (CSU) claimed that any risk to the German population could be “absolutely ruled out”. It is only now, when we know more and the timeline of the disaster has been reconstructed, that we realise how readily Soviet propaganda was believed abroad, compounded by the disastrous communication strategy of the Kohl government, which was determined not to let the construction of nuclear power stations be discredited.

For the people in the GDR it was even more dangerous: they were told that Western German precautions were only “capitalist” propaganda against them. Many of us at the French-German border remember that people in French Alsace wondered why their German neighbours were suddenly so cautious. The French government claimed that the fallout had been stopped at the Rhine! It was not until five years after the disaster that the scientists’ views gained acceptance there. I emigrated to France before that change but was fortunately connected to the world news. But I hadn’t realised that Poland, too, was deliberately withholding much of the truth from its people. When I moved there in 1993, news from abroad was slow to reach us. I felt well-informed, avoided irradiated food – or so I thought – and ate an organic diet.

I’ll never forget that either: when I found a slightly out-of-date issue of the Scientific American in a bookshop in Warsaw, with Chernobyl as the cover story. I’ll never forget the horror I felt when I saw the maps: my organic food came from the most contaminated areas. All the whitewashing by the Polish government: propaganda. The most dangerous place of the world was just 631 km beeline from us. The first women in my circle of acquaintances suddenly developed thyroid cancer. Officially, any link to the reactor accident was still being denied. Even scientists often sounded helpless: so many didn’t knew anything for certain. So very little had actually been researched. And so much could not be investigated because the Soviet Union was keeping tight-lipped. We will never know how many people actually died. We will never know how many suffered harm or will go on to die of cancer.

The World Has Changed

When my thyroid started running completely haywire, I was fortunate enough to be living in a France where science had gained the upper hand and the disaster regarding radiation had been made public there too. I had the most luxurious operation performed by the chief surgeon, was given the finest painkillers, and sat enthroned in a bed that massaged me automatically. For I had been asked beforehand if I would be willing to participate in research. I happily agreed. At last, the matter was being taken seriously! I talked about the rain, I was asked what I had eaten in Poland, when, and from where. I was told that in France, too, the number of people with thyroid disorders had risen dramatically following the nuclear accident. But what was particularly alarming was the number of expats who had lived in Eastern Europe in the years that followed the catastrophe. I heard it from the doctor. I never read it in the news.

You can’t smell or taste radioactivity. You can’t imagine the ages, a place will be contaminated. You forget that mushrooms - connected by the mycelium with the soil, can still have too much radioactivity. And Radioactivity doesn’t stay in one country only, it doesn’t respect government’s borders or rivers like the Rhine - it’s moving around the globe with the weather.

The good news was that people were waking up at that time. In Germany, there was criticism from the Greens and a broad anti-nuclear movement. And yet today we have still those who deliberately turn a blind eye: the Russians have fired on the Chornobyl* sarcophagus, leaving a gaping hole that urgently needs repairing. They continue to endanger nuclear power stations in Ukraine. In December 2025, the IAEA warned that the containment structure had lost its key protective functions and required a comprehensive refurbishment.

The area around the reactor will remain contaminated for tens of thousands of years. A timescale, we cannot even begin to comprehend. We do not even know how to convey this danger to future generations. This makes it all the more dangerous to turn a blind eye, even today.

After 26 April 1986, the world was never the same again. Even if we only realised it later.

*Chernobyl is named today Chornobyl in Ukrainian. I’m using the old name here because I’m talking exclusively about the Soviet era back then.

I have some reading tips especially in German:

• NDR: The first reactions in Germany in 1986

• SWR: Alsace - the secret

• Spiegel: Short timeline 1986-2012

• Tagesschau 29.4.1986 one of the first news in Germany

• Deutschlandfunk: the German communication disaster

• Greenpeace about the new damage and the dangers

• And find a lot of info on Wikipedia (EN)

And in English:

• The Conversation: Nature in the Exclusion Zone Today

• The Guardian: The No-Zone-Paradox

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I remember how, decades ago, a renowned non-fiction publisher rejected a manuscript on my European history of oil, saying: ‘Nobody will believe how bad it was! Don’t you have a nicer topic?’ I couldn’t and didn’t want to sugar-coat reality. Back then, we used to play a game among colleagues: make up the craziest story you can think of, as absurd as possible. Then let’s bet which publisher will buy it only because it sounds nice. What innocent times those were!

Of course, the easiest thing was to come up with sci-fi plots and imagine parallel worlds until we felt we could sprinkle a bit more sugar on the knots in our brains. And today? I feel so often empty. I can barely keep up with the day’s news; I’m drowning in the internet, overwhelmed by endless drivel from AI-generated fake websites. Whilst we wade through a president’s quotes as if a deregulated AI bot in a padded cell were spitting fire. How could I come up with another idea that’s worth reading? Should I focus on real, dry reality, and how it would look like? Like a sugar-coated muffin or a musty, unironed shirt with tomato sauce stains?

Imitating Reality

Elizabeth Goodspeed, designer and writer, says: “As AI and digital tools make polish effortless, analogue imperfection has taken on new cultural weight. But what does “analogue” actually mean when most things are made, shared, and consumed digitally?”

In “The End Of The Analogue” she talks about touching attempts to rebel through imperfection right from the design stage. Bleeding ink instead of Insta reels, children’s drawings instead of perfect interiors, distressed digital brushes instead of lips that have been pumped up nearly to their bursting point. Do we reconquer reality with deliberate mistakes?

Goodspeed writes: “What matters isn’t how convincingly something performs imperfection, but whether we can create conditions where imperfection still matters.”

Nature Of Evil

And what would happen if, in the real world, someone were to do or say things that seemed so ridiculous they could only be imagined in a tacky TV game show? Would that be that famous imperfection that saves our reality from AI spitted “halluzinations”?

Unfortunately, times have changed. Nesrin Malik shows us What Evil Looks Like: Absurd, Frightening, Cruel. She has the same feeelings as I when she thinks of “the evil”: “Some are characters from movies not seen since childhood. Others are snippets from literature or iconic art. What joins them all is an exaggerated, almost kitschy evil.” And then she struggles with the complete casualness of cruelty, the threatening of civilisation with ‘funny’ images of Easter bunnies or Jesus slop in a “squeakily bombastic” staging of a bad video game. Crime is paired with performance. “Evil is composed of frivolity and nonchalance and fragility, as well as relentlessness and insatiability and brutality,” Malik writes and warns:

“The unbridled cruelty and violence that he is unleashing and enabling domestically and abroad draws on all its precedents, and can only be fiercely fought – and with urgency – or it will consume all.”

Money, Money

Let’s take this to the extreme. Let’s imagine there was a whole caste of people on our planet who deliberately set out to pulverize everything humanity has fought so hard to achieve over the centuries. And these people really wouldn’t care about anything at all, except their dream of world domination and profit.

Yes, I too immediately think of the famous tin foil hat. But Noah Hawley has met these people in reality: What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat. What he and his family experienced, looked like Ted Talks on LSD and a tsunami of money. He can’t believe what he sees and then looks into a tiny moment when Bezos seems to look horrified. The moment, when a human offers … just being a human. Hawley brings it to the point:

“And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.”

Super-Villains

Oh, as we’re having so much fun with this now, let’s keep turning this screw: the bad guys, the supervillains, who want to make tabula rasa for their fascist world of the super-rich. Not just extinct any scapegoats. No, this time, only the ones who get to fly to Mars are the ones who survive. The self-appointed elite.

Is anyone still laughing? We couldn’t possibly mine enough aluminium for hats? For these people are so real that some governments start (too) slowly to think about contracts. Alex Karp of Palantir is such a guy, making money with spy tech and military. “Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears” - the story of what such people really think.

And again people need comparisons with films because nobody finds adequate words of what is happening:

“The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.”

A company that tries to get connected with the UK health system … and also in other countries with your most sensitive data! Will political leaders just laugh or wake up? Karp - he says it loud - tries to fight women, democracy, and all our values.

AI Versus Freedom

And he’s not alone, of course. Next idea: An “AI Ministry Of Truth”, that damp, fascist dream of silencing the entire media, of pillorying journalists ... and if you still smile, the system is already in place for every social media user! You only need money. “Can AI judge journalism? A Thiel-backed startup says yes, even if it risks chilling whistleblowers” asks Tech Crunch rather soft-washed. Also here the supervillains are well known: Thiel, D’Souza, and Srinivasan, as always obscenely super-rich white men. The platform they invented, a kind of AI pseudo ‘super court’, criminalising every real legal court, follows the same dangerous playbook: Don’t ask about regulations or laws, just start. Put crazy amounts of money into it. And count on that people will be baffled and don’t believe what you really want to achieve.

Critical articles are still rare, at least some voices can be heard like this:

“First Amendment and defamation lawyer Chris Mattei was even more blunt, saying the platform “seems like a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful.””

To put it in a nutshell: it is a fascist tactic to cast suspicion on entire professional groups and to incite the public to generalise and intensify their hatred of the media. A public that plays along with the game until it realises it’s their turn. But by then it’s too late.

Meet A Rhino

Perhaps you now feel the same as I do. After so much reality that feels almost unreal, I’m in the mood for a friendly rhinoceros trotting through the streets. Doesn’t exist? It’s all there: ‘They come right past the house’: learning to live with rhinos.” With great photos!

Match Cuts will be delivered irregularly. If you want to see all that I share on social media, you can follow me on Mastodon.

Because energy costs have risen enormously and the nights are still freezing (yes, really!), I have a ko-fi where I am happy to receive any hot coffee or more for my work! This blog/newsletter is free:

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Thanks to Mastodon, I found two veritable text gems, longreads, which are worth every reading minute because they are perfect thought fodder!

Memories

'Who Will Remember Us?' - written by Cade Diehm is a brillant essay about the culture of remembrance, about digitising who we are, or who we believe ourselves to be. And about the ethics behind it. About tech ideologies and human resistance. Imagine, the cloud went dark ... what remains?

I use the word ‘brilliant’ sparingly, but this essay deserves it. It’s not just for techies. Don’t be put off by the rather technical episode about Signal – that’s just the hook. It’s more than tech, it’s an essay about humanity and our actual path, connecting bodies, landscapes, and virtual spaces. The author writes on Mastodon: “It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too.” I wish we had more of this fury because it’s inspiring for choosing a different path!

Author's Life

From digitising our memories to producing false memories in form of AI slop is only a very small step. I come across it almost every day in my research, to the point where it became like a puking pill: texts supposedly typed by human beings, recognisable as slop by the fact that they’re preceded by a summary. As if the website programmers knew full well that any more of this same old drivel would be unbearable.

Do you ever asked yourself what using LLMs makes with their users? Then take that thought to its logical extreme: what effect does it have on people who are professional writers? People who, strictly speaking, wouldn’t need such fakes at all, because they have learned to write themselves. Even more: they fought hard to master the craft - through struggle and failure!

In “The Colonization Of Confidence”, author Robert Kingett tells a story about a group of creative writers which is infiltrated by an influencer. The man persuades them to adopt a particular style of ‘publisher-friendly’ writing. One of the writers is on the verge of a breakdown. Could his friend’s crazy-sounding idea save him? The inherent dystopia is a current reality. The happy ending might bring a few tears and spark some ideas.

More Memories

Back to real human memories: a recommendation in German language comes from a years-old topic, we “once” felt overwhelmed and also fed up with. It cut too deep into our very bones, often literally: COVID. And then happened what usually happens to war veterans: people fall silent, want to forget, and no longer want to go through the important process of working through their experiences.

The Viennese doctor Wolfgang Hagen recalls the day - six years ago - when the first patient arrived on the ward: 13. März 2020 (German). A list of memories of individual lives, which, precisely through its matter-of-fact tone, shows how much work we still have to do to keep these memories alive.

Match Cuts

Match Cuts will be delivered irregularly. If you want to see all that I share on social media, you can follow me on Mastodon.

