#arables

[huariqueje]

Värmland Landscape With a Red Barn   -   Hilding Werner , c. 1940.

Swedish ,  1880-1944

Oil on board , 46 x 62 cm.

[glitchlight]

it's a difficult position to be in as an environmental scientist and a leftist, and i always try to stay aware of how in the us especially there's a reflexive backlash to this kind of language but: some of yall are fucking delusional about what a sustainable future looks like, and refuse to acknowledge the fact that some of the creature comforts americans have grown used to need to go away. Public transit systems usually kind of suck but it's better than cars. We need to be building a lot more kind of shitty apartments and a lot less private homes. You are setting the AC too damn low. And the entire agriculture and food economy is grossly distorted because people love eating meat and fruit out of season.

[chaotictoon]

Piglet

Cartoon girls + Pet Pigs

[alteredsilicone]

Albrecht, admiring Loid's rose garden: Quite impressive, you must have had a lot of experience gardening.

Loid, who lived in the Orokin equivalent of a commie block for the better part of his life and the most experience with plants he had were the few potted snake plants on his windowsill: ...you could say I had quite a lot of academic experience with gardening.

(translation: Loid read a lot of books on gardening to pass the time and daydream about the hypothetical garden he thought he would never be able to get)

[namedafterflowerstournament]

Botanic Tournament : Ferns Poll !

Fern Mertens (Adventure Times)

Fern Arable (Charlotte's Web) - she's the little girl, not the piglet

Fearne Calloway (Critical Role)

Fern the Green Fairy (Rainbow Magic)

Fern (Disney Fairies)

The two with the most votes will get into the main bracket

[mapsontheweb]

Percentage of arable land of a countrys whole area

[rastronomicals]

2:34 AM EDT August 5, 2024:

The Red Krayola -   "Hurricane Fighter Plane (Free Form Freakout)" From the album The Parable of Arable Land (1967)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: H-Town Psychedelia

[farmerstrend]

The Future of Wheat Farming in Kenya: The Economic Benefits of Israeli-Kenyan Wheat Farming Partnerships

“Explore the potential transformation of Kenya’s wheat farming through Israeli investment, focusing on innovative technologies and private partnerships to boost production and create jobs.” “Learn how Israeli investors are set to revolutionize wheat farming in Kenya, enhancing food security and leveraging advanced agricultural technologies in private-sector partnerships.” “Discover the future of…

[autisticcharacterslist]

Fern Arable from Charlotte's Web. Fiercely compassionate, determined, nurturing, & willing to stand up for what she believes in. Bravely stops her father from killing a baby pig when she's only eight years old. Declares she doesn't see any difference between a baby pig & a human baby. Worries her parents with her intense love for animals.

[lunarwildrose]

The two children's book characters with my personality types, Fern from Charlotte's Web for INFP and Sara from A Little Princess for INFJ.

[princesssarisa]

Autism headcanon:

Fern Arable (Charlotte's Web)

Note: This is about the book character only, not her portrayal in Hanna-Barbera's animated film or by Dakota Fanning in the 2006 live-action film.

*Through most of the book, she prefers animals to people. The only other child she plays with is her brother Avery; she doesn't seem to have any close friends. Instead, she's content to spend hours sitting quietly in the barn cellar and watching Wilbur in his pigpen. Obviously, being a loner and having a hyperfixation (animals) are two classic ASD traits, and a special affinity with animals is common for people on the spectrum too, especially children.

*Her mother is so concerned about her spending so much time alone in the barn instead of with other children, and how sincerely she seems to believe that the animals talk, that she consults the family doctor about her. The doctor is unconcerned, but it still shows that her behavior isn't "normal."

*Her uncle, Mr. Zuckerman, calls her "a queer child."

*Her fixation on Wilber and the other animals distracts her from practical things: for example, when she daydreams about him in class and accidentally answers "Wilbur" when the teacher asks her to name the capital of Pennsylvania.

*Yet she's intelligent for her age, with a more advanced vocabulary than the average eight-year-old (e.g. "injustice," "aloft," "sociable").

*At the same time, she's very sensitive and doesn't always think rationally or regulate her emotions very well. ("Fern, you will have to learn to control yourself," her father says.) She cries easily throughout the book, and at the beginning, she sees no difference between euthanizing a weak, undersized piglet and killing a human baby.

*When the rotten goose egg breaks, she reacts to the horrible smell by screaming and then starting to cry. A bit of an overblown reaction, unless she's hypersensitive to smell, as many people on the autism spectrum are.

*She sometimes doesn't seem to "read the room" very well. For example, at the fair, when Wilbur doesn't win first prize and the adults are all disappointed and sad, she interrupts the moment to ask for money to ride the Ferris wheel again.

*She understands the animals' speech when none of the other human characters can. When she tries to tell her parents about it, her mother thinks she's just making it up. While understanding animal language isn't an average autistic trait, it's still relatable to those of us whose perceptions and abilities are different than most other people's and tend to be misunderstood.

*In the end, as she develops a crush on Henry Fussy, she loses interest in the animals and stops visiting the barn, because she's "growing up" and wants to avoid "childish things." This might reflect that some children on the spectrum, especially girls, become more social and learn to "mask" as they get older.

Now some people might argue that these traits are just her being a child, or just her unique personality. I don't think E.B. White set out to write her as autistic. But I still think it's a valid headcanon. Especially since, from all I've read about White – his introversion and shyness, his own affinity for animals, his chronic anxiety, etc. – I sometimes wonder if he was on the spectrum himself.

[landwriter]

not to sound like a country queer but man do i love my pitchfork

[wearethewitches]

oh BTW, i finally watched mando s3, and now i intimately understand why people ship din & bo-katan. bc like,,,,,, the vibes are Immaculate and just played off so equally(?). seriously, i did a double-take the moment we saw her on that big fuck-off throne and they started chatting.

