#ecological systems

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Climate literacy principle #4: As of 2021, Earth had warmed by about 1.1°C above preindustrial levels. The current rate of warming is roughly 30x faster than the rate at which Earth warmed as it emerged from the last ice age.

More: https://www.climate.gov/teaching/climate/climate-literacy-essential-principles

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Embracing Truth and Reconciliation: A Call to Action on September 30

[howdoesone]

How does one account for the unique environmental conditions and ecological systems of a region in architecture?

Accounting for the unique environmental conditions and ecological systems of a region is a crucial aspect of architectural design. Every region has its distinct environmental characteristics, including climate, topography, vegetation, and ecological systems. Architects must consider and respond to these factors to create sustainable, resilient, and contextually appropriate designs. This article…

[signanothername]

if Killer was a worm would Color still love him? Platonically ofc. I'd see Color getting a nice big tank for Killer with lots of variety

[reasonsforhope]

"In response to last year’s record-breaking heat due to El Niño and impacts from climate change, Indigenous Zenù farmers in Colombia are trying to revive the cultivation of traditional climate-resilient seeds and agroecology systems.

One traditional farming system combines farming with fishing: locals fish during the rainy season when water levels are high, and farm during the dry season on the fertile soils left by the receding water.

Locals and ecologists say conflicts over land with surrounding plantation owners, cattle ranchers and mines are also worsening the impacts of the climate crisis.

To protect their land, the Zenù reserve, which is today surrounded by monoculture plantations, was in 2005 declared the first Colombian territory free from GMOs.

...

In the Zenù reserve, issues with the weather, climate or soil are spread by word of mouth between farmers, or on La Positiva 103.0, a community agroecology radio station. And what’s been on every farmer’s mind is last year’s record-breaking heat and droughts. Both of these were charged by the twin impacts of climate change and a newly developing El Niño, a naturally occurring warmer period that last occurred here in 2016, say climate scientists.

Experts from Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies say the impacts of El Niño will be felt in Colombia until April 2024, adding to farmers’ concerns. Other scientists forecast June to August may be even hotter than 2023, and the next five years could be the hottest on record. On Jan. 24, President Gustavo Petro said he will declare wildfires a natural disaster, following an increase in forest fires that scientists attribute to the effects of El Niño.

In the face of these changes, Zenù farmers are trying to revive traditional agricultural practices like ancestral seed conservation and a unique agroecology system.

Pictured: Remberto Gil’s house is surrounded by an agroforestry system where turkeys and other animals graze under fruit trees such as maracuyá (Passiflora edulis), papaya (Carica papaya) and banana (Musa acuminata colla). Medicinal herbs like toronjil (Melissa officinalis) and tres bolas (Leonotis nepetifolia), and bushes like ají (Capsicum baccatum), yam and frijol diablito (beans) are part of the undergrowth. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

“Climate change is scary due to the possibility of food scarcity,” says Rodrigo Hernandez, a local authority with the Santa Isabel community. “Our ancestral seeds offer a solution as more resistant to climate change.”

Based on their experience, farmers say their ancestral seed varieties are more resistant to high temperatures compared to the imported varieties and cultivars they currently use. These ancestral varieties have adapted to the region’s ecosystem and require less water, they tell Mongabay. According to a report by local organization Grupo Semillas and development foundation SWISSAID, indigenous corn varieties like blaquito are more resistant to the heat, cariaco tolerates drought easily, and negrito is very resistant to high temperatures.

The Zenù diet still incorporates the traditional diversity of seeds, plant varieties and animals they consume, though they too are threatened by climate change: from fish recipes made from bocachico (Prochilodus magdalenae), and reptiles like the babilla or spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus), to different corn varieties to prepare arepas (cornmeal cakes), liquor, cheeses and soups.

“The most important challenge we have now is to save ancient species and involve new generations in ancestral practice,” says Sonia Rocha Marquez, a professor of social sciences at Sinù University in the city of Montería.

...[Despite] land scarcity, Negrete says communities are developing important projects to protect their traditional food systems. Farmers and seed custodians, like Gil, are working with the Association of Organic Agriculture and Livestock Producers (ASPROAL) and their Communitarian Seed House (Casa Comunitaria de Semillas Criollas y Nativas)...

Pictured: Remberto Gil is a seed guardian and farmer who works at the Communitarian Seed House, where the ASPROL association stores 32 seeds of rare or almost extinct species. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

Located near Gil’s house, the seed bank hosts a rainbow of 12 corn varieties, from glistening black to blue to light pink to purple and even white. There are also jars of seeds for local varieties of beans, eggplants, pumpkins and aromatic herbs, some stored in refrigerators. All are ancient varieties shared between local families.