Because energy costs have risen enormously and the nights are still freezing, I have a ko-fi where I am happy to receive any hot coffee or more for my work!

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If I were a snail, my slime would be foaming with rage. But don't worry, I'll try to remain rather objective. It's not easy, because the websites and accounts that are cloned at breakneck speed not only render genuine human knowledge and human work invisible. The AI companies steal human work, human-made creative content. And worse: if people find more slop than facts, they won’t believe the facts anymore. Hard times for science!

So we get three dangerous baseline shifts: the one caused by human-made species extinction and destruction of natural habitats. And the new one caused by misinformation (at the best) and disinformation (mostly used on big platforms). Take a third danger: austerity measures for schools or even the disappearance of universally accessible education for all. Especially authoritarian states try to destroy education. How will younger generations get ecology knowledge important for conservation or climate action?

To explain you what fake horrors I found with only one search and four clicks, lets concentrate on a specific example. It’s easier to understand than theory. Let’s talk about snails!

self promotion

It's really hard for me to ask for this publicly: my work is donation-based. And right now, I'm facing increased heating costs and a few repairs that can't be put off, with high bills. I'm grateful for any small amount of help! I have a Fund-me on Ko-Fi. Or Ko-Fi just for a coffee (I do love coffee). Warm thanks to all who appreciate my work in this practical way! And also thanks for all readers interested in my work without the means - you can share my links!

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Fake Nature

I thought long about what to show you for giving no clicks for slop! So no real links but the picture. On Facebook (and probably Instagram), pseudo-sites with names like “Blabla Hacks” or “Loving Blablabla Animals/Plants/Fishes/Cats” posted a so-called “info-graphic” about how to save snails. I'm sure anyone who doesn't look too closely and isn't familiar with the subject will find it interesting. Even real nature sites share it because they don’t fact-check what they share. Just for the clicks? It went viral …

Suspicion only arises because all the graphics on this “Blabla Loving Nature” site - including the logo - have the same typical AI style, achieved through training with the work of real illustrators. There is no communication whatsoever. It's just being blown out:

Let’s have a fact check:

Misinformation:

The left side shows an red ouchie on the soft part (the fallopian tube, the mucous gland?) and cement-like cracks of the foot. The warning: if you grab snails by the shell, you won’t crack the shell but cause “internal collapse” or tear their mantle.

Facts:

• The mantle is more inside the shell, snails don’t walk on their mantle. And they don’t break their foot.

• Walking snails don’t produce a vacuum, they are no suction pads.

• If you take a snail quickly and with sensible fingers, it will automatically detach from the floor and move naturally. The bigger danger is that a human’s grip is too strong and breaks the shell. Touch the soft part out of the shell shortly and they will retract very quickly!

• The organs of a snail (Wikipedia illu, mostly inside the shell) and their mantle are only hurt by raw violence destroying the shell, e.g., bird attacks or humans’ shoes.

Misinformation:

The right side claims: 1. Touching the shell gently will 2. cause the snail to retract very slowly. 3. Now you can take the shell. 4. You should not change the direction the snail had choosen.

Facts:

• Touch the shell gently and probably nothing will happen. Snails touch twigs or stones with their shells while walking, they take your fingers for silly wood. But their eyes can see sudden light-dark changes. Effect: they perhaps retract their eyes only. Yes, if you knock at their house, they would feel it and retract. Forget it all.

• Just take the snail quickly and gently by their shell. Or touch the foot before. Let the snail sail through the air between your fingers. Or let them walk on a leaf and take the leaf.

• If a snail retracts, they do it rather quickly. You won’t have the time for another coffee.

• Trust the snail: they will find their way and can orientate themselves. If you want to save them, moisture and green food are more important than a supposed plan that they wanted to cross your car park to the north only because snail Claude invited them to snail-cake. Whether you turn them in the right direction or not, they will first explore the area for shade and food. That's the most important thing, not some general direction!

Disclaimer, for nowadays, you always need a disclaimer: This is not written for “pet snails” but for most wild European garden snails. And yes, it’s also depending on the situation which can be different. Don’t trust me, I’m only a real human (irony alarm).

For more snail information I recommend Wikipedia (Gastropoda).

But My Garden!

You will see that there’s not only a big difference between snails (the ones with the shell) and slugs (the naked ones) but also between species. I just read that some people kill all of them in fear for their gardens. These people would kill even those good for their garden!

It’s mostly the slugs eating your legumes or fruits. But we also have purely fungivorous slugs and carnivorous ones (eating even other slugs)! Most snails are rather harmless. Some are feeding only on plant detritus, some only on microbes. Ecologically, snails are important for the soil food web. And as soil health is important for our food, they will help your plants!

Don’t kill them without knowledge. Look at the species and how they live! Cepaea (the ones with the beautiful coloured spirals) eat mostly dead plant material. Helix pomatia are even protected in different countries.

You will discover that sometimes, carnivorous ones can hunt the legume-munching slugs. The slug Limax maximus, e.g., goes not only for cat food left in your garden but also hunts smaller slugs during the night.

If you want to have less slugs in your garden, help their natural enemies: e.g. certain birds, hedgehogs, moles, toads, and slow worms eat them. If the ecological balance is good, the balance with these animals will be natural, too.

Ask genuine, experienced nature experts. Follow biologists and other scientists. Use content curated by real people. And above all, go out into nature and use all your senses, not the nearest LLM.

And My Rage Against The Machine?

You wanted to know why I’m so furious?

You see, how much time and energy I spent only to fact-check and tell the facts instead of just composing a fascinating article about snails. And even this article will be attacked by AI-training bots. It will become invisible in search-machines because of all that louder, more massive AI slop websites and their social media accounts with 250k followers and more. Not only my website gets massive AI bot attacks - it’s a problem of all creatives. My website was already down by these attacks and it costs money (because traffic costs money). I only wait for the day when they’ll scrape my voice for fake-podcasts.

You think this is a conspiracy idea? No, it's already happening to the first colleagues with famous voices. And it's the reason why real people are slowly becoming invisible on podcast platforms too, unless they're celebrities.

We can still reverse this trend. Hopefully. If only we wanted.

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Local Loss

In France, people and Le Monde (archived here) mourn the fact that the last kit against loneliness is being crumbled: the village postbox. When I emigrated to France, our facteur, the postman, was an institution on a bicycle. He still had time to talk with everybody, knew about people who needed help, and connected neighbours who had had a dispute. When he moved to Bretagne, an era finished. Nowadays you can pay La Poste, so that a carer rings the doorbell at your grandmother's house, who has Alzheimer's, to play postman and check if she is still alive.

If anyone ever wants to send letters or parcels instead of Whatsapp posts, they do so online and deposit them in their own letterbox. Postal workers, who no longer have time to get out of their cars, have to collect them, working the same hours for the same miserable wages.

One little example that complaining about change and reminiscing about the good old days, as already the ancient Romans once did, doesn’t change the world we live in: we need ideas.

We could ask ourselves: How can we create new structures so that people can meet and have a chat? What if we set up a book exchange box for every letterbox that is removed?

Let’s throw some more sticks for thoughts. Match Cuts is my new column with reading tips and finds from my social media accounts. What the hell means match cut? Read it here.

Reconnection

I would like to recommend a German-language text because it impressively demonstrates what nature writing can achieve, this synthesis of humans and landscape, nature and climate. And because a prominent climate activist is thinking about new approaches to activism and politics.

“In gewisser Weise muss es beeindrucken, wie erfolgreich es gelungen ist, die Auseinandersetzung mit unserer Existenz auf dem Planeten zu etwas umzubauen, was politisch wie emotional an den Umgang mit einer unaufgeräumten Abstellkammer erinnert.” (Luisa Neubauer)

In “Was war nochmal der Klimawandel?”, Luisa Neubauer asks how we can halt the erosion of our relationships with the natural world and how we can feel such a reconnection to nature that we see ourselves as part of the organism that is Earth and get new ideas for activism.

Local Power

While global political disasters threaten to paralyse us, The Guardian’s Ashifa Kassam sees a new generation of mayors making headlines by shaking up the traditional political landscape: ‘We have a new role’: mayors across the world increasingly taking on society’s biggest challenges. Interesting for the next elections - and good to know that we can engage locally.

Small Life

Sometimes, a magnifyer glass or a good zoom can help to shift our perspective. What we discover on and in our soil, looks nearly like intelligent life of a different planet. And these tiny people we meet there have indeed fascinating ways of living. My favourite photographers are Alex Wild (website / on Mastodon) for ants and insects - and Frank Ashwood (website / on Mastodon) for soil life and soil ecology (he is preparing a book at the moment). Attention, their websites are veritable rabbit holes!

Match Cuts

A note: I occasionally recommend articles in several languages (De, Fr - nowadays, browser or machine translations work well enough that you can follow articles.) However, the main language will continue to be English.

Match Cuts will be delivered irregularly. If you want to see all that I share on social media, you can follow me on Mastodon.

Because energy costs have risen enormously and the winter is freezing, I have a ko-fi where I am happy to receive any hot coffee or more for my work!

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2025

This morning, I read an urgent plea from a patchwork artist asking people not to roll finished quilts onto swim noodles, as recommended on the internet. These things disintegrate into slimy slop and destroy the fabric. But hey, Google, LLMs and influencers all say so! Experts and conservators are wringing their hands. Real knowledge becomes invisible.

Someone said it’s time to invent a politics kaleidoscope for reading the news: There is always some government that keeps changing, narcissistic types who want to get some Nobel prize immediately, and the laughing third party who wants to make sure that at least two sides are in conflict. Because that is the only way their cult of death, which they want to establish everywhere, can function. Such a kaleidoscope would be an ideal news spinner and a colourful replacement for rose-tinted glasses!?

Last news in this collection: While more and more people can barely afford heating in winter, health services are stretched to their staff limits, and you may be considering where you could save a little bit money, the net worth of one of the most evil guys increased by nearly 50% year-on-year to $645bn. No, it’s not a James Bond story about Elliot Carver, it’s real 2025.

A completely random combination of what bombards us every day. 2025 has given us so much of it that it's actually more than enough. For me, the year was so tough that I often felt like screaming with all my might from the top of a mountain. Fortunately, you can also do that in your car and then just talk with baby goats. Or someone else who is kind.

Now imagine a big shredder where we could tear the year 2025 into tiny little pieces and keep only the beautiful scraps.

2026

Unfortunately, ignoring and repressing the ugly problems in the long term will not help us. I am convinced that 2026 will be an absolutely decisive year for our future.

We will have to fight for our democracies. We will have to fight against the digital loss of culture and knowledge. We will finally have to stand up for the kind of world we want to live in.

The good news: We are many. And many would like to join but feel overwhelmed and helpless.

That's why part of my work here next year will be to provide some orientation - and report more on how people get involved or how to come up with ideas for doing so. I already share a lot on Mastodon, a social media network that runs in a decentralised manner, without algorithms and dependencies on billionaires or fascist owners. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get people away from those platforms – although there is a great guide for those who are interested in Mastodon. If you want to follow me there, just say hello that you are coming from my blog!

For everyone else, I want to offer a kind of digest here more often, with links to articles that I found particularly important or interesting. A kind of a commented link list.

Nature will remain my main theme, but natural and cultural heritage will also be a focus – and how we can protect and pass on our knowledge. This blog is one of the guaranteed human bulwarks: I think up and write my texts all by myself, using my own teeny-tiny grey cells.

Best Wishes

… for a happy new year! And yes, we all have every right to simply switch off the kaleidoscope of everyday madness sometimes and simply look at baby goats. Or anything else that lifts our spirits!

Perhaps my zine “Reconnection For Aliens” which you can download here for free as a gift until the end of the year!

Stay curious and symbiotic - I look forward to meet you again next year!

