#conservationism

[detective-watson]

Take action with me to ban neonicotinoids (neonics). Neonics are a pesticide that is highly toxic to insect and bird populations. Numbers of bees and birds have declined by the millions because they eat plants that have been treated by this chemical. Birds who eat the seeds of these plants or insects who have consumed this can suffer from convulsions, extreme weight loss, and death. Join me and the PIRG in urging the EPA to ban these pesticides.

[melyzard]

*article is dated Jan 2024

*article is dated Dec 26, 2023

*article is dated Jan 2024

*article is dated Dec 2023 (and also, the design is neat and a huge gamechanger for all reforestation efforts everywhere!)

[drakkonyan]

Maybe it's just late night determination, but I'm feeling REALLY strongly about making PSAs about how the way animals like Slider turtles and goldfish are being treated is the equivalent of putting a puppy in a 20x20cms box and neglecting it until it dies at 5 months, and then saying that's because they "aren't supposed to live that long", and why parents should be worried these are the values their children are learning. Or how you wouldn't give a Rolex to a 5 year old just because it was spelled cheap to you, and so then why are we giving them pets that cost 2000$ to take care of and are practically family hairlooms

Shitttt maybe I'll doooo. I need to contact my local conservation group.

[danu2203]

[maastrichtiana]

[thecreator-atraitor]

Trees

I'm gonna talk more about this because it just bothers me sometimes.

Under the cut, I talk about pine trees, mangroves, and oak trees. I also talk a bit about beach grasses. I do provide sources because reliable info is important to me.

Planting trees to combat climate change it great, don't get me wrong.

But it's not enough. So many people act like all they need to do is recycle and donate to plant trees, and that's it. They've done their part.

Again, it does help. But it doesn't help very much.

According to TreeJourney, pine trees take 25 - 30 years to grow. I'm 24 years old. My sister turned 30 years old this year. Pine trees planted in 1994 may have just reached maturity.

Part of the CO2-absorbing ability of trees is based on surface area. After all, the tree has to have surfaces exposed to air in order to get the resources in the air.

Pine tree saplings (at least the ones that I've seen) are really, really skinny. Like you could wrap your hand around the trunk of one. A four-year-old could probably do the same with younger ones. You could fit like 30 pine tree saplings in the trunk of a fully grown oak tree.

Mangroves can take 10 - 20 years to mature, according to SkootEco. Mangroves can, however, grow really fast. Mangroves are also super important! They've got crazy-ass root systems. You know what crazy-ass root systems submerged in water are great for? Protection against floods and storm surges (same article on SkootEco, scroll down to "#2 The Importance of Mangrove Trees")!

Oak trees seem to be another popular option for tree-planting programs. Oak trees are great because they are really big. According to TreePursuits (note, this site seems old and is a bit hard to read), oak trees can grow to between 40 and 100 feet tall (12.2 m to 30.5 m). Unlike pine trees, oaks start branching at a lower height. This means more branches, which means more surface area.

Pine trees look kind of like a toilet bowl brush. Long handle (or trunk) with all the bristles at the end (or branches). Oaks are like feather dusters but with short handles (or trunks) and lots of feathers (or branches).

Beach grasses are also super important. Why? Because they have roots. Roots that are specialized in holding themselves in place despite being in very loose material (sand). In order to hold themselves in place, they have to hold the sand in place. This is good, we want the sand to stay where it is. Why? Water. Water needs to get up the beach before it reaches (most) people. On smaller beaches, with less sand, the water doesn't have far to go. During floods and storm surges, these places are hit hardest.

Coasts, like everything else, are constantly eroded. The oceanic tides pull sand away as they flow back into the ocean. Tides also back onto the beach, and put some sand. If the sand is loose enough, the tides will take more than they give, and your beach will shrink.

Plant your trees. But also do more. They need time to grow. Go to your local beaches (if you can and if you have them)! Pick up trash (but please watch out for glass and be conscious of what you're allowed to take; laws are weird)! Plant beach grasses (if you're allowed; some laws are also stupid)!

If anyone complains about beach grasses or mangroves "ruining the view", just tell them, "Y'know what else ruins the view? Mass flooding."

