Welcome to Dispatch #43! It’s shaping up to be quite the hot summer this year with record-breaking heatwaves sweeping across Europe and a “Super El Niño” that could potentially warm the planet up even more. The climate crisis is here and addressing this crisis requires us to radically reimagine how we think about nature, urban spaces, and our communities.
This week, we want to highlight a piece by Mattia Acerbo for the Ecosocialist that breaks down why even staying cool during summer becomes political and why we must move past the notion that urban spaces and nature are opposed to one another. Comparing trees to living infrastructure is a fascinating way to look at something that many don’t give a second thought, but it’s an important reminder of how urbanism and industrialism have separated us from our natural roots and why we must return to those roots if we want to navigate the world’s changing climate.
In addition - we’ve got a big rewrite on our last Deep Dive essay about sports & fandom as a tool for political organizing, a primer on Anarchism, and the story of an architecture firm that’s working to build more sustainable cities in Singapore. Let’s get into it!
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Easy Actions to Take
Why: On June 29, 2026, Israeli forces shot dead Saleem al-Ashqar, the 32 year old goalkeeper for Khadamat Khan Younis, in al-Qarara, according to the Palestinian Football Association. He is one of 1,009 people from Palestinian sport the Palestinian Football Association says Israel has killed since October 2023, 567 of them from football. Article 64.2 of the FIFA Statutes says no member association may play on the territory of another without its approval but at least six Israeli league clubs are based in settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Demand that FIFA apply its own rules and its own human rights commitments consistently. Organized by Newscord
⏱~3min | Tell Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard: Stop blocking donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center
Why: The SPLC is famous for monitoring and exposing domestic hate groups and winning landmark legal cases against white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan. The US Justice Department has accused the SPLC of criminal fraud, claiming it lied to banks and donors about its reliance on confidential informants inside extremist groups. These claims are unproven but Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard are prohibiting customers with donor-advised funds from making grants to the center, sabotaging the SPLC’s ability to withstand this existential attack by the Justice Department. Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard cannot be the judge, jury, and executioner before the SPLC even gets its day in court. They need to face pressure from the public to reverse course. Organized by The Intercept Voices
⏱~3min | (US Only) Tell Your Representative to Help Free Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya From Israel's Torture Prisons
Why: Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is a renowned pediatrician and acting director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza who has been illegally held captive without charge and tortured by the Israeli military since December 2024 — more than 500 days! In his last visit with his lawyer, Safiya said, "This is the last time you will see me. They brought me here to kill me. I don't see myself surviving. This is the end." Doctors should not be tortured for saving lives. Act now to secure Dr. Abu Safiya's freedom. Organized by IMEU Policy Project
Little (Movement) Wins
Flashback: We Can't Let the Right-Wing Have Sports by Ray
The World Cup is underway and it’s got us thinking a lot about sports and games in general. Few things in life can mobilize people as consistently or powerfully as their favorite sports team - but why? There’s powerful psychological reasons why we’re so invested and that makes sports, games, and other fandoms powerful spaces for political organizing. We’ve seen right-wing and authoritarian governments take advantage of sports and mainstream entertainment to project a more positive image of themselves and spread their ideology to great effect. In this essay we argue that if the Left wants to be victorious, we can’t turn our backs to the power of fandom either.
We shared this essay last Dispatch, but since then I’ve actually done a significant rewrite to make it more clear - so if you already read it, please take another look! Click below to learn what cultural organizing is, how sports and fandom have been used politically, and why we must engage deeply with mainstream culture when building our movements.
Featured Piece
Record heat-waves are boiling across the world and things are only going to get hotter as the time goes on. Places like France have experienced record-breaking heat that has already caused hundreds of deaths. In these times, it becomes evident that heat, and how we deal with it, is actually extremely political. Often the difference between just “being hot” and physical distress is class and as the climate crisis worsens so too will structural inequality of our urban spaces become more obvious.
This short essay by Mattia Acerbo does a great job of breaking down how modern urbanism has tried to control nature, why that’s holding us back from dealing with the climate crisis, and why we must reimagine our relationship with trees and nature in our cities to survive what comes next.
