#conservation shit

[hardtchill]

this opening ceremony is basically a mix between Eurovision and Pride with a sprinkle of Olympics thrown in there

[casbeeminestiel]

Things that happened this summer that still don’t feel real because I miss my job:

-lived with 50 18-30 year olds on the weekends in a converted nursing home that used to be a halfway house

-lived in a tent for the rest of the week all over the southeast

-was awoken by about 20 coyotes screaming more frequently than I’d like to remember (if you’ve never heard coyotes screaming and want to hear what absolute terror sounds like, look it up on YouTube)

-hiked for like 15 miles one day with tools

-had to evacuate from a national forest and abandon our campsite temporarily for a few days until we were pulled from the project because a very dangerous convict had escaped about 15 miles away and was very likely hiding in the woods

-hiked barefoot on my day off for two miles because there were about six creek crossings with very slippery rocks and my shitty sandals weren’t cutting it, only to get to the swimming hole and find that it was freezing cold. I went in regardless and only experienced the consequences of my actions when I was trying to hike out up a small and extraordinarily narrow cliff trail with numb legs and full body shivers, still barefoot :)

-befriended a horse

-planned a screenplay for a horror movie, went to one of the Great Lakes, bought a ukulele, and played an obscene amount of pool whilst waiting for our instructions after the convict thing

-went camping in the smokies on a weekend and participated in the most sketchy yet fun tube rafting ever. also saw a bear :)

-ingested sawdust and am still ingesting sawdust actually due to an unfortunately placed nalgene on a rainy day bench restoration in TN

-let river fish give me a mani/pedi also in TN

[inkskinned]

it is totally okay to be hurt and tired and fed up with the american schooling system but i need you to understand that we need to be better about loudly and routinely defending public education.

yes, many teachers suck, many schools utterly suck. i also got bullied and was absolutely not given the right support for my needs. i am not defending public education because it was kind to me. i am defending it because it needs to exist.

right-wing republicans do not want an educated population. they want kids to be homeschooled or in private school. there is a huge religious undertone to this.

the most common argument is that despite high costs, the "result" is not "good" enough. they point to failing schools as proof that public education is just never going to work out. there will be arguments made here that you actually agree with: that teachers can be bullies, that we taught online for 2 years and still charged the same amount of tuition, that we have no recourse for students to actually have agency or a voice, and that schools are now unsafe for kids due to risk of illness and gun violence.

these are all placing the blame in a fraudulent way, one intended to get your parents to homeschool you. the less kids in a school, the less federally-awarded funding for that school, the less any school succeeds. they will not mention the fact it is their legislation that takes away important funding opportunities, that teachers are living at or below the poverty line, that buildings are not kept up to code, that administration is overpaid and forces specific curriculums, that corporations like (my personal enemy) Pearson Education control certain classroom goals because teachers can't afford other options. they pretend to be ignorant of the gun violence and say "oh just get a gun" - but these are the same people who will be sending their child to a private school with a bulletproof backpack. they don't care if your kid dies, though. they "don't believe" in covid, but they did get their kid vaccinated, because of course they did.

it is a closed loop. conservative parents hear the fearmongering and remove children from the system. frequently these parents are also deeply religious. the kids are raised without access to other media & learn to parrot their parents. you have now created a new generation of conservatives. additionally, one of the parents/caregivers must stay home and homeschool the children, usually for free. i will give you 1 guess which parent tends to stay home to homeschool the children. these parents are encouraged to have many, many children. those children are most likely not getting access to safe sex ed.

we might laugh at fox news suggesting teachers are forcing children to use kitty litter but: first of all, there is kitty litter in the classroom. it's part of an emergency kit in case children are locked in due to a shooter. so that's fucking dystopian, and the fact they've completely reimagined the scenario to somehow make the teachers look bad when it's instead a fucking huge symbol of our failure as a country to protect our children.... it feels a little intentional.

secondly: don't just dismiss the situation. because, yeah, obviously, no teacher is encouraging kids to be a catboy. but the actual undertone that fox news is trying to sew is an outright distrust of teachers and of public education. they rely on the dehumanization of trans people as a common touchstone to hide the fact they're pushing two agendas at once. (which is ironic. because the thing they accuse teachers of. is pushing. an agenda.)

whenever someone tells you they want you to read less, you should be suspicious of that. when someone tries to separate you and your education, you should be suspicious of that. i don't even like incel rhetoric nor would i want my kids exposed to it - but i would not take away my child's (age-appropriate) access to the internet. i would just provide more educational materials, not less. the difference here is that i believe we can resolve ignorance with knowledge; whereas conservatives believe that ignorance is bliss.