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Who would turn down such an opportunity: an expedition to a distant planet where strong evidence of life had been found: the planet Elder 0815, part of the famous Mosslich-system. I knew that this would not be a hike to the highest mountain in the Vosges, but a strenuous exploration in unknown terrain. I only accepted the offer because a probe sent ahead had identified ideal conditions: an extremely humid climate with slightly elevated oxygen levels, manageable for us humans without space suits. If only I had been warned how much climbing we would have to do while taking samples of a unique ecosystem!

The Landing

As we approached, Planet Elder 0815 differed from Earth in its colour: it shimmered emerald green and did not appear to have any clearly defined bodies of water. Even as our landing module touched down, we could not tell whether the ground was rocky. The planet's sun was further away, and large areas lay in permanent darkness. And I tell you: if you could imagine moisture – it was even more humid than that. Although we landed on solid ground, our space boots squeaked with wetness.

What we had identified as rock seemed to somehow retain this moisture. We didn't bounce like the first humans on the moon, but the ground gave way strangely under our feet. It was like being a giant dinosaur stomping on a thick cork mat. And of course we have also these first words. These famous words, the first human on an outer planet squeaked into her radio: “That’s one small step for a woman; one giant leap for humankind!” (Ground control on Earth immediately recognised the progress we had made since 1969. Perhaps because we had started in Europe.)

Our initial orientation made particularly our geologist happy: although the rocky ground of Elder 0815 felt strangely soft, almost bouncy, he immediately drew a parallel with sedimentary rocks on Earth. What if similar processes had taken place here? Would we be able to find evidence of fossilised extraterrestrial life in the layers?

There was no question that the planet was home to life: huge, lush green plants that seemed strangely familiar to us were rooted in the crevices. They were somewhat reminiscent of aloe.

We would have to examine them more closely. But there was another mystery: were these whitish deposits something like snow? It was much too warm for frozen water!

The Expedition

We prepared for a hike. What followed can be understood by anyone who has ever been on a long hike at the bottom of the Grand Canyon: exhausting and magnificent at the same time. We chose an outer canyon, even at the risk of the rock dropping steeply on one side. But it would have been much more dangerous to have to abseil down into an inner canyon. In the worst-case scenario, we told ourselves, we would have more escape options. Because what we found on one of the paths made us shudder: according to our biologist, it was the still-fresh remains of an unimaginably large avian dinosaur!

Imagine that the poo of a bird was three times longer than a human: how big the bird must be! We didn’t want to test meeting such a creature! We panicked and ran - and found protection in a place that looked like Stone Age shelters on Earth. You know, those half-open caves where you're reasonably protected.

After a short break with that eternally boring astronaut food, we had to climb to the top of a mountain to take our measurements. I'll spare you the details of the arduous climb in full expedition gear and show you the highlights that we radioed back to the ground station. Even though the extremely narrow mountain ridges were densely covered with jungle-like greenery, this was only for people with a head for heights.

We may have found further evidence of intelligent life in several places. First, there was a shelter that resembled a hut, which had been artificially constructed from slabs of rock. Here we discovered that the rocks were incredibly light; even we could have built this hut only by hand. We are excited to find out what material will be found in the sample analyses back on Earth.

And repeatedly, all the way to the summit, we came across material that looked like artificially manufactured, transparent ropes. It was stretched to the top in a similar way to our earthly cable cars. It felt incredibly flexible and durable at the same time, reminiscent of silk. However, we were unable to discover any living creatures responsible for it during our entire stay. The winged dinosaur did not appear either.

Extinct species? The ropes and remains appeared too fresh for that. Our ecologist noted several theories: nocturnal activity, something had warned the planet's inhabitants about us, or our eyes and equipment were not properly adapted.

A New Flight Planned

But no problem - we’ll send another expedition to Elder 0815 searching for life forms beside these plants. And I have tips for you if you want to join the next selection process for astronauts. It will be hard because the Mosslich planet system is quite far away. But you can already train to get a place:

• Get yourself a good magnifying glass or a camera with zoom.

• Read the guide how to caress moss and think like an astronaut.

• Go for a hike on planet Earth with both.

• If you meet moss, lichen, and elder tree bark, say hello from me.

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If it’s art, you perhaps even don’t join: but I’m not an artist! I’m not a crafter! What might I be able to achieve on my own?

Therefore, I do love participatory art. It’s the technical term when many non-artist people work on something creative which is then transformed into one big piece of art. The real artist or artist organisation remain in the background as organisers and motivators. One of the most successful participatory art projects of the last years came from the twin-sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim: their Crochet Coral Reef travelled around the globe, people from everywhere joined the joyful work to crochet corals - and some still do it. Perhaps they would never have done it alone but when being part of a museum exhibit, they were overwhelmed by feelings.

Such projects easily become community art, social practice, and craftivism with a political aim. Perhaps you have already seen some events of Inside Out, launched by the French artist JR. By displaying large-scale black and white portraits in public spaces, “actions have revolved around a range of topics: diversity, community, feminism, racism, climate change, education, children’s rights, and art are just a few of them.” Half a million people from 152 countries have joined.

This is the secret: Whatever you do, it can work as social glue, become a visible political protest. But the best of all: in participating, you are no longer isolated, you became part of a group or movement. And all these tiny parts form something big enough that others can’t overlook it any more.

Read more

• Definition and history of participative art

• History & Theory background of participative art

• Examples of the participatory art revival in 2017

• Artificial hells : participatory art and the politics of spectatorship

A Project For A Friend

For the last months, I joined such a project, not a political one, just like friends do it. And it was such an important and lovely experience! We are a club of women doing mostly embroidery but also some knitting, lace, or crochet. I’m nearly the one who had never learnt to embroider accurately and perfectly like my cross-stitch colleagues. So I developed my “wild embroidery” looking like children's scribbles, sometimes I transform French Knot stitches into moss, or I “paint with the needle”.

Suddenly, we were faced with the challenge: we wanted to gift our organiser something special that money couldn't buy in any shop. What if we all embroidered something for her ... and made something out of it? Quickly, the idea of a patchwork blanket was born which would be fixed by our sewing talent. We had no idea what an immense task lay ahead of this woman: she had to come up with a plan, keep the rascals together, and push the tardies to meet the deadline. Meanwhile, she collected suitable fabric remnants and finally got down to sewing. Warning: If you would like to organise participatory art, calculate more time and energy than you think you will need.

Each of us was free to choose a motif. To ensure that everything would fit together afterwards, the rule was that we could only choose colours from the brownish spectrum or white; the fabrics should not be pure white. So it would fit to any colours of the blanket. For me, it was a difficult challenge: I don't like beige tones and have never worked with these colours before. But when I visited our museum geese Rosalie and Kasimir, I suddenly had my motif! I dyed an old flannel coton with black tea over night. Then I drew outlines of geese with one of those magic pens whose colour disappears after ironing. Needle painting …

It's hard to put into words what a project like this does to you. Weeks of work in anticipation of the recipient's joy. The wonderful secrecy, because she saw that we were embroidering. Our surprise when we watched the finished object. And the immense joy that this blanket brought. As we celebrated it all over dinner, the magic of our community art slowly dawned on us: so many personal stories and memories woven into a piece of fabric that will survive for a long time to come. Made by the hands of 20 women.

Alone you can feel overwhelmed or isolated. Many hands united can create a treasure of memories and beauty - or lasting political projects.

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And these animals influenced the rich biodiversity of wild herbs: Depending on whether sheep or cows grazed there, or poultry pecked in between, all these animals acted as gardeners. By selecting their food, transporting seeds in their fur, or simply because certain insects felt at home in their dung. And you could taste this rich biodiversity in every cheese. You had even a different taste of spring or autumn cheese depending on the plants.

• Podcast NatureMatchCuts: When Gardeners Run Wild I.

• Podcast NatureMatchCuts: When Gardeners Run Wild II.

The trees also lived quite wild in those days. Apart from necessary, professional pruning and the hands of the villagers during harvest, they were never touched for being sprayed. The old varieties (some meanwhile extinct) were tough, and their diversity evened out extreme weather conditions. These orchards were a paradise for children: you could climb the trees, play in the meadows, discover insects, and big animals.

And, of course, everyone was waiting to taste the first ripe fruits! Even in later times, when the orchards had become private property, we had a special law. While fruit was not allowed to be stolen, the so-called ‘Mundraub’ (petty theft of food) was not punishable, if the orchard was freely accessible. It was o.k. to take some windfall fruit. A reminiscence of times when orchards were still common land.

I still remember how, as children, we had bulging trouser and jacket pockets in autumn. They couldn't be big enough! At home, we would unpack our treasures: red-cheeked, earth-smeared apples, tiny hazelnuts, or pears with a few brown spots. We ate softer fruits such as prune and mirabelle plums straight from the tree.

Does anybody recall biting into a small pear, just out of curiosity: how would it taste? The sudden shock when the gums contracted! Sometimes the whole mouth felt furry. We didn't know anything about tannins back then. But we knew that the pear with the little shock had to be left until winter to turn into a fruity-sweet delicacy. And the ones that numbed the inside of our mouths for a long time were turned into something even harder: schnapps.

Apples with worm droppings on their skin? No problem. Jeans were used to rub all sorts of things clean. And if that wasn't enough, you spat on the fruit first. Brown spots, cavities gnawed by insects or snails, and wormholes? No problem, you could just bite around them! The rest was for the meadow insects. And sometimes you even got an extra bit of meat.

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Autumn: time to pay for the heating. If you like my articles and work, you can contribute via Paypal or Ko-fi or become a member here.

At that time we didn’t know that we ourselves consist of a multitude of other living beings! Without our microbiome, we can not even survive. Modern science researches the interconnections of the traditional meadow orchard’s biodiversity and our own gut biodiversity. We learn that traditional methods of bread baking were connected even with that natural “dirt” of apples. Today, we wonder how this home-made bread and eating all these fruits had been a superfood for our microbiota. Now we learn that intensive and industrialised agriculture not only kills ancient apple varieties, but also leads to species extinction in our guts. And that leads to more allergies and diseases.

• Podcast NatureMatchCuts: Sitting With Your Beloved Sourdough tells you more about these connections!

Autumn means pure happiness of taste in our region. Just a walk, and I tasted fruits, nuts, and yes, some dirt. And when the apples are so ripe that the sweet juice runs down my chin, I long for delicious apple juice and how flat the stuff from the supermarket tastes.

Making Apple Juice

So I was helping at a public apple juice pressing based on old traditions. Families with children were invited to watch and taste the juice. I washed the apples, fresh from the meadow, in the stone basin of an old well with a hand pump. There was no need to scrub off any herbicide or pesticide, they had never been sprayed. As in the past, I worked with an oversized ‘ladle’ made of a metal sieve on a broom stick: I turned the apples carefully so as not to damage them. And I moved them back and forth in the water. Using the same tool, they were then lifted out of the water into the press.

The children opened their eyes wide, these red-cheeked apples looked too delicious! Can I have one, asked a boy. Of course, I said and stopped working, you can choose one and I take it out of the water!

But no, he said. The water is dirty! My mom washes apples under running water, I may not eat dirty apples!

I explained him and his mom that our apples were not sprayed and what we wash was only some soil, sinking down in the stone bassin. We couldn’t wash every single apple under running water, not with hundreds of kilogram. The very sad boy was forbidden from picking an apple because soil would be so dangerous. You never know what might be crawling around in it. Bacteria, perhaps, his mother said.

The Culture Clash

Nowadays, so many children learn that natural soil (and nature) would be something dirty and dangerous. Nobody teaches them that they have many of these microbiota in their gut. Or perhaps they no longer have them and are becoming ill from the lack?

We experienced a culture clash. The happy children fishing an apple and smiling when dad or mom also looked for one. My smallest “client” who came to me several times with his empty cup, big eyes, and a “more juice, please!” He didn't notice me winking at his parents, because we had agreed to only pour a little bit at a time. Some children were asking their parents to take some bottles at home.

But some families made me sad. When the adults didn't dare to try the freshly squeezed juice. “You couldn't possibly know what was in it! At least the apples in the supermarket had been treated!”