Content Worth Consuming
- Why fandom organizing is a powerful strategy for movement building by Natalie Green, Elana Levin, and Anthony Vidal Torres
- Why: An article written by the organizers behind Project Fulcrum, an initiative by Get Free that aimed to activate Star Wars fans and effectively turn passive viewership into real-world action, breaking down how they were able to leverage a fanbase for political purposes.
- Anarchism, explained by Andrew Lee for In Struggle
- Why: Anarchism is perhaps one of the least understood political ideologies. It’s often thought of as advocating for total chaos without any form of structure, but that’s actually far from the truth. This is a great primer on what anarchism really is and how it looks in practice.
- When the Heat is On by Scot Nakagawa
- Why: A short explanation about the difference between coalition and infrastructure, and why too often coalitions can fracture under pressure when there is not a proper infrastructure built underneath it. A great quick read for anyone who wants to build more resilient groups.
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Conscious Creatives: Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell
Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell are two Singapore-based architects, educators and environmentalists using their skills to build more environmentally and socially sustainable cities that can protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis. In 1994 they started an architectural design firm called WOHA that’s gained global recognition for how they’ve integrated environmental and social principles into their creative approach. Known for their use of natural vegetation as a core building element, their firm has designed a wide range of innovative projects in cities throughout Asia including schools, churches, resorts, airport extensions, train stations, multi-use districts, and commercial and residential projects that have become pinnacles for sustainable design. Their primary focus is creating "breathing architecture" — buildings that are porous, open to air movement and natural light, functions within a system, and is laced with vegetation that’s embedded into the building's water, drainage, and engineering systems from the very first sketch.
What makes their work so enduring is that every building is also a prototype — an idea that gets refined, iterated on, and passed forward into the next project. Some of their notable projects include:
- The Parkroyal on Pickering (2013) introduced sky gardens, inspired by rice terraces, embedded into a hotel's very bones. The use of naturally ventilated corridors, solar-powered irrigation, rain water retention and sun shading helped this project achieve Singapore’s highest environmental certification.
- Oasia Hotel Downtown (2016) wrapped a mixed-use skyscraper in red aluminum mesh threaded with over 50 species of climbing plants, creating a vertical habitat for birds and insects in the heart of Singapore.
- Kampung Admiralty (2018) was named World Building of the Year at the 2018 World Architecture Festival and is stacked elderly housing, a rooftop farm, a medical centre, childcare, and a public park in one integrated community that has since become a global reference point for how cities might care for aging populations.
Their vision, laid out in their book Garden City Mega City, is both a blueprint and a belief: that the comfortable garden suburb experience shouldn't be a privilege reserved for the most affluent, but something replicable and available to everyone. Through their life’s work, WOHA reminds us that the most powerful things we can do when creating urban homes, buildings, and spaces is to challenge preconceptions and ask better questions – not just what should this look like; but who is this for, what does it give back, and what kind of city does it help build? Because every building is a choice about what kind of world we’re making and the only real way to protect nature and ourselves is to weave it into everything we build.
Resources & Tools
Here are some recent adds to the directory. Please share these links with anyone that might find them helpful:
- ⛑ Transform Harm | A resource hub for ending violence and challenging traditional ideas of incarceration, punishment, and justice. This site offers an introduction to transformative justice and includes selected articles, audio-visual resources, curricula, and more to help you learn more about these important concepts.
- 🌎 World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) | A really cool non-profit organization linking visitors with organic farms/farmers from around the world that will host you in exchange helping or working on their farm.
- 🌎 Free Repair Cafes | Worldwide community repair cafes that help you repair your clothes, furniture, appliances, bicycles, toys, etc. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee, lend a hand with someone else’s repair job, or get inspired at the Repair & DIY reading table.
- 🌎 Local Farm Finder | A handy map and directory by My Health Forward to help you find a local farm near you (in Canada, US, or Mexico). If you have a farm, ranch, market, or farm stand you want to add to this map, there's also a submission form on their website.
- 🤝 Mutual Aid Toolkit | A detailed step-by-step guide on how to set up a mutual aid network in your community.
➡️ Explore More on our Directory!
Know any resources that you think would be a great add to our directory? Share it with us! (We only see so much from our corner of the world)
If you're new here, don't forget to sign up to get full access to our directory and free newsletters sent to your inbox every other Sunday. Till next time, do your best and take it one day at a time. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up. And remember, you're not alone. We always have each other.
With Love & Light,
Elisa & Ray
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