Mike Potter 💉 💉 🇺🇦 🇾🇪 💉 💉 🇸🇾 🇵🇸 💉 💉

In 2004 the sheep on a Yorkshire moor worked out how to cross a cattle grid, and the village below them has not had a safe flowerbed since. A cattle grid is the simplest idea in farming. A pit across the road with steel bars over it. A hoof cannot grip the bars, so the animal will not cross. It has kept sheep on hills for the best part of a century. The hill sheep above Marsden, near Huddersfield, looked at theirs for a while. Then one of them lay down on its side at the edge of the grid and rolled. Over and over, eight feet across the bars, like a soldier going under wire. It got up on the far side and walked into the village. Others watched and did the same. Within a season the trick had gone through the flock. Villagers woke to sheep on their lawns, in their vegetable plots and browsing the churchyard. A local councillor told the BBC, with some feeling, that they were also clearing five-foot fences and squeezing through eight-inch gaps. Nobody had taught them. One animal solved the problem and the rest learned it by watching, which is how sheep learn everything, and why a flock knows its own hill. For as long as there have been jokes about sheep, the joke has been that they follow each other. At Marsden they followed the one that had cracked it, across a barrier designed by engineers for the sole purpose of stopping them.

Stop calling it a climate problem. Call it what it is: organized greed. The planet isn’t dying. It’s being killed for profit. The killers have names. And boardrooms. #ClimateJustice #StopEcocide

A Holocaust survivor was given a house stolen from a Palestinian family. When she saw their dishes still on the table, she refused to live there. Her entire family had been exterminated in the Holocaust. She had survived, but arrived in Israel with almost nothing. For a long time, she lived in a tent, in desperate conditions. Then the Jewish Agency offered her a beautiful house by the sea in Ajami, Jaffa. When she entered, she saw something she could never forget. The plates and dishes of the Palestinian family who had lived there were still on the table. The family had been driven from their home. Their belongings remained, as though their ordinary lives had been interrupted without warning. She understood immediately what had happened. She returned to the Jewish Agency and demanded to be taken back to her tent. She would rather live in poverty than take another family's home. Her granddaughter, Israeli filmmaker Hadar Morag, recounted the story in an October 2023 interview with the Italian newspaper il manifesto. It took place against the backdrop of the Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes. In Jaffa, Palestinian properties were subsequently allocated to Jewish immigrants. Morag's grandmother had lost her own family to one of history's greatest crimes. But according to her granddaughter, she refused to let that suffering become a justification for benefiting from someone else's dispossession. Morag concluded her account with a question: “How could we have become what we opposed?” Source: Hadar Morag, il manifesto, 29 October 2023.