More and more we have to explain the differences of fresh juice and bottled, preserved one. We show these people how lively fresh juice is, reacting with the air, working. After a short time, the bright golden liquid turns brown. The same thing happens when you leave a bitten apple or grated apples exposed to the air: oxidation. It is a chemical reaction in which mainly the polyphenol in apples oxidises to melanin. Melanin makes also our skin brown. Well, the process is a little bit more complicated (read here) but also fascinating: the same chemical reaction gives us the familiar brown color of tea, coffee and cocoa (read here)!

Nothing bad, you can eat brownish grated apples or drink the fresh brown juice - thanks to the natural oxidation, it’s even better for your microbiome.

But freshly pressed apple juice is like Federweisser from grapes – after a while, it starts to ferment. And that's why it is stabilised for keeping it before that happens. Or processed further into cider.

The culture clash against “dirty nature” or even only fresh apple products is so weird that you find more tips on Google to throw them away than about their healthy impact. AI slop articles tell you nothing and are like the parents missing knowledge, automaticly paroting: Only buy at the supermarket …

My tip: take the chance if you find a dirty apple in nature, wipe it on your jeans and taste! And give your children a chance to taste fresh juice!

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Some days ago, a friend told me that she has started a psychotherapy out of pure defiance. She had previously said to her doctor that she felt extremely exhausted and could no longer escape the vicious circle of being afraid of the world. Really bad fear. “What are you afraid of?”, asked a doctor. She answered: “Of Putin, of Trump, of our next elections, what they destroy in the world.” The doctor laughed at her: “How can you be so afraid of Putin, he is far away from you!” Yes, this was a bad doctor, but fortunately the moment for my friend to search for a shrink. And she came back from her first session with a smile: “He said that I’m not alone! And that it was good to leave this doctor because she had nothing better to do than laughing at my fears.”

Take People Seriously

Never laugh at someone who tells you that the world and the conditions surrounding politics, nature, and the climate feel scary. Never minimise fears, because people in the middle of a bomb attack would “have much greater fears”. Never dismiss fears because someone superficially seems to be well and “doesn't even have to starve”. Fears are first and foremost a very real feeling that can't be reckoned up against one another. And so it’s with grief, whether you have lost a relative or are mourning an extinct species.

• Wikipedia: Eco Grief

• Sostalgia and Mourning

Skiers can perhaps imagine how my girlfriend feels: snowfall has piled up, completely wild and in dangerous places. And then the entire slope threatens to go down in an avalanche. Who wouldn't throw themselves helplessly to the ground? Perhaps it is a problem of our time that we like to downplay or rationalise away other people's fears and emotions. But at the end of the day, you'll end up with the same diarrhoea in your pants whether you wet yourself because of a fear of heights on a school trip or because of a real drone attack.

And extremist parties are only too happy to jump into this vacuum of feeling helpless: they promise simple solutions. It sounds as easy as in a cult: someone is made the scapegoat. And then they promise that you will never have diarrhoea again if you drive away this scapegoat or worse. As long as you can think clearly, you know that one day you will have diarrhoea again. But you can do something yourself. For example, seek professional help to combat your fears, not scapegoats. Talk to friends about your emotions. And above all, don't neglect the side of yourself that isn't constantly afraid, but also experiences beautiful things. Extremists try to destroy this side - this is how they gain power over you.

• Mental Health Foundation: Some Every Day Coping Ideas

• The Conversation: Feeling Political Distress?

• The Catalyst: Coping With Political Anxiety

• Scientific American. How To Cope In The USA

Stop Doom-Scrolling

Then we have another extreme, the so-called doomers, for whom the apocalypse is already a foregone conclusion. In their eyes, even the skier’s mountain is about to crumble. You know these people from social media: They cannot find the slightest shred of hope and may even become aggressive if you succeed in doing so. Their arguments are often characterised by hatred of ‘humanity’, whose imminent extinction is supposedly already inevitable. Some even believe that the planet would explode in the very near future.

In doing so, they forget that their arguments have two major problems: First of all, self-hatred. Their arrogance towards humanity should not obscure the fact that they are part of it. So are they somehow complicit? If humanity is evil - they are part of the evil. If this situation gives them satisfaction, it would be time to seek professional help.

The second problem: Conjuring up the apocalypse is worse than helplessness. Doing so you paralyse yourself and others by doing nothing and giving up on yourself and the planet. It can be also damned comfortable to have such a great excuse for inactivity! But can we get out of this vicious circle?

• Katharine Hayhoe: Giving up is too comfortable

Connect

My friend did the first important step: She overcame her unease and her shame, and talked about it. It seems so easy and can be so hard: what will my friends say? Will they laugh at me like that doctor? She talked about it and we didn’t laugh. Like her shrink, we could tell her: you are not alone. We talked hours about our fears and confusion, and felt that something had changed. A feeling as if we had liberated ourselves to act together. Talking about that tabu felt like empowering us.

The end of this article is unplanned. Again, we had bad news today: Dr Jane Goodall has passed away. But she died as it was her greatest wish told in a Guardian interview:

“I’m not going to give in. I’ll die fighting, that’s for sure.”

Therefore I give you the link of an article (2022) I wrote about her and Margaret Atwood as role models in a time of multiple crises. With that article, you find my favourite links to interviews with her. What she says is meant to encourage. Imagine if you shared more quotes from people like her than from wannabe-dictators!

Her words have lost none of their relevance. She was a truly great woman.

My article (also for listening): Polyplurimetacrisis – where’s your brake?

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Well, I love my slow cooker for soups, I can practise slow walking (have you ever pinched your sciatic nerve?), and heard of slow food (not necessarily from the slow cooker). Some people call my “wild embroidery” slow stitching to emphasise that it could replace chanting or a spiritual session, even though I do it during my volunteer work at the museum, where I have to concentrate on visitors' questions. My curiosity aroused, I searched for the buzzword instead of telling you something about woodlice. (I call that slow writing).

Those scientists called their method “Slow Looking” because they used only their eyes and cameras but no traps for finding insects. And that despite the fact that they needed quite fast shutter speeds when taking photographs! With that buzzword, I buzzed through search engine links … and found a book about slow looking at walls (I recommend it for every prison library), or a “study” about learning self-compassion by looking not too fast. You can get trainings to watch stuff for longer than 5 minutes (try it and you will me pay for 30 min!). And of course, if you are a person with sight, you should better connect your breathing sessions with slow looking than slow munching.

Museums And Galleries

All joking aside, I found what I was looking for: the origin. I was surprised that the buzzword comes from museum work. Volunteering as a museum guide, I had never actively given any thought to the fact that I don't like to present groups with an infodump, but rather like to present favourite pieces whose story I can tell or whose appearance challenges people.

How long do you watch one item in a crowded gallery? It’s an average of … eight seconds! Yes, you see the object, but what do you perceive? How much sensory input does your brain receive? What can you remember when I ask about the colour, the texture, a small inscription at the bottom? Are you also annoyed by museum guides who rush their groups through the rooms and don't allow time to linger and admire an object? Did you ever watch children being absorbed by an unknown item and wished to experience the same? Then you're ready for slow looking.

The technique is as old as humanity itself: cave paintings required a great deal of slow looking at pigments, the painting process and, above all, the animals that were to be depicted. It is as young as children: Watch an ant running in the garden and forget everything else. Artist Georgia O’Keeffe once said: “...to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” Perhaps we have simply lost track of taking time?

Therefore, especially the Tate Gallery established the word with their famous guide for slow looking. You’ll see, it’s something for being comfortable, something for your feelings, and nourishment in dark times. And it can be a start to share your impressions with others. More guides for slow looking popped up during the lockdowns, and nowadays galleries even plan special exhibitions like the one in the National Gallery in London with only three pictures: Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look. Some other guides:

• What is Slow Looking? (and How Can I Get Started?)

• Try Slow Looking with 9 Guided Activities In A Museum

Looking At Soil Life

Perhaps you remember the story behind my podcast: As a child, I loved to watch all the small aliens under a rock in a dry stone wall. On Mastodon, I share my watchings in nature spontaneously … and I should show them more often here! Let’s start how you can do it yourself - and it’s great for children. For watching soil life, a very small place is enough: a moss cushion in a city, the compost heap in your garden, or a window box. The latter is great for taking photos.

It may look “ugly” for your neighbours but this planet of small animals is easy to make if you have no compost heap to watch:

• The open box should always be kept in the shade, not too hot, and always moist.

• Don’t imprison any animals there and never ever put non-native animals in open boxes or your garden.

• Do not fill the box completely to the brim with soil that is as natural and rich in humus as possible (not the sterile substrates from the hardware store). You can also take fresh humus directly from the compost.

• Protect the surface from drying out with plant debris or loosely layered, flat stones.

• Start with very small fresh plant debris like salad or rests of an apple.

• When soil life increases, you need to add plant debris, just like in compost. Do not add food scraps!

• The largest stones and some lettuce leaves can be your observation stations. Lift them up carefully!

• Use the Tate’s Slow Looking Guide for inspiration!

• A magnifyer glass and/or macro lens can be very helpful.

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I did that by accident, adding compost to my plants. A week later I could watch a colony of woodlice with babies, funny springtails (always to quick for photos), and some nematodes being crazy about mould. And the best: I re-discovered a tiny species of snails I had not seen for decades. Bigger soil life is quite hungry.

I have to feed the woodlice and snails with salad, tomatoes, apples, carrots or potato peels. They like the box so much that they proliferate. But when too many woodlice live in confined spaces, they can become cannibalistic. I therefore always remove a large portion of the soil and place it on a compost heap or in very shady, protected areas. I then replace it with new soil without any underground burrows.

And so you can watch or photograph what normally happens in a compost heap or in places with dead wood and plant debris in a garden. You can see live how all these tiny beings produce valuable humus. Slow Looking - you remember? Sometimes you can forget the time!

Are you curious? You can practise slow looking without any effort – a magnifying glass is your best friend. Take a look at crumbling walls or tree trunks in the city. When sitting at a street café, observe not only who is walking on the pavements, but also who is crawling in the cracks. Just stop on a hiking trail and observe a stone, a decaying tree, or a cushion of moss. And of course, I’ll show you more photos of soil life and nature!

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And please take my next stories as an excuse that I’m forced to pause my podcast again (but it will come back!) due to a chaotic, difficult situation in caring for someone, and preparing some changes in my life. I’m quite exhausted and write much quicker here!

Let's dive into the emerald green magic moss worlds of this primordial plant and climate champion, play voyeur at their courtship, and meet moss-lovers around the globe! My interview guest is experienced in space and winner of the Guardian Prize for the Invertebrate Of The Year 2025.

But before, I want to tell you about the chaotic life of the podcaster behind the scenes … and all these small catastrophes that tried to prevent me from publishing the new episode. Imagine a cartoon character crawling to the finish line on all fours with the last of her strength: that's me today.

I worked hard on the research as always, scripted several days, and finally did the sound design. No joke: At the moment when it was ready and I just wanted to save a backup, there was a bang. Not loud, it was more a big nothing. Once again, the power was simply cut for a fraction of a minute. If you want to sell me one of these machines that keep power in such cases, you can donate some machine parts on my Ko-fi or become a supporting member here, thanks!

And don’t tell me about back-ups, please. I’m a great back-upper! If you have to handle about 40 GB, you only don’t do it every ten minutes like with a word file. And who could know that it’s one vulnerability of Audacity crumpling up the entire file, spoilt for lifetime. Did you know that you can open their file format only with their software? (At least I didn’t find another one.) I know now.

This was last week and I needed extra time to repeat the whole sound editing. When suddenly my windscreen wipers stopped moving (and I can't even go shopping in our neighbourhood without a car, no public transport etc.). As if the sky was laughing tears, we had heavy thunderstorms. My time ran out. With the first sunshine I was at the garage … three times a day only for checking. They were crowded. Then the appointment for Monday, I waited there, my moss podcast waited at home. The sun smiled. My brain became green, moss everywhere, still so much to do!