[talesfromtrigadora]

Book Review & Poetry Potential

I finally finished Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs a couple days ago. I had picked it up from the library because it was about conservationism and whales. I've been trying to consistently enter writing contests, and there's a poetry contest due June 5th where the prompt is Kayapo Elder, or Humpback. Since I know nothing about Kayapo elders and little about Humpback Whales, I figured I should do some reading about both before I attempted this poem. In the end, Fathoms was an interesting and educational read, but I had a lot of trouble getting through it due to the author's inexplicable insistence on using big words when laymen's terms wouldn't have diminished the writing at all. I nearly put the book down just during the introduction because of the word choices, and found myself questioning the choices of her editor to leave these word choices in as they were likely to alienate the common reader, who ultimately would get the most out of a book that's message is why whales (and environmentalism in general) mattered, to everyone. After that first chapter, the editor maybe had some notes on these big words, but instead of removing them, Giggs merely added more words to her book by defining them in parentheses. Ultimately, it just seemed unnecessary.

I'm not sure I have a poem in me about whales and Kayapo Elders, though my readings have made it clear as to why these two seemingly unrelated topics are paired for this contest. They both are studies in conservationism. The Kayapo people of Brazil have been loud and active in their mission to protect their rainforest from the effects of logging, mining, and the building of dams. They have raised their voices in how these changes to their environment will negatively affect their habitat, and in doing so, they are fighting hard to protect the habitat of those who cannot speak up.

In contrast, whales were nearly hunted to extinction before people began to speak up for them. People had to essentially create a Super Whale, a conglomeration of many types of whales, in order to get enough human voices raised to speak for these creatures, because no one whale stands out as the most "savable." It was the Humpback who gave this Super Whale its voice, as it is the Humpbacks who sing.

But is there enough here for a poem? Probably. But at my core, I am not a poet (despite that the only thing I have been published for so far is my poetry). Poetry, for me, comes out of emotion. It rises within me as one whole when the emotions become too strong that I have no choice but to put them on paper. While I am intrigued about the environment and understand the importance of these two topics, there is not emotion here for me. I could write a story about it, because a creative writer (and maybe an attempting journalist) is my bread and butter, but this contest does not call for a story. It calls for a poem, so I think I will leave this contests to the poets.

[kinialohaguy]

Two Americas

Aloha kākou. America is in the midst of a Civil War. It is happening, despite those that want to either ignore it or refuse to acknowledge it. This Civil War is between Marxism and Sovereignty. Democrats call themselves progressives. It’s just another word for communism and socialism. Tyranny doesn’t need a definition that branches across finite points of tyranny, it simply means the loss of…

[borrelia]

PARK RANGERS ARE ALSO BASTARDS BTW

SONIC FANDOM LEARN HOW THE NATIONAL PARKS SYSTEM UPHOLDS SETTLER COLONIALISM AND ISOLATES INDIGENOUS PEOPLE FROM THEIR ANCESTRAL LANDS CHALLENGE

[detective-watson]

A butterfly’s delicate orange wings flit through the gentle breeze toward its northern habitat. This gorgeous specimen, the monarch butterfly, is searching for a milkweed plant upon which to lay its eggs. The milkweed is the only plant a monarch larva will eat. What this butterfly does not know, however, is that it’s very likely its search will be fruitless at best and fatal at worst.

Pesticides, especially systemic insecticides, sprayed upon milkweeds have caused devastation to the monarch community. Residues of chemicals, such as neonicotinoids, have been shown to stay on these plants for up to a month after the initial spraying. Insecticides poison monarchs - monarch butterfly populations in the eastern migratory region have decreased by 59% since last year. But there is a way to stop this senseless loss.

In December, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is deciding if monarchs deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act. This act allows for special conservation efforts for this species, such as designating lands as critical habitats and implementing species recovery programs. We must act fast to save these butterflies before we lose them for good. Join me in signing this Environmental Action petition and urging the FWS to protect the monarch butterflies.

[verm1c1de]

openedmy old homestuck fic ideas doc and wow thats a lot of things thatll nefur be written! lol

[pikslasrce]

@ god stop making me have dreams where im friends w my fav band guys

[qveenpoppy]

only 2 acts go through... i hate this show

[fatehbaz]

when the British Empire's researchers realized that the cause of the ecological devastation was the British Empire:

much to consider.

on the motives and origins of some forms of imperial "environmentalism".