Outside the seed bank is a terrace where chickens and turkeys graze under an agroforestry system for farmers to emulate: local varieties of passion fruit, papaya and banana trees grow above bushes of ají peppers and beans. Traditional medicinal herbs like toronjil or lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) form part of the undergrowth.

Today, 25 families are involved in sharing, storing and commercializing the seeds of 32 rare or almost-extinct varieties.

“When I was a kid, my father brought me to the farm to participate in recovering the land,” says Nilvadys Arrieta, 56, a farmer member of ASPROAL. “Now, I still act with the same collective thinking that moves what we are doing.”

“Working together helps us to save, share more seeds, and sell at fair price [while] avoiding intermediaries and increasing families’ incomes,” Gil says. “Last year, we sold 8 million seeds to organic restaurants in Bogotà and Medellín.”

So far, the 80% of the farmers families living in the Zenù reserve participate in both the agroecology and seed revival projects, he adds."

-via Mongabay, February 6, 2024

[dailyanarchistposts]

In mid-August, a three year-old lawsuit charging that environmentalist groups were religious extremists comparable to some of the more violent, intolerant, ultra-orthodox Islamic sects collapsed when the attorney failed to meet a re-filing deadline with the U.S. Supreme Court.

The suit had been brought against the Forest Guardians, the Superior Wilderness Action Network, and the U.S. Forest Service by the 125 companies that make up the Associated Contract Loggers (A.C.L.) of northern Minnesota. The loggers were asking for $600,000 in damages and permission to plunder timber from the Superior National Forest.

Lawyers for the A.C.L. argued that deep ecology was actually a religion, and so by extension, environmental groups that espoused its philosophies were cults, and by outlawing timber cutting on so-called “federal land,” the Forest Service was favoring a particular set of religious doctrines and was therefore violating the guarantee of neutrality in matters of religion purportedly vouchsafed in the U.S. Constitution.

According to theological scholars at the logging company syndicate like former executive director, Larry Jones, Deep Ecology is an “earth-centered religion,” a “belief system” that holds that “trees and Man [sic] are equal.” Anti-logging activists who extol the virtues of forested spaces over industry profit and environmental degradation are spiritual zealots, and the government functionaries who are swayed by their proselytizing may turn out to be fanatical closet druids themselves.

Stephen Young, the A.C.L. lawyer and a former Republican Party senatorial candidate, explained his legal action on such esteemed venues as Rush Limbaugh’s radio show by saying that clear-cutting in national forests had been restricted by the Forest Service for no reason other than reverebce for some fringe New Age religion.

A U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota dismissed the case as “frivolous” in February 2000, but the A.C.L. petitioned the Supreme Court last year after reports that Wahabi Islamic extremists were responsible for the blitzkrieg attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“The doctrine of Deep Ecology is the very worldview that gave rise to eco-terrorism. We feel that after the events of September 11, it’s an obligation of the Supreme Court to keep religious fanaticism in check,” Young said. “Just as devout faith in the literal words of various Hadith of Mohammad gave the Taliban license to impose through state power harsh conditions on the women of Afghanistan, so Deep Ecology gives license to its adherents to take extreme actions against those who would live by different beliefs.”

Perhaps the less said about this sleazy episode the better, which is just as well, since it is so hard to get a firm analytic grasp on it because it is sad and sick on so many different levels. For instance, likening the plight of women in Afghanistan to that of lumber barons in northern Minnesota is staggering in its shamelessness, as it has been my experience that women living near industrial logging camps are subjected to at least the same sort of abuse, derision, and masculinist domination as women who had been living in Taliban-controlled Kandahar.

And we all know that if the U.S. government was serious about keeping homicidal religious terrorism in check, then John Ashcroft and the Army of God anti-abortionists would be in the Guantanamo Bay gulag. It was all obviously just a miserable attempt to slander and jam up anti-logging activists with legal action, and it failed.

But I can’t help thinking about the broader philosophical implications of who supported it. I have no idea as to whether or not there are Deep Ecologists involved in Forest Guardians or the Superior Wilderness Action Network (and I suspect that none are to be found among the Forest Service feds), but in demonizing Deep Ecology as an alien fanatical religious practice in this lawsuit, we can see once again how tighly Christianity is bound to capitalist exploitation and ecological destruction.

Deep ecology is not a single doctrine, but rather an ethical sensibility informed by a variety of perspectives on the relationship of hummankind to the whole of nature’s systems. We can oversimplifydeep ecology by saying that its fundamentals include a belief in the intrinsic value of all forms of life as well as the holistic diversity of those life forms. The economic, technological, and ideological beliefs that prop up Western civilization antagonistically threaten the existence and diversity of natural life systems.