And then came the revenge of the moss.

I needed a new windscreen wiper motor, a nasty expensive repair. At least, I wanted to know what can break this piece. The garage owner grinned askew: “Well, it was moss that had killed the motor.” MOSS ???

My parking place is under trees. Some moss that had learnt to fly, had been washed into the windscreen wiper drain by the rain, got stuck, then water came to the engine ... and bang! Killed by flying moss.

Now you now how I learnt to gild moss . .. with that invoice.

I felt like in a bad film. Everything seemed to be conspiring against my comeback. What had I done to the moss!? With my grimmest grin, I sat down at the computer again and repeated the entire sound editing, this time backing up so often that not even moss could fall from the tree in that time. It was boring, extremely boring, I was exhausted. But then came the sound editing with music and nature sounds and I had fun working again.

Yesterday, I uploaded the episode, it worked.

And another bang.

During my podcasts long break, the hoster had changed the webadress, the user interface, and the login. Everything was broken: the RSS was not catched by others, I suddenly had two podcasts: one old, and one with the new episode only.

I make it short: Today, my hoster’s support helped me during one hour of work, with high concentration and several screenshots. Since lunchtime today, everything is repaired, in the meantime Apple has catched the RSS again, and some smaller platforms, too. And best of all: your favourite podcatcher now gives you again all episodes of NatureMatchCuts!

I need a silly film for the evening and early sleep. Probably I’ll dream of some moss cutting electricity and giggling loud about these humans.

If you like to cut my invoices or just support my crazy work: you can do it regularly as a member here or with a one-time-donation on my ko-fi. But you can support me also without money: podcasts become more visible, if you give them good ratings on your platforms, if you subscribe to listening to them, or if you just recommend them on social media. And if you want to give me feedback directly, I’m mainly on Mastodon but also on Bluesky now. And starting on Monday, I work on part 2 of the moss adventures …

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Since the super-big platforms use their profits for financing a fascist system, people with integrity leave these muddy bars. The alternatives still don't have nearly as many members. The disadvantage: social media breaks down into facets. For professionals, it means the times of one platform where you find everybody, are over. You have to decide whether you want to do without the missing people - or split up your work. I'm currently testing the latter because of my podcast. I am and will remain on Mastodon in the Fediverse as my centre of social media. But I've also been on Bluesky for a few days now.

Here’s my absolutely subjective impression due to my goals, the type of people I follow, and the topics I am looking for. And it is only ephemeral after a few days, so it can change. You can find tons of material about the technical differences and user numbers via search. And yes, you can find people on Mastodon with hate against Bluesky and people on Bluesky hating Mastodon (which is only one part of the Fediverse). But you find more people who use both like they eat steak in a restaurant and cake in a café. They tend to be quiet.

Meanwhile, Mastodon is a cosy nest where I can have lively conversations with a good mix of more prominent people and complete unknowns, learn a lot of new stuff (including about different conversational cultures) and get a lot more interaction with far fewer followers than I had on Twitter. When I wanted to ask people what fascinates them about moss for my new podcast episode, this is the most intriguing platform.

Then I started on Bluesky as a newcomer does: first of all, diligently following people, interacting, sharing and commenting from time to time. Writing my own posts. Yes, it was much simpler than thinking “decentralised” because it isn’t so much. It uses the AT Protocol but imitates Twitter feeling.

My account existed only some seconds when I got my first followers! They look all like the same cloned kind of a woman bred in a test tube using Instagram, botulinum, and Ai genes. They don’t interact, don’t write, only boost. Mostly it was politics, superficially in favour of more liberal views. But while scrolling, suddenly Chinese posts appeared. Typical for propaganda bots. To be honest, to this day I rarely know whether a real person is following me - even humans don't seem to be so keen on real names and profile descriptions. This makes people interchangeable.

First I was happy. I found all these people again who had been important for me in the last years. Because I love their books or work. Because they gave me important input to see the world while shifting the perspective. My podcast wouldn’t exist without them inspiring me. I found the people who teached me English nature writing in workshops, a publisher who had published one of my very small stories, and these people with their fascinating online events about nature. Many of them had tried Mastodon and left. Mastodon has lost them.

The reasons why someone tries something else are personal and varied. But some have left because they were bullied in the first few days by know-it-alls and their ‘this is how we do it on Mastodon!’, or experienced excessive mansplaining. Adult, independent spirits. Those never come back. And unfortunately they are right: this educational mania is a problem, if you don’t block. (I’m curious if I will experience the same factor of mansplaining on Bluesky).

At the moment, interaction on Bluesky is quite zero. You get likes. Sharings came from bots mainly, some single persons followed back. So I’m still in the void.

I can choose between a “Discovery” and “Following” timeline, sorted by algorithms. Main difference to Mastodon, which is algorithm-free and presents your followers’ posts in real time. So if you don’t follow enough people of your time zone from the beginning, you can feel lost. The opposite happens on Bluesky: the “discovery” timeline overwhelms me with tons of garbage, bot accounts, AI crap, and incessant chatter. It is as if your brain suddenly turns all the people in the pedestrian zone to the same volume. Even the biggest idiots, from whom you have fortunately been spared so far in real life.

I could only tolerate my “Following” stream: even this is too much noise. I follow the Guardian but it’s RSS dominates everything. On Mastodon, I have so much more possibilities of finetuning. I have a list for journalism and muted it for my livestream - I only read it if I want. On Mastodon, I can mute agitated people for 24 hours or 7 days, or simply their boosts. I have installed filters with warnings and without. Yes, you have trolls and haters on Mastodon but the mods are real humans and react fast. For mental wellness, it’s the best.

On Bluesky come all these possibilities to “train the algorithms” or be lazy, read ready “feeds”, or import people with starter packs: “Take 100 fungi guys and 150 people who walk barefoot on concrete, and here are the 250 best hobby astronomers, or get 1500 politicians for free!” I suppose I'll get more followers if I walk barefoot on concrete one day and someone puts me in the club.

But why should I train algorithms for a company? Why should I show them that I am fascinated by fungi and insects? It starts with fungi and ends with the 1500 politicians who want to conquer the world. And hey, who pays me for all this extra work of packing starter packs, or feeds, or tuning this in reality quite centralistic “machine”? And still it’s free - but for how long?

After some days following all these highly inspiring people, I had lost every inspiration. I was fed up with that good old slimy feeling. I had to work hard to get rid of it after Twitter and Facebook: this dependence on the treats that the algorithms sprinkle into your brain. They make you restless and make you feel like eating a bad fast food hamburger: You eat too quickly and are hungry again after a minute.

Maybe I've become too much of a hippie through Mastodon because I value the conversations with interesting people so much. It doesn't matter whether they have 2 followers or 20,000 - what matters is whether they have something to say. In any case, I'm too independent to give everything over to one company again. And the future?

What I do now: I installed a comfortably small list on Bluesky with the people I had missed. Sometimes I read this list only. Not the live feeds. Not on week-ends. I try to post, perhaps comment. Even the most interesting people only “broadcast”. I suspect that some of them have been letting their students do this for a long time. If I find more listeners for my podcast - we will see! Professionally, I have to give it a try.

I may be cured of large platforms for good. I prefer quality over quantity. And I prefer nature, not that slimy feeling.

Every “platform” has its advantages: For example, protests organise better on Bluesky, reach many more people, create more visibility. But if I want to practice co-operation virtually, talk about backgrounds and visions, or how to recognise anti-democratic behaviour, then Mastodon is the right place. Yes, it’s some more work to understand what decentralised systems mean, and to actively choose or filter. But the finetuning in the Fediverse is definitively better and you can learn it.

For me, more meaningful human connections are the future, especially in the political situation at the moment. And for informations and news, I turn on the broadcasting platform - but I turn it off again, before I feel overwhelmed. Like a radio. Well, that’s me. Your experiences can be utterly different, and that’s good!

Disclaimer: Yes, again politics. Nowadays, if you love biodiversity and nature, you have to get political. Nowadays, we have to fight for our future. But don't worry, this is about how we can use situations for the good. And as always, my links are the bacon to go with the egg.

Back to the penguins living on Heard Island and McDonald Islands who show us clearly that even the most remote and human-free places on our planet are pelted with sh*t from a regime that has lost every humanity, empathy, and reason. Or as the Australian Prime Minister said: “Nowhere on Earth is safe.”

This morning, my writer’s imagination gave up for the first time in my life. I can come up with trouser-sh*tting bullies or with psychopaths on the wrong drugs as characters for a crazy novel. But my absurdest imagination can't top what the chief blackmailer from the other side of the pond comes up with - without anyone stopping him.

I once wrote: when I’m angry (and I’m super angry), it makes me creative. One coffee later my imagination worked again. What would happen, if we get as mad as that leader without leader skills? Start to think about the craziest politics you could make, if you were the president of the USA!

Let’s start with something easy.

Imagine that some penguins near Antarctica become more famous than an US foreign minister. Let’s concentrate on these animals and tell the story of melting ice and climate change! Perhaps we could install some extra hard tariffs on climate change causers?

Well, that’s not absurd enough.

Imagine two bullies playing in a sand box. They don’t stop to to annoy all the other children. Suddenly, someone comes up with the idea of setting them against each other. They don't go for each other yet. But the great bromance is already disturbed. Level one on the Absurdometer but it could have happened already.

Let’s try better!

Imagine you could invent some easy way to destroy capitalism. It would be so easy that you only had to wait being completely passive. And the most effective destroyers of capitalism would be the rich and powerful. Wait. Today top insurer Allianz warned of the end of capitalism. Yes, they did. And they come even with a survival plan for civilisation: “The good news is we already have the technologies to switch from fossil combustion to zero-emission energy.” That’s great: Imagine a top insurance company writing solarpunk or even hopepunk!

Would be nice, if more people would join: imagine your hopepunk and resist!

Doesn’t help?

Although too many people are still too sleepy, they underestimate their power! Look at what people can do to a big bully when they resist and boycott! Just resist more. Resist especially his platform. Resist another Trump enabler’s platforms.

Yes, actions work perhaps slowly but steadily. Even in France, the boycott grows, from 62% at the moment. Globally, nobody wants to play with bullies. Even if world leaders have to use diplomatic language, imagine what they think when they are alone.

Everthing seems to be possible in these times. When the evil ones in this bad reality film imagine evil things, do the opposite: imagine your personal hopepunk. Imagine a better world, a world full of humanity and hope. And then try to bring it into reality. Fight for your dreams. If the evil is possible, the good can get a role in the film, too. Don't let go of the good.

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Yesterday was one of those days that don't need to happen. I had an important appointment coming up and suddenly an indefinable mess bubbled up in the kitchen sink. Well, actually, it stopped bubbling pretty quickly: the drain was blocked.

I'm quite good at DIY, but I hate anything to do with plumbing. The mess, the filth, the stinking slop. I cursed: Don't we have to endure enough filth in these days? Listen to the news - a big political sink splashes with brown sludge!

Anyone who has ever experienced a blocked toilet knows the lesson to be learnt: it's best not to let it get to that point where the crap rises to the top and messes everything up. And if you have missed the moment because you thought problems would solve themselves, the remedies have to be quite radical.

So was I, rushing to the village shop. I was surprised to find three different drain cleaners. No experiments with small actions, I choose the red bottle with the radical promise, although the danger warnings sounded like death and destruction. I googled to make sure I wasn't producing chlorine gas in my kitchen or causing the sewer to explode (I had previously tried bicarbonate of soda and vinegar to no avail). But everything was fine, it only was better not to breathe in. Such a resistance against the sludge requires caution, sometimes sacrifice.

To cut a long story short: After a few hours, the drain farted very loudly. I rinsed it with plenty of clean water and everything was free. You could indeed hear the sewer blockage disappearing. What remained of that day was a pleasant appointment and the feeling of having overcome a stinking problem. It's these small achievements that count. They give you the energy for more.