[kiseiakhun]

Why the fuck does milk cost $6 now. I'm not talking about those giant gallon jugs, I'm talking about the little paper cartons. Six dollars? Six fucking dollars? I mean milk has always been expensive in Canada and also I need the special lactose free milk but SIX FUCKING DOLLARS???????

[ramblings-of-a-mad-cat]

I read Charlotte’s Web back when I was nine so it was nice to read your thoughts on it. I remember liking it when I read it despite my arachnophobia.

That's another great thing about this book! It helps little kids overcome a fear of spiders if they have one! Because Charlotte is gentle, caring, and brilliant. (She's a total Ravenclaw, let's be honest.) She protects Wilbur, both in terms of trying to save his life and also protecting his innocence and feelings. She doesn't tell him that she's dying until she must, and depending on the version, she elects not to tell him about The Smokehouse either. Charlotte is fascinating because she's clearly been alone for a long time and is now grappling with what it means to have a friend again. A friend who is on a higher rung of the food chain yet clearly has no concept of what that means.

I could gush about this tale until I keel over. Seriously, this story means so damn much to me.

[bisquid]

"Kill nothing but time" only works when you have an intact trophic system - which can itself include humans! I don't have any information on it because it's not my area of research but I would not be surprised if one of the effects of the genocide that occurred during the colonisation were ecological effects not unlike those of a major trophic disruption (any data on this would ofc be muddied by the much more direct ecological destruction happening, unfortunately). I know there were food forests on the east coast so productive the settlers thought they'd found Eden, which ~mysteriously~ disappeared not long afterwards. Because they had been managed, but because they didn't look like what the Europeans were used to - arable fields and coppiced woodlands and so on - it was assumed to be a pristine wilderness, and a massive free resource.

One of the things that frustrates me as an ecologist in the rewilding 'sector' is the number of well meaning people consciously or unconsciously valuing 'pristine wilderness' higher or considering it the only real 'end goal' and being sort of sniffy about 'half measures' like protecting field margins and wilding urban green spaces. 'those things are important but they're just a stopgap measure! We need to protect more land and give it back to nature!' which is a well meaning but incredibly frustrating attitude to take, honestly.

One: I am based in Scotland, which has an incredibly low percentage of actually 'pristine' (another word that's more open to interpretation than people think but I won't get into that now) landscape because.. well. Centuries of deforestation, land clearances, intensive farming and monoculture timber plantations, among other things. Today Scotland can boast slightly less (or slightly more, depending how you define it) than one percent of its native pinewood. 'Pristine wilderness' is a pipe dream, here.

Two: there is no way in hell, heaven, or earth that Scotland is going to give up vast areas of productive land - pasture or arable - for 'giving back to nature'. It just won't happen. And, frankly, it doesn't need to happen. The existence of farming is not the problem. Food production is not the problem. Modern farming techniques are the problem, and those problems can be solved, or at least mitigated, with the cooperation of the farmers. Incredible things can be achieved like that! The problem - as everything seems to be these days, seriously, it's exhausting - is this false dichotomy that you can only have 'good untouched wilderness' or 'evil arable farms'. Obviously people don't think it's literally one or the other, but there's a definite inclination towards 'this land can either be for nature or people, not both'. Which is... wildly unhelpful, for obvious reasons. It's also deeply untrue, and between the rewilding I'm involved in professionally and all the Deer Math and associated research I've been doing for fun, it's becoming ever more clear that it's not only possible but far easier than it seems to be able to produce resources including food at a scale significant enough to be a genuine alternative to traditional farming. Especially if you combine it with more 'eco friendly' methods of eg construction.

Coppiced hazel and willow can generate insane quantities of - essentially - small gauge timber, as well as producing haws - theoretically human edible but also a valuable source of food for wildlife. Any fruit bearing tree, again, can provide food for humans and wildlife. Let wild garlic grow where it wants. Plant blackberries and raspberries and manage their spread. Let pigs roam and rootle to grow fat on oak and beech mast, use the winter deer cull to stock your larders with venison rich with winter preparation. Seed riverbanks with cress and alder to shade the water and watch otters playing among their roots. Let elder trees hang heavy with a white foam of flowers in the sunlight in clearings full of wildflowers and the heady buzz of bees at work. Fish in streams and rivers packed with trout and salmon while the swifts and martins dip and dive overhead and the heron stands still as a statue in the shallows.

You don't have to choose between food and nature. You can have both. I promise.

I would far, far rather see a million acres of Aberdeenshire Managed Food Forests than nine hundred thousand acres of traditional intensive farming and a thousand acres of untouched nature reserve.

“National parks have been vital in protecting huge swaths of land, including sacred sites and unique ecosystems, from land developers and other forms of destruction and are some of the last places in the continental United States where many animals are able to live safely from overhunting and unnecessary culls.”

and

“National parks are, just like the rest of the US, land stolen from indigenous people who are now denied access to the lands that their ancestors lived on and cared for for thousands of years, even when having access is vital for a community’s survival, whether that’s through food sources in the form of hunting/fishing/gathering or the ability to continue cultural practices.”

and

“National parks provide places for people to feel connected to nature and to able to observe plants and animals and land masses that they’d never be able to see otherwise, and many national parks also include other services like horseback riding lessons and educational events to help people better understand their planet.“

and

“National parks, including with the famous motto ‘take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints,’ push an ahistorical and frankly dangerous narrative that separates humans from nature, turning people into observers of our world instead of active participants, and does damage to the plants that adapted and evolved at the hands of foragers to benefit the most when they’re harvested.“