Individuals who adhere to the ideas of Deep Ecology are obligated to work towards radically changing those deadly attitudes and social structures. Deep ecology challenges the long-held anthropocentrist notion which entitles humans to take advantage of and destroy wilderness at will and for private profit, a view obviously held sacred by the A.C.L. timber industrialists.

Anthropocentrism derives from core Judeo-Christian values that have been part of the settler-capitalist catechism on this continent since the early seventeenth-century. Consider, for example, the preaching of Puritan minister, John Cotton. In his popular pamphlet of the 1630’s, “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” Cotton claimed that God desired colonists to “take possesion” of land in New England, saying that whosoever “bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it” has an inviolable divine right to it.

The Native Americans, dying in large numbers from exposure to European diseases was proff that God wanted to wipe the slate clean for the Puritans and thereby better facilitate His decree in the Book of Genesis that humans aggresively “subdue” the earth. Christians were the center of the universe, exclusively licensed by Almighty God to dominate the land, eradicate wild nature, and replace it with the purity of civilization. “All the world out of the Church is as wilderness, or at best, a wild field where all manner of unclean and wild beasts live and feed,” Cotton proclaimed in 1642.

There were many others during the period who were at least as enthusiastic about Christ, colonization, and commercial cultivation as Cotton was, and these ideas, linked to distinctly Judeo-Christian models of linear (rather than seasonally cyclical) time, became ingrained in the settler psyche, especially during the era of westward expansion some two centuries later. Justified by the Calvinist capitalism of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations — complete with its fallacious notions about the ennobling “civilizing” powers of wealth, marlets, and economic growth — the implications of Puritan repugnance for the wilderness and wildness on the North American continent becomes depressingly clear.

As inheritors of Puritan fanaticism that have erected the violent, intolerant faith of capitalism, it is individuals and organizations like the A.C.L. who hold a worldview that advances a five hundred year-old campaign of terrorism against entire bioregions and “empowers its adherents to take extreme action against those who would live by different beliefs.”

[achrilock-aether]

[…] “What burns in Palestine and Los Angeles today are symptoms of the same disease: a system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people, expansion over existence.”

[…] “… we either stand together against this destruction, or we all burn separately.”

[the-pea-and-the-sun]

why is namek like that

i had a namekian specbio post drafted but along the way i got distracted with the namekian sky, so im just jotting down a bit of my thoughts about how a namekian solar system and planet atmosphere might work. most projections arent particularly stable, its no surprise they had a severe ecological disaster. we know namek has liquid water, and is an earth-like enough temperature for bulma to be comfortable there, so everything else is kind of bending around that. this super cool article by sean raymond talks about how you might make a no-night planet work. luckily no other planets are ever specified to exist in namek's solar system (to my knowledge) which makes this a lot easier! generally more stars = less planets, so im imagining that namek is the only planet in its solar system.

this is raymond's three star system diagram! in this model though, the planet actually does experience night, but only once every 600 years. im satisfied with this, as we get the information about namek "always having at least one sun in the sky" from dende, who's 8 years old, and likely just hasn't experienced or heard about namek's night yet. there's a lot of fun worldbuilding potential here! supposedly grand elder is only around 500 years old, and given that within his lifetime there was a catastrophe great enough to nearly extinct their species, it's possible that no living namekians know that their planet has a night time. but if they have, it's probably some huge legendary event, and is probably associated with porunga in some way since that's the only time the vast majority of namekians will ever experience a dark sky (do namekians have religion? holidays? questions for later...)

so COOL a three star system works! (as long as you allow for these substantial aus, anything for eternal sunlight..) however due to dragon ball rules we're working with a canon year of only 130 days. this is kinda problematic for a habitable planet like namek. shorter orbital period = closer to the (main) sun. given that there are already two extra suns shining light on this definitely liquid water having planet, this seems like we might have to do some magical hand-waving, which makes me sad because i find that boring. but its at least fun to think about what the magical logic is instead of just saying "eh it works because magic", so i wanted to try that! since the dragon balls operate on their own magical logic they might have a skewed definition of what a "year" can be classified as (and a year is pretty cultural too, right?). also, why do the dragon balls take a year to be able to be used again at all? (aside from plot reasons) like... what are they doing? with the dragon balls on earth, it was kinda easy to presume that they were "recharging" or that the dragon himself needed some kind of "rest", and that this process just so happened to take an earth year. the translations i could find were kind of vague on this, so im taking advantage of that vagueness. being about 1 au from the sun in this model, namek's "year" as defined by how long it takes to orbit its central star is about the same as earths (a bit boring, sorry) ! and the time it takes the other two objects in its system to make a full rotation around their shared center far far exceeds that, so i kind of don't think theres any justification to define a namekian "year" as 130 days other than that being the time it takes for the dragon balls to recharge, which makes perfect sense to me culturally! i mean, given that there are three suns, surely the amount of time it takes for your planets magical wish granting dragon to start working again would be a much more meaningful unit of measurement than the time it takes your planet to complete and orbit around your smallest sun (oh god what are namekian seasons like. probably fucked. another question for later). also from my wikipedia skimming it looks like alpha centauri's planet (assuming its a planet) has a similar orbital period to earth's too. its nice to have some real-life justification 👍

theres more to say about that but im moving on from this part for now. i just wanted to provide justification for a namekian year being however long it needs to be in order for namek to have three suns and still have liquid water.

