idk how anyone can look at how expensive fast food has gotten and think we’re doing okay
there used to be a dollar menu. like. one dollar. that was the gimmick. whole wide selection just one solid dollar (only one). and this was in my lifetime. i remember seeing ads for this shit. wha
u ever see someone with extremely fucked up views (or actions) and think wowww if a couple of things in my life went the tiniest bit differently that would have been me
I think most people would benefit from reflecting on how this might be true for them
Sometimes people bitch about media, both fiction and nonfiction, that they think “humanizes” bad people, especially bigots fascists Nazis et cetera. And I’m just like. Hey. Hey. The problem is. They ARE human. HUMANS did that. Your next door neighbor could do that. Your grandma could do that. You could do that.
“No I’m a good person” why? Because you’ve gotten lucky and not seen propaganda yet that perfectly hit your buttons? Because you had people to correct you when you fucked up? Idk man I don’t think we’re all so different from the bad people. We’re all just people.
Reminding ourselves of our shared humanity with terrible people does NOT serve to justify their actions. It serves to remind us that the seeds of what happened to them could get into us as well, or might already have. It reminds us to be vigilant and interrogate the hatred inside us.
If you convince yourself that you’re just an Inherently Good Person who would never believe hateful things well. Now any little hateful thing that makes its way inside you undetected is never going to be interrogated. It will be left to grow undisturbed.
If you remember that those things can get into anyone, you know to look out for them, and weed them out when they appear, and take the criticism when others point them out in you. So remember, that could have been you. If you forget, maybe it will be.
If you genuinely, truly, absolutely, cannot bring yourself to vote for the president of the united states, please just show up for elections anyway and vote for your congresspeople and local representatives.
Please.
Just.
If you cannot bring yourself to vote for the president because he’s so disgusting of a candidate you morally cannot bring yourself to cross that line, then PLEASE vote for your congresspeople and local representatives who can block, defend, or present new bills, actions, acts, etc.
These are the people who can actually confirm or deny or impede horrendous acts when they happen.
Like. This is the bare minimum. If you cannot vote for the President, please just still vote for someone.
Change doesn’t happen if you don’t vote for the people willing to enact change.
The “smaller” elections often have the biggest impact on your actual life. Everything starts local and works its way outward, not the other way around. Every time a judge lets a cop off the hook for killing an unarmed person? You can vote those judges out. Those anti-queer laws in your home state? You can vote out the governor. Hate seeing your taxes raised for the sake of more cops while the schools and the roads go to shit? You can vote on those tax bills. “Blue” states aren’t safer just because of who they vote for as president. It’s because they voted for better governors, better judges, better laws.
You gotta do it, because fuckhead old conservatives are doing it. They’ve got bad ideas and they’re willing to make them your problem. Your single vote might not count for much in the presidential election, but it absolutely has an impact on who is in charge in your particular town.
Your vote in a schoolboard election can mean the difference between electing someone who thinks public schools are good versus someone who reps Moms For Liberty and not so secretly wants to burn books that make them feel icky.
“A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.
The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.
Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.
The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.
“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.
“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”
The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.
“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”
By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.
The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.
However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures.”
-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024
Reblogging to show the temperature maps that are featured in the original study (and the Guardian article about it), because the visual difference really is so striking and so encouraging.
As you look at these maps of forests vs. temperature trends, remember that the temperature map is showing large-scale, very long-term averages, especially on the temperature map. Because of that, the map data doesn’t reflect how very, very big a difference it can make on a local scale, e.g. those 9°F summer temperature conditions. And those local scale changes are the changes that people actually live in.
This is hugely
Forest Age vs. Warming Maps
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Pictured: Guardian graphic. Source: Barnes, et al, 2024, ‘A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States.’ Note: Forest age data from North American Carbon Program. Age estimates as of 2019 at 1km resolution. Temperature data from Delaware Air Temperature & Precipitation Dataset.
(Also, btw, for any non-US and/or non-geography people, don’t worry about the fact that there aren’t any forests in the middle of the country. That’s the Great Plains. Like we definitely did turn most of it into cropland, but it’s not supposed to have forests.)
This is huge.
Even the small pockets of new reforestation elsewhere in the country are usually correlated with small pockets of cooling. (And of course correlation by itself does not equal causation, but that’s what the rest of the study is for.)
This is genuinely strong evidence that the massive tree planting campaigns of the last 25 years are going to pay off dramatically much sooner than we thought.
The study found that the coolest forests were ones planted planted 20 to 40 years ago.
That means that trees planted in the 90s through 2004 are in that stage and causing the most cooling right now.
It also means that the ongoing, absolutely massive recent reforestation efforts are going to pay off a lot between now and 2050.