And just then I found this link about someone in Wales who re-discovered tiny rare seeds. His threshing machine looked like the model in our farm museum. His language sounded like ancient days and lost worlds, like the music of a living landscape. I had goosebumps.

Watch this beautiful little film, read the article with its touching photos showing humans and a part of the world that's also reality quite now (click on the link in the photo):

Llafur Ni – Our Grains

Growing Seeds

Right now, as the world's political sink is blocked and stinking, threatening to paralyse the entire wastewater system, some old and young people hold grains in their hands and are singing. They are small like their seeds, unknown to most of us. Big media will perhaps never write their story, headlines and social media not shout their names. What will remain?

And what do we want to take as an example: the great destructive screamers or an old man in the nowhere who has quietly joined forces with others to revive an old, almost lost grain?

This film particularly touched me because I often wonder what cultural heritage does to people (I volunteer in an Alsatian farm museum and heritage centre). And because our region has also been changed by old seeds.

Our movement began with public Saturday lunches at a farm bringing together people with ideas and visions. It also started with a young couple restoring an 700 years old mill and working with ancient stone grinding methods. They worked hard, had to experiment, to revive forgotten knowledge. Their different kinds of organic flours and bread became famous on the regional markets. They catched even the most conservative people who were suddenly discussing which degree of grinding and which grain was best for grandma's cake recipe, the children's favourite pizza, or the thinnest crêpes.

Their mill is an Ali Baba cave of flours as you could never find them in a supermarket: next to the usual wheat, you get spelt, rye, emmer, and einkorn wheat but also flours from sweet chestnuts or buckwheat:

Small film about the mill (Youtube, Alsatian with French subtitles)

In a region with dying structures, people like these started to live their visions of organic farming and cooperatives. After years of hard work and convincing people, their success was so great that regional politics helped with funding. Soon we had the first cooperative shop and a market bus for remote villages. While elsewhere vital hedgerows were cut down to promote the monotony of maize monoculture, in that area they seem to have gone backwards. Small farms needed something special to survive: whether it was traditionally produced yoghurts or cheese, cereals also had to be re-thought.

If you wander around this area on the edge of the Northern Vosges Nature Park today, you will see grain that you may never have seen before. "Le grand épeautre" (Triticum aestivum subsp. spelta), as we name spelt or dinkel wheat, is widely known from the organic farming movement because it needs less fertilizer. Meanwhile you can find this flour in supermarkets.

But here grow two siblings: the einkorn, or as we name it 'the small one', "Le petit épeautre" (Triticum monococcum). Together with emmer, the middle one, "le moyen épeautre" (Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccon) you can start your time travel!

A Landscape For Time Travelling

These sibling species emmer and einkorn were one of the first grains cultivated by humans. Evidence from DNA printing, shows us einkorn wheat was first domesticated approximately 10,000 years BC in nowaday's Turkey. That means Neolithic times when humans started farming. Also native to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, was emmer with oldest radiocarbonate datings from 17,000 BC. Your time travel machine lands among hunter gatherers collecting wild grains before domesticating them.

Let us realise this once again: We happen to live in the chaotic year 2025, in a time of Monsanto, some very evil politicians and obscenely rich men, climate crisis, and species extinction. And thanks to a few unknown people who are interested in ancient grains and diversity, our hands can touch this ancient grain in summer. We can bake a bread with possible Mesopotamian taste or eat like a pharao in Ancient Egypt. We cook grains which were already on fire places of our hunter-gatherer and Neolithic ancestors.

These landscapes of deep history can be tasted but they also influence our gut microbiome. We literally are what we eat. We are landscapes and a living variety of microscopically tiny organisms.

This cultural heritage of farming has nothing of old-fashioned backward-looking. Nowadays, ancient seeds and grains are important for science and our survival in the future. Emmer for example has the ability to give good yields on poor soils and shows resistance to fungal diseases such as stem rust. Einkorn wheat is low-yielding but can survive on poor, dry, marginal soils, even in rougher climate and on mountains.

Nowadays, scientists investigate old, often forgotten food species for their ability to withstand the challenges of climate crisis and the associated diseases and pests. Modern industrial farming has not only become an important factor of habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. It is itself a victim of species extinction. The species loss in the so-called agrobiodiversity is enormous: Worldwide we lost 90% of our crop varieties and some 75 percent of plant genetic diversity. Of the 4 percent of the 250 000 to 300 000 known edible plant species, only 150 to 200 are used by humans. (Source: FAO)

And now judge anew: Who are the most important world changers? Those who shout 'make XY great again' and walk over dead bodies in their greed? Or the more quiet ones who get together, let tiny seeds slip through their fingers, swap old varieties, and revitalise this important knowledge? No question: we need to fight the fascist sludge. But we need to cooperate - starting at local and regional structures - and tell more often the stories of a future we dream of, especially in social media.

A fist cannot dig up the earth. Even Scrooge McDuck had to learn that money does not germinate. But a plant grows from the smallest seed. It was these tiny seeds that held the real power over thousands upon thousands years.

Apropos Seeds …

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Sounds too easy? Therefore, for really bad days, I have plans and collections of topics. But let me first tell you why my podcast is English while I'm a German author living in France.

The Choice Of Language

My every-day languages are French and some Alsatian (Alsace is bilingual), rarely German. The decision not to write and talk in my mother tongue was hard: I know how long it took me to develop my individual style and skills in German. My English can never reach that level, I make a lot of mistakes and have an accent. You know, the combination of an impostor syndrom and knowing these facts could kill a project.

I am still grateful today to a language coach who presented me with a wonderful mixture of accent nuances from the UK, not to mention the differences between the UK and the USA, India or Australia. I learnt that I can train to speak better but also to embrace my accent: it's me. And it reminds me of a German editor who said that when she spoke to me on the phone, I had such a wonderful French accent in my German. Not that I speak my mother tongue as broken as in a cliché film. She thought she heard that I spoke more softly than other Germans. So if I had an accent in my native language, why not in others too?

The choice against German resulted from a market decision. Nature writing is an absolute niche market in Germany. It doesn't even sell to publishers - I had experience with that and didn't want to waste another few years. In English it was even a trend.

And why not French? The answer is simple. I speak French fluently, I have professionally translated books from French into German. But the other way round - my written French is a disaster. I would have to pay a proofreader for every little text. And when I told an enthusiastic French podcast listener about my plans, he immediately said: But not in French, please! We young people only listen to podcasts in English. Well, here I am!

How do I find my topic?

It's like with a book topic, only for a shorter time: As we say in French "je suis mordue" (= I'm hooked), in word-for-word translation: "I'm bitten". I imagine a kind green snake biting into my leg during a walk (I do love walks for finding ideas). Her venom is the sweet juice of passion, mixed with curiosity, and enthusiasm. I can work without that bite but with that inspiring snake I work much better and find enough discipline. If you have an idea or a project, the most difficult is to find that daily discipline not to give up, no matter how grey the day may be or how bad the world situation is.

I have huge collections of bookmarks for the best rabbit holes. I read everything that doesn't read me. Sometimes I read too much. But then it starts ringing in my head and I get the feeling that this could be an issue. This could be a story. Then I do research about it and read even more. Imagine Sherlock's mind palace, except that a messie lives in individual rooms. That's me when I go looking for material.

And then comes the magic point when I'm saturated with material. I switch everything off and stop reading. A few days of doing nothing in nature. Walks in the forest. I talk to bugs and goats. I concentrate on the beauty of a flower or the buzzing of a bee. It happens suddenly. I look at something or listen to a bird and there's the catch: I have my topic. I know how I want to build it and what I might need from all the messy reading stuff.

That sounds more magical than it is. As a journalist, you practise the technique. In everyday working life, you are often given a topic and then do some research. As a writer and podcaster, I can afford to choose my own topics from a wealth of material. Relaxing and doing nothing is a technique to avoid cluttering up your own creativity. I set myself the same deadlines for detailed research and writing as I would in an editorial office. Relaxing is an important part of it.

When looking for interview partners, I proceed in the same way as when working with humans: Who really has something to say? Whose personality is interesting and exciting enough? Can I find good questions? How can I approach them empathically? How can I elicit information from people that they don't want to talk about at first?

My people are animals, plants, even bacteria. You could accuse me of humanising them. Of course, my approach is not scientific. Even if I am secretly transporting science. (I read plenty of studies and knowledge texts before I speak). Above all, I look for a bit of humour to distance myself from anthropocentrism. Of course, as a homo sapiens, I can't really get away from it. But if I let a bacterium grumble or an ant criticise, then perhaps I can show a bit like in a cartoon that we humans are not the "crown of creation". In fact, we are often very stupid.

For me, it is presumptuous and conceited not to see all the other creatures in nature as people. I find it fascinating that in English in particular I can give them personality just by choosing pronouns. And when I then stand in front of a tree who is he-she at the same time, or see an animal who has not yet decided which gender they want to be, it becomes clear that nature is pure diversity. Much wilder than many people can imagine.

And so my comeback will be about moss. Even about moss-sex. But now I have to invite a tardigrade, drink some water with them and develop an interview.

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I asked the person if they had never spoken to their plants on the windowsill before. Or asked a teddy bear why the adults were behaving so stupidly today. I got an astonished look. A look that you could also give aliens with three blue heads.

Can you see the hand holding the stone? Can you imagine the creature living there?

“But you told me you were a journalist. How can you do such a work with your podcast!”, he said.

“Well, I can do it because I love this work, and my boss (who is me) allows my ideas. I can do it because I learned it”, was my answer. I still had at least two blue heads for him.

Be Child-Like: Breed Your Imagination

I rarely get feedback from people who think I'm too childish while they're looking for ‘proper’ mainstream content. But I realised that I perhaps take it far too much for granted that people know how my podcast is created.

Indeed, I’m like a very curious child deeply connected to my inner self when I once bred ‘pyjama beetles’ under my bed and talked to roly polies in a drystone wall. I watch animation films and am a fan of children’s television explaining science. I grew up with the German cult show ‘Pusteblume’ (blowball), later ‘Löwenzahn’ (dandelion), where a hippie guy has to assert himself against a fussy neighbour and later an over-correct guy from the public order office. Meanwhile, the viewers learn a lot about nature and cultural heritage. Later, growing grey hair, I dreamt of painting a door in Tardis blue and calling Dr Who, so that he could help us humans with the chaos that we have caused on earth.

Joking aside, the writer in me was thrilled by this deeply benevolent character who finally met aliens at eye level and operated wonderfully quirky machines. In a spaceship that was itself a living being. I’m fascinated by these screenplays. In the absence of exciting aliens, I realised that we have enough more-than-human life on Earth that far too few people were listening to. I only had to invent that listening-translating machine.

So, my ‘micro-macro-amplifier’ came into life. (You remember the three blue heads?) Perhaps it is Tardis-blue. It’s a plug-in with three ends: One for my ear and mouth, one for the interviewee, and one for the software. The idea for the ‘micro-macro-amplifier’ came to me when I was learning how to record and edit a podcast.

From Tapes To Audacity: My Personal Culture Clash

I had actually once trained at a private radio station. Back then, in the 1980s, you had to lug around an ultra-heavy chunk of recorder. Sound engineers used it to make stuff on tapes. Tapes were brown stuff rolled on big reels. In the studio, we still had real knobs and switches to flip, just like in old Startrek films. I only had to speak at the right time. Everything else was magically animated by the sound engineers who were the only ones with computers. There was extra staff for every little step. Behind a music programme in which people were interviewed on the street, was a well-oiled and immensely expensive machinery.

Imagine the culture clash when I was suddenly confronted with the possibility to produce and speak such a programme with only one computer, software, a professional microphone, and a recorder. Suddenly, the machinery was only me: no sound engineer, no colleague writing the moderation, no assistant cooking coffee while you had to phone live. After the first heavy investment for the hardware and a new coffee machine, I felt like a little idiot beamed into the future. How could I ever imitate a real studio? I got a full flash of an impostor syndrome. And booked a master class course at the Guardian in cooperation with the BBC. It’s all or nothing! And even though it hurt to have to invest real money in my uncertain plans, I have never regretted it. I learnt so much for my job!