i wanna talk a bit about the planet itself. namely: why the fuck is the sky green??

almost any other sky color could have some non-poison gas explaination except green. DAMMIT!! but its fine we can make it work. (also the plants are blue. which is actually a lot less problematic but i'll talk abt that later) im referencing this artifexian video for my information here btw 👍he gives a few ways that a sky could appear green but we kinda have to rule out all of them here except for something green being physically suspended in the air, because there just isnt any light/atmosphere combination that makes the sky look green to human eyes. since krillin is a human whos just so super wicked strong he can also fly, id be fine hand-waving breathing a green gas or dust for him and gohan, but. bulma is on that planet too... breathing away... also there's pretty clearly grass on this planet and like, brown earth. so mars like dusty skies dont make a lotta sense either. so i guess artifexian's sky-algae idea will have to work ! as horrifying as the implications are .... either these guys are just straight up breathing in green stuff all the time, or the algae is somehow suspended too high up to be inhaled. (also sky-algae would explain why the planet looks almost gaseous from space)

luckily bulma doesnt seem to be having any problems breathing it that green stuff, but like pollen allergies its easy to imagine that someone would be. which is kinda fun to think about actually. someone having an allergic reaction to the namekian sky, validating bulma's concern about breathable atmosphere would be a lot of fun... BUT I DONT HAVE TIME FOR THAT FOR NOW !! i have other goals in mind. i just wanted to record this "namek's sky is green because theres guys in there" concept somewhere. also, three suns at various levels of rising at setting at all times, while not portrayed in the anime due to technical limitations, would almost CERTAINLY mean namek would have a really cool variety of sky colors! just all tinted green because of the sky algae. of course sky algae doesnt need to be green all the time, nor does it need to be in the sky (or alive) all the time. maybe the green skies are new post ecological disaster? very fun to imagine pre-guru namekian skies....

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Obviously it would have been better if the Chernobyl disaster had never happened. But to see how wolves and other wildlife have adapted to the nuclear contamination and ambient radiation there gives a glimmer of hope that, even if the worst were to happen worldwide, we might still see at least some of the life we know today continue onward. Here's hoping that scientists, both in Ukraine and otherwise, will continue to be able to safely study Chernobyl and its effects.

[dykegeology]

Stuff that's like 'we want to increase representation of women + people of colour in science' and it's like yay awesome so you're you're going to do stuff about systemic discrimination, and racist and misogynistic views about only white men being good at academic stuff right??? and they're like 'lol noooo we are just looking at doing more focus on scientific communication rather than maths and programming because everyone knows only white men can do those things, and women and people of colour hate data and love Community' and it's like wow what if I put 10000 funnelweb spiders in your house

[greenteacology]

my theory of science as a field is that. you know those light box things we would use to trace pictures as kids? my theory is that the true nature of reality is this wild complex crazy complicated picture, and it’s covered by about 100 layers of paper and that’s what we can perceive. and science is us putting that on a light box and trying to trace it. and every time someone makes a new discovery it’s like peeling away one tiny layer of paper to make it easier for the next person to trace.

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Germination and Growth in the Afforestation Areas

[russellmoreton]

Core, Periphery and Semiperiphery : Spatial Drawings #1 by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: russellmoreton.blogspot.com/ russellmoreton.tumblr.com

[nando161mando]

Zapatista education is an inspiration for many movements and peoples fighting for autonomy, as it has built an education system based on the self-organisation of communities, the composition of scientific and traditional knowledge, and the common struggle for land. For some years now, the movement has been asking itself a fundamental question for our times: how to fight for autonomy in the face of ecological collapse?

https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/10/27/education-and-autonomy-in-times-of-ecological-collapse/

[thequietpartisloud]

I have come to make an announcement

TheQuietPart has a Tumblr blog thingy, now! Yippee! I know that literally, actually nobody will see this because, well, I haven't linked it on my channel yet. So, effectively I'm talking into the void right now. But, it'd be weird if there was really nothing here when everyone takes a look. So. Hi.

[exculis]

oughhhh romanticizing foreign countries but only because they have functional rail systems...............