they misappropriate funding and demonize teachers. they pull the same trick each time - the same thing we are seeing with anti-trans rhetoric. they do not want you to have access to safe sex ed, so they act horrified, claim sex ed teaches you how to thrust deep, claim that we have no idea what "age-appropriate" means. since the mid-nineties, the united states has spent at least 2 billion dollars on abstinence-only education, even though to quote the above link: "a preponderance of studies has found no effect of abstinence education at reducing adolescent pregnancy". conservatives want you to think less of any person struggling with addiction so they can continue their racist "war on drugs", so they spend up to $750 million dollars a year on the DARE program which has absolutely no effect. acting like teachers "must" be "grooming" children is just the same thing - so they can demand that funding either goes to their causes or the funding doesn't "exist" ("i'm not paying for our kids to learn that thing!")

and they want you to feel uncaring about this. they are aware that you will hate some parts of your school experience. pretty much everyone does. they want to lean into the parts that you hate so that you don't put up a fight about it when they take it away for not being "good enough."

i know i maybe sound like a conspiracy theorist. but truly. truly. it is beneficial for conservatives to reduce your faith in the american public schooling system.

one of the explicitly stated campaign promises of the conservative party: to axe the Department of Education in 2024.

i know we are all tired and burnt out and there is so much else wrong with their entire platform. but maybe just - pay attention to this one.

[icomefromthemountains]

YEASSSSS!!!!!!! !!!!!!

[botanyshitposts]

ok INCREDIBLY old content originally meant for this blog but in 2018 when i was just a wee lad with a little spinner propeller hat and big rainbow lollipop i went to a carnivorous plant convention in california and met a bunch of people who breed/collect/study these guys. one person was this collector who was slowly working on leaving the hobby or at least no longer growing plants, and he had a bunch of carnivorous plant related files he was charging like 50 cents for or something, and so i came into possession of these, which are examples of the kind of paperwork you have to have done to legally ship/trade endangered species of both plants and animals. functionally very boring paperwork, but something i found like, incredibly fascinating. i blacked out the personal id of the person and then immediately forgot to ever upload them, lmao.

these plants were bred and raised in a greenhouse and sold abroad, not taken from the wild, but because the species are endangered and often protected in their native countries (most of these are nepenthes, asian pitcher plants, a huge family spread throughout oceania and southeast asia), there's a lot more documentation that needs to be done regardless of their origin, both on the end of the seller and on the end of the buyer.

the rabbit hole on carnivorous plant trade is deep and kind of wild. there's plenty of common, non-threatened, greenhouse-grown pitcher plants on the market that people buy all the time, even non-collectors, but there's a whole debate to be had on if it's morally okay to be collecting the more endangered/rare of these plants in the first place. the big argument for breeding is that breeding them in captivity means there's more supply that's not poached from the wild, meaning poachers have less of an incentive to take the risk of taking adult plants from their habitats; from what i've heard, sometimes countries will issue permits for breeders to collect some wild seeds just to create a non-wild breeding pool to drive down the price. predictably, however, you also get people who are very much willing to pay a lot of money to get as rare of a plant as possible.

anyone familiar with the allure valuable plants have had over people throughout history can imagine the rest, but here's an article about a guy who started buying poached plants to enrich his private nepenthes collection, who then got busted by a fish and wildlife service agent embedded in his carvirorous plant circle. the plants this guy was buying were being sold to him without any CITES paperwork or declarations like the ones above; it was literally just a guy in indonesia taking rare plants from the woods around where he lived, selling them over facebook marketplace and ebay, and mailing them overseas as an undeclared 'gift' to get around customs. frighteningly small steps to take on all sides, to be honest.

(also, fun fact: another example of carnivorous plants that get poached are wild venus fly traps, which are only native to north and south carolina in the US. from what i understand it's a mix of people who genuinely did not know it's a native species and people who really are just going out into the woods and digging up plants to sell online. sometimes poaching is closer to home than you'd think!)

anyway. wild and interesting times in the land of plants recovered from a hard drive lmao

[liberalsarecool]

JD Vance is 40 years old.

His understanding of the world for a person born in 1984 is fcuking pathetic.

Powerful, accomplished women were everywhere. Geraldine Ferrraro was the VP candidate in 1984!!

No one that young hates women that much without some major issues. This is not casual misogyny, JD is warped. It's disturbing.

[reasonsforhope]

"The world’s coral reefs are close to 25% larger than we thought. By using satellite images, machine learning and on-ground knowledge from a global network of people living and working on coral reefs, we found an extra 64,000 square kilometers of coral reefs — an area the size of Ireland.

That brings the total size of the planet’s shallow reefs (meaning 0-20 meters deep) to 348,000 square kilometers — the size of Germany. This figure represents whole coral reef ecosystems, ranging from sandy-bottomed lagoons with a little coral, to coral rubble flats, to living walls of coral.

Within this 348,000 km² of coral is 80,000 km² where there’s a hard bottom — rocks rather than sand. These areas are likely to be home to significant amounts of coral — the places snorkelers and scuba divers most like to visit.