Student Again …

Learning from the great professionals showed me that, like everywhere else, it all depends on skills, knowledge, and a lot of practice. In contrast to youtube tutorials and what influencers tell you, the trappings were of secondary importance. I kept the photo of the BBC correspondent who was broadcasting in an emergency studio: under the covers of his hotel bed. Duvets and wardrobes are the best and cheapest substitute studios. I record my podcast inmidst the messy material collection of my paper art studio. Paper, cardboard, and shelves full of boxes insulate perfectly!

Interested nerds: for the hardware, I use a Blue Yeticaster (with Yeti USB microphone, radius III shockmound, compass boom arm, and anti-pop filter), professional monitor headphones, and a H2n-Zoom recorder for interviews and outdoor sounds. My 20-Euro coffee machine comes from Emmaus France. The Audacity software was “intuitive” enough to learn and train editing (I worked hard for that!). Maybe now you understand why podcasters often ask for donations or offer subscriptions before the first broadcast. Not everyone gets a studio as a Christmas present ...

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I don't want to bore you. The rest was months of hard journalistic work: finding a topic that can last for years. Developing a concept that doesn't die after 6 episodes. Research the competition, determine the target audience. Public relations concept. Social media concept. Editorial plans. You have to have at least 2-3 episodes ready in advance to avoid getting stressed. I didn't have that during my enforced break, which unfortunately lasted too long. Such a break can kill a podcast. I hope that you are curious enough to wait for my first episode after the break. I’m working hard on it.

And in part 2 of this blog post, I’ll tell you why I decided to work in English and how I find my episode’s topic and the interviews. Meanwhile, I’m working on my next podcast interview with a tardigrade!

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Have a good time and watch out in nature: With early spring exploding, perhaps you can meet some fascinating aliens from planet earth. Greet them from me!

And then came that world situation when reality makes even professional writers look pale: I can hardly invent such absurd stuff in my darkest imagination. Well, I’m a realist, and also (still) an optimist, in Peter Ustinov’s sense. I don’t want to become overwhelmed by gloom & doom scrolling because doomism paralyses. And that’s exactly what the evil guys want.

Do you notice it? I sound like I'm drawing a comic. A skill I often wish I had these days, because all too often I don't find the words. What I see seems like a second-rate James Bond plot, except that James is bogged down somewhere over his martinis and not around when you need him. Meanwhile, the villains multiply.

How can you write about nature and conduct interviews with bacteria or bats in times like these? Isn't that childish? What can you talk about while the world is burning in every corner?

Then there was one trigger: Trump wrote an order with “forbidden words”. The National Science Foundation is now scouring thousands of research projects for dozens of words that could violate those orders. Unity In Diversity - the official motto of the European Union: “diversity” is on that NSF list of flagged words. “Cultural heritage”: on that list!

I hope nobody laughs at Mr Newspeak any more. Because what's happening here is dark fascism. This is how people (especially women, POC, and trans people), minorities, and important topics are made invisible before something worse happens. It's a way of eradicating knowledge and influencing education. Language creates realities. And it’s against Human Rights and all the achievements of which we in Europe are rightly proud. Pay attention, something similar can happen to us if we don’t protect our democracies.

Unfortunately, it also affects us in Europe. One of my podcasts’s main topics, and indeed of my voluntary work, is cultural heritage. This is one of the most important anchor points of Homo sapiens. If we were fungi, our mycelium would be closely linked to cultural heritage and nature. How much will my work be silenced now, by Google, and for my listeners in the USA?

That was the moment when I became grumpy. And then angry. Very angry. That was the moment when defiance and resistance made me creative again. Now more than ever: I'll tell you about my work in an Alsatian cultural heritage centre. Because there I continue to look for traces of how people translated their relationship with nature into cultural traditions and techniques. So exciting, because we can learn a lot for the present. Ideas such as circular economy, respectful treatment of biodiversity, living with nature calendars - all cultural heritage!

I will continue to interview animals and plants, because it feels damn good to change your perspective. Because my listeners have fun with it - and we need fun. And as a journalist, it feels doubly good for me when bacteria living on cow dung play the leading role instead of the same old politicians’ faces.

So here's to a new one! Renitently in love with nature. Optimistic that the good guys are more: they just have to get off their ‘backsides’! Free of newspeak. I like to continue to offer you NatureMatchCuts as a podcast and now also with a blog / newsletter. The new episode is in preparation, I'm working on it. Pssst … I do research on moss.

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This time, I have packed my wishes into a special format - to listen to in the new podcast episode "She dies in beauty - Why You Can Feel Both Eco-Grief And Hope."

Did you ever feel eco-grief, this modern malaise, a mix made by knowledge and experience of biodiversity loss and climate crisis? How is it possible to feel hope at the same time?

Come with me and visit a place of extreme ambiguity where a restricted area becomes a rewilding idyll. Learn about traditions of feeling oneness and interconnectedness with nature, from ancient times to Minnesang and Troubadours, and old mystics until modern people like Romain Rolland or Oliver Sacks. Find out how to feel awe and the happiness of unselfing!

Wishing you a good start of 2023,

Petra

Near our neighbour village, two huge old poplars are dying for many years, damaged by drought, fungi and the notorious fungal white rot. Mistletoe did not kill them but did its part in ensuring that the imposing trees did not survive. The owner let them die in grace, naturally. Huge mushrooms are visible now on the stem and the branches. One by one, branches fall to the ground. Sometimes they just sink and wait for gravity. It’s gotten dangerous around there. A suddenly falling branch can kill you. But the finds from the crown, which the farmers piled up at the edge of a meadow, are extremely interesting.

These branches housed the mistletoe. And how mistletoe transforms wood is at least as beautiful as the plant itself. In the past, these „lumps“ were extremely sought after in the marquetry. Unfortunately, the ancient craft declined. Today, wood often comes from abroad. And in plantation-like forests, the trees grow straight. Hardly any company still sends people out to find crippling and tree knots in nature. Deadwood is cleared away. Ancient wood crafts often depended on old, natural forests.

I love to work with small branches that once housed mistletoes. They  give me a feeling like magical wands for my art. You can imagine how  fascinated I was by this big wooden piece. It is at least twice as big  as my head. It’s slowly drying now. Later I want to cut it from the  stem. It will be a sculpture made by nature. I don’t even have to smooth  the wood with sandpaper. It is silky soft and feels like the skin of a  living creature. I visited the poplars every day. This wood talks.

If you love to hear more about nature and my walks with Bilbo, listen to my Podcast NatureMatchCuts!

Find the original article with more photos here on my blog!

The red kite called again and now performed aerial manoeuvres that seemed like joy. A female had joined him. The two dropped, soared, and circled. What was happening on earth seemed unimportant. Together they rose so high that they were almost out of sight. That walking human down there was just a tiny scurrying creature. Would be replaced by other fuzzy creatures. Was infinitesimal, unimportant. It is a feeling that can also take hold of you on mountain tops or at night when you lie under the starry sky and look up. The German word Ergriffenheit means being overcome or deeply moved by emotions, it contains a hint of something sacred, a primal experience. The miniature sibling of this emotion often carries the hashtag #AWE on social media.

There’s another feeling of smallness. You get it most effectively when reading trends on social media or live tickers on the news. A terrible catastrophe happened here and a new problem came out there. Almost insoluble crises are followed by other crises, suddenly a dictator triggers another one or a natural disaster devastates a region. You no longer fly with birds or stars. You feel more like a stone that its heaviness is ramming deep into the mud. Some days I want to yell out loud: Polyplurimetacrisis, troll away! How to find the brake?

Feeling Small

You can see, both feelings to be small are extremely different. That feeling in nature puts us into the appropriate perspective, from anthropocentrism and human hubris to normal size. It fills us with a wonderful feeling of happiness and above all: we are active. By trying to put me in the bird’s umwelt and communicating with it, I perceive it as a partner, at eye level. But above all, I act.

Read more in my blog. There you can also listen to this text!

Learn about two famous role models: The two grand dames Jane Godall and Margaret Atwood get to the heart of what makes our time and threatens to paralyse us at the same time - and they show how to get hope.

Recently was World Wildlife Day. And today I want to tell you why I don’t give up and don’t chuck it all in.  Impressive photos from all over the world were sprouting up on social  media with the wildlife we know from nature documentaries: wild lions  and tigers, an elephant family, brightly coloured birds from faraway  countries with names we’ve never heard. Butterflies I haven’t seen for  years and finally an ancient tree, a tiny mushroom. Someone wrote: „What  a pity, I have to travel for something like this, I live in the city,  there is no wildlife.“ Is that true?

Maybe you’ve heard that in a metropolis like Berlin, there are packs  of wild boars or foxes running through the streets? In New York City,  you might not only encounter chipmunks, grey squirrels, or bats, you  might even run into a coyote. Hardly anyone knows that New York is one of the greenest cities in the world.  Nature is conquering human-made spaces worldwide. Peregrine falcons, as  cultural successors, now use skyscrapers or bridges as breeding sides,  because their natural habitat in cities is mostly lost. But you don’t  have to walk far. Open your front door, go outside! If no one there has  scared everything away with a cleaning mania or leaf blower, the chance  of finding wildlife is quite high.

Tiny Worlds And Huge Problems

Sometimes it is so tiny and hidden that you need a magnifying glass.  These beautiful violet oil beetles f. e. love dry and sunny places where  they can run over the floor and hide under leaves or a piece of bark.  Adult beetles eat pollen, so there must be flowers. The specimen in my  photo lived in our parking place, warm concrete paving stones with wide  cracks in which moss and small weeds grow. They did not have far to go  to a sown bee pasture. There was plenty of pollen and these beetles can  find also bees to parasitise.

Wildlife starts tiny. This includes the ant at your  sitting place as well as the tardigrade hiding in the moss next to a  rain barrel. Or take only one handful of soil! Scientists in New Zealand have counted the life in a handful of soil: there can be 500 different  species of fungi building 50 km of fungal mycelium. This infinitesimally  small part of Mother Earth is home to 10,000 species of microorganisms  if the soil is healthy, and up to 100 billion different bacteria! If  living beings were able to seize world domination solely based on their  numerical distribution, they would not be human beings at all.

World Wildlife Day is not just a day for celebration alone. We live  in a time when man-made climate crisis and species extinction threaten  all life on this earth. A sterile, dead soil would mean the end of  humanity because agriculture would no longer be possible. And yet we  treat our soils as if they were interchangeable and endless. The United Nations write:

„The Day reminds us of the urgent need to step up the fight against  wildlife crime and human-induced reduction of species, which have  wide-ranging economic, environmental and social impacts.“

But how are we supposed to cope with these immense problems when they already affect such tiny creatures? 

Continue reading on my website!

Told differently: In disruptive times, when dearly held forms of communication explode can be especially hard. We remind similar situations from the past. The school clique breaks up because the best friend suddenly bullies everyone. Or unforeseen, the local pub is bankrupt. Mailing lists go out of fashion. And the beloved platform connecting you with the whole world is bought up and wiped out. It happened to Geocities after Yahoo bought it. Many people don't remember. But they are experiencing a new extreme with the takeover of Twitter by a single man, not a company.

I don't want to bore you. Many of you don't need Twitter, don't need Social Media. Many Twitter users still have bulging bubbles and are not interested so much in background stories. Everybody's experiences are different.

As a journalist, I have disheartening insights into the deliberate conversion by a single too-powerful man who destroys democratic structures, shadowbans activists of human rights and pampers the alt-right mob. The mob already threatens and persecutes opponents and vulnerable minorities (not only online). That was a red line: I can't support such a toxic and anti-democratic system with my name or data. My account is a data grave now. (I only keep it so that no one can take it over abusively.)