That means campaigns like China’s 2022 pledge to plant or conserve 70 billion trees by 2030. Or India’s annual tree-planting drive, which in 2021 saw 250 million trees planted in just one day. Or Kenya’s new tree-planting holiday, started in 2023, to plant 100 million trees each year.
This study also gives strong evidence that newer forests don’t have vanishingly few benefits compared to old growth forests - they do have benefits (if not as many), just different ones. It also, I would argue, suggests that tree planting efforts don’t have to be ecologically perfect to make a real difference. They certainly were not nailing native plant biodiversity and ecological best practices in the US in the 1930s!
And as we learn (and actually implement) more and more about how to do reforestation right - more biodiversity, native plants only, actual forests and not just tree plantations - the benefits of reforestation will only increase.
A point of explanation for those who aren’t used to having to read scientific figures, and are thinking that this doesn’t make any sense so there must be a big flaw: the fact that the newer forests are associated with more cooling doesn’t mean that younger forests give more cooling effect. It means that there’s no cooling effects from the older forests because they were there all along. What that map shows is the change over 100 years. If the forest was there (and mature) for the whole time, the cooling was already happening in 1910, so there was no change from 1910 to 2010.
@yarnings Yes, exactly! Thank you for adding that clarification!!
I’m starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.
I think it’s a vicious cycle; when people don’t know something exists, they’re not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.
This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests
@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.
Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches
And THEN.
I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.
HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.
I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was “Whoa! That is BIG.”
Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just…little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.
I dive down the Research Hole™. Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren’t viable.
It’s barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there’s not enough research
There’s a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA
Some gardening websites list its height as “over 6 feet” “Over 10 feet” There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES “AS THICK AS A MAN’S THIGH.”
The interval between flowering is anyone’s guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone’s guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.
It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.
I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it’s an inch.
Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I’m growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.
The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that’s 140 individual PLANTS.
Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren’t living long enough to reach mature size or aren’t healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.
it’s called the Alabama Canebrake Pitcher Plant and there are, in total, 11 known sites where it still grows.
in general i’m feral over the carnivorous plant variety of the Southeastern USA. we have SO many super-rare carnivorous plants!!!
Protect the wetlands. Protect the canebrakes because the canebrakes protect the wetlands.
Many years ago I did some (non-academic) research on native canes in the USA because I thought I remembered seeing a bamboo-like something in the wild that I’d been told was native, and I thought it might make a nice landscaping accent. But the sources I found said something like “unlike Asian bamboos, the American equivilant barely reaches the height of a man”, and I went “nah, that is exactly the wrong height for anything.” But if it gets 10 feet and up, I think there are a lot of people who would be VERY happy to use it as a sight barrier in public and private landscaping, and if it means putting in a bit of a wetland/rain garden, all the better. The lack of a good native equivelant to bamboo is something I have heard numerous people bemoan. Obviously it’s very important to protect wild sites and expand those, but if it’d be helpful, I bet it wouldn’t be hard to convince landscapers to start new patches too.
For instance, a lot of housing developments, malls, etc. seem to set aside a percentage of their land for semi-wild artificial wetlands (drainage maybe?) planted with natives, and then block the messy view with walls of arbovitae or clump bamboo from asia - perhaps it would be a better option there?
Good Lord. Arundinaria isn’t just a better option, it’s perfect.
I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.
The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.
It grows slowly compared to Asian bamboos, and seems to need some shade to establish, so it would take time to become a good barrier, but no worse than those stupid arborvitae.
plants like this were often intentionally cultivated in planter boxes as a form of water filtration and civil engineering by a bunch of indigenous nations.
There’s a reason why Native Americans cultivated canebrakes.
Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.
The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.
This stuff is, no joke, a viable alternative to plastic for a lot of things. The seeds and shoots are also edible.
Uh I know this is out of left field but I work in plant cloning - it’s a lot easier than you’d think to do for plants and it’s honestly a really important conservation tool, and good for making a TON of seedlings in a short amount of time. I can look into this genus for like, cloning viability?
I know about reproducing plants from cuttings, rhizome cuttings have proven doable with this species.
Hi y'all, reblogging the Canebrake Post again. It’s been over a year since I fell in love with the coolest plant ever. I’m trying to bring it back but I am very small so if any of y'all have a Canebrake nearby you might wanna talk to the owners and contact some local parks and nature preserves yeah?
I ran an Aliens rpg years back. But the players didn’t KNOW it was an Aliens game until halfway through the first session.
They thought it was a sci-fi game but they also thought the monsters were going to be zombies.
Over a period of 2 hours they then proceeded to make EVERY Aliens movie cliche “mistake” known to man. Because at the time they all made sense.
The characters in a story don’t know they’re in a story or what kind of story it is.
They might think their in a romcom instead of a slasher movie. And if you’re not in a slasher movie, why the fuck would you search through every closet in your house just because a cup mysteriously fell off a table in the dining room?
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