You might wonder why we’re finding this out now. Didn’t we already know where the world’s reefs are?

Previously, we’ve had to pull data from many different sources, which made it harder to pin down the extent of coral reefs with certainty. But now we have high resolution satellite data covering the entire world — and are able to see reefs as deep as 30 meters down.

We coupled this with direct observations and records of coral reefs from over 400 individuals and organizations in countries with coral reefs from all regions, such as the Maldives, Cuba and Australia.

To produce the maps, we used machine learning techniques to chew through 100 trillion pixels from the Sentinel-2 and Planet Dove CubeSat satellites to make accurate predictions about where coral is — and is not. The team worked with almost 500 researchers and collaborators to make the maps.

The result: the world’s first comprehensive map of coral reefs extent, and their composition, produced through the Allen Coral Atlas.

The maps are already proving their worth. Reef management agencies around the world are using them to plan and assess conservation work and threats to reefs...

In good news, these maps are already leading to real world change. We’ve already seen new efforts to conserve coral reefs in Indonesia, several Pacific island nations, Panama, Belize, Kenya and Australia, among others."

-via GoodGoodGood, May 2, 2024

--

Note: You can see the maps yourself by going here!

[queerdiazs]

as an eddie girl who loves buddie and enjoys bucktommy, one of the best things to come out of the tommy and eddie hate is how many of you have exposed yourselves for being homophobic, misogynistic, racist, classist, elitist, and bigoted motherfuckers ✨🫧

[sher-ee]

https://x.com/blueatlgeorgia/status/1802904289783767542?s=46&t=mbJnYiD2cTkYQM25aWje0A

Go to this tweet to watch full video ⬆️

[punkitt-is-here]

i think we should tell blonde guys with glasses they look like Dahmer, keep them on their toes

noooo listen. I don't care how funny something sounds in your head, I have serious issues with making fun of people for things about their appearance even if it is "accurate" or whatev. We should all be nicer!!

[saffigon]

being anti-porn is not the great leftist idea you think it is. it's fucking purity culture. and being anti-porn as a whole is being anti-sex work, actually. you can acknowledge the horrors of the porn industry without being anti-porn as a whole.

[solvevi]

my fanart of ryland steel catcher from hit 2012 mmo guild wars 2: the icebrood saga

[botanyshitposts]

ok this sounds insane but in 2018 i went to a few carnivorous plant talks at the botany conference in minnesota. i got caught up in conversation with one of the guys there who was a huge nepenthes guy who told me a story about another collector in the pacific northwest who'd been buying poached plants, like a huge amount, and eventually got staked out by the fish and wildlife service and arrested and had all his plants seized and went to prison for it. idk if i ever talked about this on this blog before-- i know i liveblogged a lot from that conference but cant remember what all i posted-- but ive avoided talking about it since then because i was never able to find like, news articles or anything covering it, but behold.... we now have proof it was real, and im like 80% sure this was this guy he was talking about. the raid happened in 2016 and they'd been staking them out since 2013. he had nearly 400 plants and had been sourcing many of them from poachers in indonesia and borneo.

remember folks: poaching happens with plants too! it's a huge problem not only in carnvirous plants (nepenthes especially, which this piece is dedicated to talking about) but also in native plant populations in the US, including native carnivorous plant populations (north and south carolina's venus fly traps, california's darlingtonia, and sarracenia from the east coast), native orchids (historically one of the most poached categories), desert plants/cacti/succulents, and slow-growing woody ornamentals (cycads, for example). never buy bare-root plants off ebay or facebook! your best bet is local nurseries (which usually purchase farm-raised plants that do well in a wide range of conditions, and as a result have a healthy population in the wild) or specialty greenhouses (more expensive, but at least in the case of carnivorous plants offer young plants bred from established adult plants in-house, raised in captivity).

[ssaturnsapphic]

when i see yt americans tell black and brown americans to vote for biden bc “trump will be worse” or “trump is extreme right”, i roll my eyes bc where on the political spectrum does joe biden, who is financing and supporting multiple genocides as well as restricting the human rights of MILLIONS of people, fall? yt ppl think that bc he tweets abt roe v wade (which he could’ve codified but didn’t btw) that that makes him left wing

[uncanny-tranny]

At this point, talks about "mutilated bodies" tell me everything I need to know about people's politics. I truly don't believe you can combine the idea of mutilated or degenerate bodies with anything even slightly progressive in terms of autonomy. If you believe yourself to be progressive or anything left of an unapologetic fascist, you frankly cannot truly entertain the idea that some bodies and people are inherently mutilated or degenerate. It is an inherently fascist idea.

[quasi-normalcy]

We have two major political parties in this country, and the TOP legislative priority of one of them has been to harass and attempt to eliminate a minority group who's just a random, natural variation of human existence.