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Since the material resources of colonies were vital to the metropolitan centers of empire, some of the earliest conservation practices were established outside of Europe [but established for the purpose of protecting the natural resources desired by metropolitan Europe]. [...] [T]ropical island colonies were crucial laboratories of empire, as garden incubators for the transplantation of peoples [slaves, laborers] and plants [cash crops] and for generating the European revival of Edenic discourse. Eighteenth-century environmentalism derived from colonial island contexts in which limited space and an ideological model of utopia contributed to new models of conservation [...]. [T]ropical island colonies were at the vanguard of establishing forest reserves and environmental legislation [...]. These forest reserves, like those established in New England and South Africa, did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather a "more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing a new landscape by planting trees [in monoculture or otherwise modified plantations] [...]" [...].

Text by: Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. "Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth". Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by DeLoughrey and Handley. 2011.

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It is no accident that the earliest writers to comment specifically on rapid environmental change in the context of empires were scientists who were themselves often actors in the process of colonially stimulated environmental change. [...] As early as the mid-17th century [...] natural philosophers [...] in Bermuda, [...] in Barbados and [...] on St Helena [all British colonies] were all already well aware of characteristically high rates of soil erosion and deforestation in the colonial tropics [...]. On St Helena and Bermuda this early conservationism led, by 1715, to the gazetting of the first colonial forest reserves and forest protection laws. On French colonial Mauritius [...], Poivre and Philibert Commerson framed pioneering forest conservation [...] in the 1760s. In India William Roxburgh, Edward Balfour [...] ([...] Scottish medical scientists) wrote alarmist narratives relating deforestation to the danger of climate change. [...] East India Company scientists were also well aware of French experience in trying to prevent deforestation [...] [in] Mauritius. [...] Roxburgh [...] went on to further observe the incidence of global drought events which we know today were globally tele-connected El Nino events. [...] The writings of Edward Balfour and Hugh Cleghorn in the late 1840s in particular illustrate the extent of the permeation of a global environmental consciousness [...]. [T]he 1860s [were] a period which we could appropriately name the "first environmental decade", and which embodies a convergence of thinking about ecological change on a world scale [...]. It was in the particular circumstances of environmental change at the colonial periphery that what we would now term "environmentalism" first made itself felt [...]. Victorian texts such as [...] Ribbentrop's Forestry in the British Empire, Brown's Hydrology of South Africa, Cleghorn's Forests and Gardens of South India [...] were [...] vital to the onset of environmentalism [...]. One preoccupation stands out in them above all. This was a growing interest in the potential human impact on climate change [...] [and] global dessication. This fear grew steadily in the wake of colonial expansion [...]. Particularly after the 1860s, and even more after the great Indian famines of 1876 [...] these connections encouraged and stimulated the idea that human history and environmental change might be firmly linked.

Text by: Richard Grove and Vinita Damodaran. "Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History, 1676-2000: Part I". Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 41, No. 41. 14 October 2006.

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Policing the interior [of British colonial land] following the Naning War gave Newbold the opportunity for exploring the people and landscape around Melaka […]. Newbold took his knowledge of the tropical environment in the Straits Settlements [British Malaya] to Madras [British India], where he earned a reputation as a naturalist and an Orientalist of some eminence. He was later elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Familiar with the barren landscape of the tin mines of Negeri Sembilan, Newbold made a seminal link between deforestation and the sand dune formations and siltation […]. The observation, published in 1839 […], alerted […] Balfour about the potential threat of erosion to local climate and agriculture. […] Logan brought his Peninsular experience [in the British colonies of Malaya] directly within the focus of the deforestation debate in India […]. His lecture to the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1846 […] was hugely influential and put the Peninsula at the heart of the emerging discourse on tropical ecology. Penang, the perceived tropical paradise of abundance and stability, soon revealed its vulnerability to human [colonial] despoilment […].

Text by: Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells. "Peninsular Malaysia in the Context of Natural History and Colonial Science". New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 11, 1. June 2009.

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British colonial forestry was arguably one of the most extensive imperial frameworks of scientific natural resource management anywhere [...]. [T]he roots of conservation [...] lay in the role played by scientific communities in the colonial periphery [...]. In India,[...] in 1805 [...] the court of directors of the East India Company sent a dispatch enquiring [...] [about] the Royal Navy [and its potential use of wood from Malabar's forests] [...]. This enquiry led to the appointment of a forest committee which reported that extensive deforestation had taken place and recommended the protection of the Malabar forests on grounds that they were valuable property. [...] [T]o step up the extraction of teak to augment the strength of the Royal Navy [...] [b]etween 1806 and 1823, the forests of Malabar were protected by means of this monopoly [...]. The history of British colonial forestry, however, took a decisive turn in the post-1860 period [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' and new agencies established. [...] The paradigm [...] was articulated explicitly in the first conference [Empire Forestry Conference] by R.S. Troup, a former Indian forest service officer and then the professor of forestry at Oxford. Troup began by sketching a linear model of the development of human relationship with forests, arguing that the human-forest interaction in civilized societies usually went through three distinct phases - destruction, conservation, and economic management. Conservation was a ‘wise and necessary measure’ but it was ‘only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire’. The ultimate ideal was economic management, [...] to exploit 'to the full [...]' and provide regular supplies [...] to industry.