One problem remains: I depend on social media for my job. Twitter was not only important as a real-time collection of human knowledge, politics and cultural heritage, but it was also a connection machine. I got a job with an editor (unfortunately cut by the pandemic), published an article in the USA, found two masterclasses for my profession (podcasting and nature writing), and contacted people who recommended me. All this happened by Twitter. When I had a scientific question for my podcast, I found renowned specialists for every topic on Twitter, and I could ask them directly. Nevertheless, I had a fairly small account with nearly 5000 followers (dropped to 3700 since the takeover).

But for a new and unknown podcast, reach is crucial for survival. Countless players are competing for listeners with the podcasts of major radio stations. We are at the mercy of the streaming platforms: Only if a minimum number of people subscribe to and like a podcast do the algorithms make it visible at all to potential new fans .

Whether we are makers or users, this is precisely the problem of our time: we have made ourselves dependent on a few commercial platforms whose goal is not our well-being but maximum profit, or in Twitter's new case, political power.

In short, I took the radical approach and got off Twitter. I swapped my 5000 for zero when I restarted on the so-called Fediverse with Mastodon (I had already joined it in 2008 and left again because it was still too nerdy). At the moment, I have about 650 followers, and I am happy (knowing that there will be still a lot of work). It's not the numbers, it's the interaction!

My bubble burst, and it was good. During the last weeks, I learned a lot about dependencies and the free internet, about communication interested in people and pure consumption of media driven by algorithms for the profit of the richest ones.

Social Media will change even more (I hope for the good). I can't wait so long ...

It seems odd that I came back to an internet similar to Geocities in the 1990s. I invite you to follow my work even if you must now choose actively and autonomous instead of being conveniently served something from a platform.

Listen to my podcast NatureMatchCuts, find you favourite platforms and all information you need by clicking here! In my November episode, listen to the first interview (ever?) of a bacteria blob!

How does it work?

The centre of my work is my podcast NatureMatchCuts.

You can help the podcast to continue:

• By subscribing with your podcast app or on a podcast platform,

• By liking it on your podcast platform,

• By recommending it to others,

• By supporting the immense work financially as a member here.

Become a member

Because of the holidays the December edition will appear on New Year's Eve. Then new episodes continue to appear on the last day of each month. The next episode will be about hope!

The co-centre of my podcast will be my blog/newsletter.

Yes, the good old-fashioned (?) blogging! Independent, hosted on my website. Technically merged with this newsletter, so you never miss an article. You can read my blog:

• On my website,

• Via this newsletter,

• Via RSS feed reader (address on my website).

Everything on the blog is free, but there will be extra content only for my members: articles about traditional knowledge and tutorials how to reconnect with nature.

In my blog, you will find what I can't present in a radio show: images and short videos. Therefore also more art, hopefully inspiring for you. But I will also record a few selected articles. These will be available in the podcast feed. You can recognise them by the label "Precuts".

A blog can be more spontaneous, but you'll find the same topics:

• Biodiversity

• Cultural Heritage (with nature art and traditional knowledge)

• Reconnecting with nature (with earth beauty, selfcare and how-to)

As a plus I want to contemplate about the multi-crises of our time and present you facts and  solution approaches.

My work is intense, especially in research. I am happy about any support! You can reach me now on Mastodon as @NatureMC@mastodon.online 

Thank you so much for listening to NatureMatchCuts!

Become a Supporter

photo: violet oil beetle (Meloe violaceus)

I still can't believe it, but it just happened (at 37,5°C!): Now the "real" podcast started (after episode 0 as an intro and one of the small and irregular "precuts" = blog posts).

Listen to episode 1 HERE or at platforms like Google, Spotify & Stitcher (as it was uploaded right now, it will take some time that the feed is updated everywhere).

EP 01: The Mess We Hate And The Beauty Of Brambles

Travel  with NatureMatchCuts through times and spaces, and follow me deep into the brambles: Meet a pugnacious Madonna in the bushes and a sensitive Triceratops at breakfast. A beautiful creature fights against a garden of horror and teaches us more laziness. We look at hedges while having  our perspective changed by a dog. Reconnect with nature with my scripted podcast between Nature Writing and science.

If you like it: recommend it, share it without restraint!

If you want to support my work, you can become a member of our community here on Steady! You can become a springtail, a brimstone, a leaf cutter ant and even mycorrhiza - just choose your favourite plan.

Find very information about NatureMatchCuts on my Website https://naturematchcuts.net

Thank you so much for every motivation and especially for listening!

Kind regards from the French Nature Park Vosges du Nord,

Petra

PS: Much in podcasting is learning by doing for me. So I apologise again that I had to postpone this episode one week because of construction machines in front of my studio. Next time I would work at night, but the heatwave exhausts me too much ... so I sleep at night.

I still have to solve the entry to Apple. Unfortunately, it's more complicated than I thought, especially as they don't give any error messages. Some hosters get you in there automatically, but that costs a lot of money every month, which I don't have. And my hoster belongs to Apple's competition. But it would be a laugh if I didn't solve this problem one day. So sorry to all Apple users at the moment!

I have never had to postpone an important release date in my life. I feel accordingly bad about it.

Episode 1 of my podcast NatureMatchCuts will, unfortunately, be released later, on 4 August, due to unforeseen circumstances. I have an extremely loud construction site in front of the studio, so I can't record this week.

The podcast episode was almost in the can. There were just a few small details of language and short texts to be re-read. Unfortunately, the sounds are so loud despite the closed windows that I can't delete them from the recordings. One would be jolted by machines or get a stone saw in the ear with every newly mounted scene.

At first, I wanted to record at night. But even there ... my dog had a bad flea attack, yesterday we went to the vet and today it's time for cleaning and washing blankets. I need the nights to sleep.

I want the first episode to meet my high-quality standards. So I apologise for the extraordinary postponement. I am truly sorry. I hope you will still be following me!

Until next week you can listen to episode 0 and a blog post on my website.

Thank you for your understanding!

For all who waited so patiently: NatureMatchCuts - the podcast reconnecting you with nature - is launched (at the end of June). Just go to the website in this link where you can listen directly or find your favourite platforms (still waiting for Apple and others) to subscribe to the podcast feed. You know, subscribing to such a feed is like food for podcasters, so we know that we don't produce into the void.

The famous Zero episode gives you a feeling of the sound and tells you about the motivation, the goals, and me. And the beetles under my bed when I was a child.

Episodes are published monthly, every last Thursday of a month.

Then I thought I'd blog a bit in between. But somehow, I can't keep it short. And maybe you are like me: I don't like to stare at the screen and read long texts all day. So I like it when you can listen to them while doing something else. Now I have the hardware and software to record!

This is how the Precuts - thoughts between episodes - came about. Wild, diverse, and appearing irregularly. If you have problems understanding spoken English, you can also read the texts with a translation programme.

Find the text of the first Precut in my NatureMatchCuts Blog. There's a button for listening. Or just go to your podcast platform and choose the NatureMatchCuts Podcast. Or listen here:

In Precut One I talk about one of my childhood role models, Dr Jane Goodall and what we can learn about her perseverance and ideas for solutions. It is a text about two very different feelings of smallness and how we could overcome the frustrating one for coming into action.

A Child's Play?

Someone recently said on Twitter that nowadays, everyone does a podcast and that it would be child's play to just yak into a microphone. I laughed and thought of the class I had taken. Our teacher said: "Anyone can make a podcast. But very few are still doing it by episode 3."

I can confirm: It's da.m.n hard work. Talking may be the least of it unless the neighbour is playing with the leaf blower again. For editing, I listen to the 20 minutes for the audience countless times. In snippets, because I delete every careless mouse click, every noise when the computer ventilates against the heat. The slips of the tongue, recently even a burp. Embarrassing. The stomach should not be too full when speaking, but not empty either. If it rumbles with hunger, I have to record again. Because a sensitive microphone also picks that up very clearly. All this is fun work!

Most complicated for me is the planning and doing of social media communication. It is a profession itself, and I can't double myself. I have to be many! And as "everybody has a podcast", people have to find it! Plus blogging and editorial plans.

I decided on a scripted podcast because you usually only get the exciting interview partners when you have already made a name for yourself. Scripted podcasts are, next to radio features, the most demanding. They are written (for me, it is a foreign language). But it's a completely different kind of writing than an article because it has to seem spoken. Because you hardly "turn the page back", the inner logic is also structured differently. I've long been sitting on the episode that will be published at the end of July.

I am telling you all this so that you understand why I took all the time I needed to prepare, even if some thought I was doing nothing (hahaha).

At the same time, I have even more ideas (and always too little time).

You have seen that you can support my work with money. As a thank you, later there will be - also in irregular order - members-only blogposts. Practical instructions, contemplations, and help for a change of perspective, which we need so much to find solutions. It's not easy to get to grips with changing our paradigm of nature. I once got an exercise when I was writing: Imagine you are a pizza. Describe the last 15 minutes of your life. In nature, it's even more complicated: cheese alone is an ecosystem.

If you want to support my work just choose one of the plans here on Steady and hear a big thank you coming from my heart!

Find every information about the NatureMatchCuts Podcast & Blog on https://naturematchcuts.net 

There you also see the distribution platforms - at the moment it's Spotify (+Anchor), Google and Stitcher. I hope that Apple will react soon, other platforms will follow.

That's my little victory in IT. As we all know, the devil is in the detail. And so it took me no less than 2 weeks to find out what was wrong with the security certificate for my new domain. Sometimes you should just pull the plug. So I simply deleted the old SSL-certificates and entered new ones - and lo and behold, everything works. Now I can write the texts for the platforms where you can listen to the podcast.

The countdown is on. In the meantime, I'm busy editing the famous Episode 0, for which I've found not only fantastic music. You can even hear my neighbour's rooster, and that's the way it has to be. Nature! Only the outro and the finishing touches are missing.

Image showing Audacity Software with sound waves

Then I will speak and edit the 1st episode. As befits the technique of a match cut (I explain what that is in Episode 0), different stories entwine around a theme. Like twining tendrils in spring - I seriously thought I could talk about brambles for an hour without you falling asleep.

Fortunately, that was only the first inspiration and I hopped from one thorn to the next. We want to shift perspectives! When I was looking for an entry theme, I became alert: there were so many people who perceive nature as dirty. Others hid photos of beautiful bugs on social media or replaced their already hostile golf lawn with plastic. What is going wrong? I had my theme for Episode 1: "Everything we hate." Don't worry, it will be entertaining because right at the beginning a voracious triceratops will stomp onto the world stage.

I'll keep it short because there's still a lot of work to do.

Subscribe to my newsletter to find out when NatureMatchCuts starts and to get my blog posts conveniently delivered to your inbox. I hurry up ... to work.

I call her Sweet Lady Violet because Hesperis matronalis became a friend to me, a sign of hope, an encouraging fragrance. She brought me out of a very deep hole after the first extremely strict lockdown in France and having recovered from illness. How to befriend and learn from a plant is what I tell you in this little essay first published by the Center For Humans And Nature, USA.

Pic: Tiny animal called collembola, living in soil (you see them only with a magnifyer)

It sounds perhaps crazy, but my Nature Match Cut community starts with written words, while the podcast is still braised in the pipeline. You know, a good roast takes a while before it tastes delicious!

What can you expect here?

• The community website (currently being set up),

• Blog posts / newsletter,

• My podcast Nature Match Cuts on all major listening channels,

• Me on social media: Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon.

You do not have to become a member to use these offers for free.

But of course, members who sponsor me should also get a little something out of it. For this, there will be exclusive content behind the scenes for the memberships brimstone, leafcutter ant and mycorrhiza:

• In-depth articles,

• Meditations / exercises to connect with nature,

• and ... no, I won't reveal everything yet. You will later find the contents under the individual memberships.

I just want to start now, even if not everything is perfect and worked out yet, otherwise you will never get to see anything. A lot of things are running in the background, so today I registered a domain for the podcast - and it has to be installed.

For now, welcome - I look forward to seeing you!

Petra,

directly from the nature parc Vosges du Nord in Eastern France