Text by: Ravi Rajan. "Modernizing Nature: Tropical Forestry and the Contested Legacy of British Colonial Eco-Development, 1800-2000". Oxford Historical Monographs series, Oxford University Press. January 2006.

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The “planetary consciousness” produced by this systemizing of nature [during the rise of Linnaean taxonomy classification in eighteenth-century European science] […] increased the mobility of paradise discourse [...]. As European colonial expansion accelerated, the homogenizing transformation of people, economy and nature which it catalyzed also gave rise to a myth of lost paradise, which served as a register […] for obliterated cultures, peoples, and environments [devastated by that same European colonization], and as a measure of the rapid ecological changes, frequently deforestation and desiccation, generated by colonizing capital. On one hand, this myth served to suppress dissent by submerging it in melancholy, but on the other, it promoted the emergence of an imperialist environmental critique which would motivate the later establishment of colonial botanical gardens, potential Edens in which nature could be re-made. However, the subversive potential of the “green” critique voiced through the myth of endangered paradise was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods, thus continuing to serve the purposes of European capital.

Text by: Sharae Deckard. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden. 2010.

[stuffforthestash]

Modern Academic AU I Guess?

Got the idea of professor Raphael stuck in my damned brain all morning, so here's hoping writing thoughts down will banish him back to the hells yeah? Edit: There is now a Part 2 and Part 3 __________________________ Raphael - School of Law, obvs. Teaches courses on contract law and legal ethics. He has a reputation for being the kind of asshole professor that can make or break your academic career, and the fact he's tenured is likely the only reason he hasn't been fired over the countless reports of student blackmail and harassment. Gale - Dep't of Literature. His classes are all niche topics like "Magic, Myth, & The Power Of Metaphor", "From Merlin To Dumbledore: A Historical Look At The Wizard's Role In Storytelling", and "The Ancient Art of Flyting", and they're extremely popular. He loves his job, the students love him, but he's rubbed a lot of his colleagues the wrong way. Astarion - School of Theater & Music. Teaches the 101 level acting course and has a rep for being absolutely brutal, but his methods are undeniably effective. Also teaches stage combat workshops, and is constantly on thin ice with the admin for the way he encourages the gaggle of students that started a fan club for him. Wyll - Health Sciences. He's a practicing physical therapist who was invited to also teach part time, due to having gained a reputation as a leading specialist in working with underserved minorities and victims of trauma. His classes are niche and can be hard to get into due to limited availability. Knows Astarion because they're both in HEMA, and sometimes helps with the combat workshops Karlach - Women's rugby coach and former pro-athlete who had to retire after a chest injury. Is also in HEMA, and was inspired by her buddy Wyll to also pursue Phys. Therapy as a career shift. Shadowheart - Grad student doing her thesis on some obscure theological topic, teaches a generic 101 level religious studies class and is obviously only there because the school requires her to put in the hours. Lae'zel - Also a grad student, transferred from overseas. Studying Sports Management and was assigned as an assistant coach to Karlach, except she's in ASC and is constantly making digs about how their practices are vastly superior to HEMA's foolishness. Halsin - Environmental Science. He's the department chair, and teaches courses on conservationism and land management. All his courses are out in the field though, which means he's never on campus and is nearly impossible to get hold of. He hates being the dep't chair, and he only reason he even accepted the position is because nobody else would. Jaheira - Facilities director, not a teacher. Always somehow knows everything that's happening on campus, has contacts everywhere for anything you could want done, and is the person you least want to piss off. Minsc is her shadow, nobody's even entirely sure if he actually works here but is too afraid of Jaheira to ask. And if you actually made it this far, well.. thanks for reading? I'm so sorry? But also share your thoughts! And lemme know if there's any other characters worth doing a 2nd post for.