#ecological-time

[guiltyidealist]

new favorite YouTube comment just dropped

[timeandart]

Richard Long

Long, R. (2024) Richard Long. Available at: http://www.richardlong.org/index.html (Accessed: 27 November 2024).

Land-based artist who creates sculptures and text-based works that explore the artist's relationship to space, landscapes, moments in time and the passage of time.

"working with nature to reflect its impermanence and the changing processes of time" (https://arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/richard-long-time-and-space/)

[hawkpartys]

i think of this image approximately every day of my life

Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) observation by kiwikiu

[pickerwheelpolls]

You are forced to live in only one type of biome for the rest of your life, how do you react? You can leave and visit other countries or places, but only if they are in the same biome:

Spin the wheel to find out your biome.

[inkskinned]

"don't make it political!" .... what proportion of death and suffering must occur before politics are involved. if this isn't political, what is even the point of any politics, ever. of democracy. the words are "by the people for the people." if i am going to be left alone by my elected representatives to "figure it out" - to undergo damage, hardship, fear. what the fuck did i elect them for. what was their job. the entire point is that they handle this shit. this is why we were supposed to be electing leaders.

poverty is political. misogyny is political. gun control is political. climate change is political. how much aid a community gets is political. what the fuck are you talking about. it's been political this whole fucking time.

[lucabyte]

i feel like people are sleeping on the occam's razor situation of how buckwild it is to outright accuse a guy of being a clone of your friend even if you DO have a lot of circumstantial evidence. there's other options is what im saying. they could just be like. a guy. that's a sensible deduction. you should explore that deduction. ignore my shirt that reads I <3 RED HERRINGS.

i still think odile has the correct theory on lock but she's smart enough to know it needs like... a real smoking gun to be able to bring it up without sounding insane.

anyway. (mirabelle voice) i know its rude to speculate but has anyone else noticed the grieving? they seem to be grieving. does anyone have any thoughts on the grieving? i have some thoughts on the grieving.

[reasonsforhope]

re: sending an ask about something that makes you hopeful to start off the new year on a good note. this is a personal project that has given me hope! (sorry for the length, i'm a rambler)

next to my house is a shallow creek. when we first moved in the banks were choked with trash, scrap metal from the road, and invasive brush. when it stormed, rainwater would run off the road, turn the creek black, and make it smell like roadkill mixed with chemicals. once we were settled in our house, we decided to try and clean it up a little bit at a time. we got to work replacing the invasive bushes with native groundcover just a few seedlings each season, and every spring since then we've made a tradition of sending out an invite to a bunch of neighbors/extended family/friends to come help clean trash out!

its been a source of hope and pride for me to see how the younger people in our community have gotten excited about taking care of the creek after that first little push. our little ecosystem has slowly improved thanks in part to our efforts: the biodiversity has steadily improved with each passing year, the baby trees we put in are going strong, the wildflowers on the banks are beautiful in the summer and help catch the gravel/muck that slides off the road! Its all very rewarding, and i love the feeling that we have made an impact, even if its a small one :)

anyway, that's something that brings me hope! i wish that 2025 will be an even better year than the ones before, for our little creek and for the world in all. p.s thank you for this blog, it has been a real light for me in the past year <3

!!!!!!! This is amazing!! This is what it's all about - picking a spot where you can make a difference, and then doing it. Small, local impacts make such a huge difference, especially in terms of ecology and ecosystem restoration

What an amazing story, and thank you so much for doing this!! That little creek and the plants and animals that live there are so lucky rn

[clevercorvidae]

i know i know creating a portal to the nightmare realm is probably gonna be wayyy worse for literally everything alive on earth but i cant get over the environmental irresponsibility of releasing a rare endangered species that only lives in a specific cave in mexico into a random ass river in oregon. its gonna haunt me. how is frilliam going to affect the trout population.

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[swampwizards]

Moth party!

Polyphemus (right) and Cecropia (left)

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Has anyone ever suggested here an Animorphs AU where, in fact, animals do talk and think and humans are simply unaware of their language, the style Over The Hedge and basically any animated animal movie does?

Cassie is immensely validated and now has to ponder a whole new set of ethical concerns, Ax has a whole horde of forest animal friends and becomes even more estranged from human culture as a result of it (Marco and Tobias do their best to correct this, but they can only do so much), and the animorphs end up recruiting animals to help them in the war - maybe even ones they give morphing tech, like Tobias getting Dude out of his uncle’s place to become another full-time Animorph (or at least be a friend out in the forest, along with Ax)

Crazy thought: Are we sure that isn't the universe the Animorphs are living in already?

In #4, Cassie speaks directly with a whale that understands she isn't a real dolphin and knows what she's looking for. In MM1, she implies whales have their own language.

In #28, Ax notes that human and chimpanzee minds are basically the same, to the point where his friends are all weirded out and almost never use that morph again.

Marco "talks" to his inner gorilla mind several times (#5, MM1, etc.) and says it's almost like a second consciousness joins him in the morph.

In MM2, Marco confidently says that dinosaurs didn't use weapons — Ax points out it was so long ago we don't know that for sure.

Like... do we know for sure that gorillas and dolphins aren't using their own languages in a way we don't detect? Are we sure that dinosaurs didn't construct buildings that just crumbled away in the ~100 million years since?

Crazier thought: Are we sure that's not the universe we're living in already?

Dolphins show signs of metacognition and self-awareness (X)

Gorillas can learn language (X)

Chimpanzees can teach language (X)

Elephants name each other (X)

There's something deeply Animorphs in the idea that the more you learn about an animal, the more you realize is going on under the surface. And a big part of its message is that animal minds are a lot closer to human minds than we humans would like to think.

[timeandart]

Sky of time, Tatsuo Miyajima

Artwork | Miyajima | 2019 | Japan

Miyajima, T. (2019) Sky of time [Installation]. Available at: https://tatsuomiyajima.com/work-projects/sky-of-time/.

Work brings into relation a scientific/data element with human rhythms (of pulse, breathing...) in a contemplative space that feels familiar (night sky) but disrupts this familiarity through the counters and changes in light and pace.

"In the work, the countless LED lights on the ceiling represent time, human life and the stars. The LEDs also count as numbers 1-9, with 0 being darkness. This is a metaphor for the eternity of human life; when it glows and counts, it means "life" and when it goes dark at 0, it means "death." Countless LEDs repeat it, but they all count at different speeds." (https://tatsuomiyajima.com/work-projects/sky-of-time/)

[noosphe-re]

In recounting dreams, we reformulate their narratives and shape them into their most honest and truest form. Dream re-visioning can be seen as a geological process where indistinct images are weathered into fixity by rational attrition. Dreams find their narrative equilibrium first through their remembering and then by their recounting to oneself. This unravelling of narrative is a process of form-finding, like a river finding a shortest path or a rock being worn smooth by flowing water. It is like the gradual shaping and refinement of a tale to fit the requirements of a myth that it encodes. The shifting collage of dream imagery – a visage of an intense, decalcomanic complexity – becomes anchored by the cues of the rational mind (like the fixing of a photographic image where vague shrouds slowly reveal sharper edges). This anchoring of the dream image is like a vision crystallising from the texture of a stone.

Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary

[mushroom-pal]

been researching a specific species of lichen for my ecology class and there are literally like. ten researchers who have ever given a shit about it. but i give a shit abt it! look at her ! lea's bog lichen

[lucabyte]

thinking about travelling-with-the-party loop doing things habitually without realising how deeply suspicious they are

[starfilledsea]

when there’s an aloof naturalist ship’s surgeon who is well-liked but separate from the rest of the crew and is excited by the beauty and discoveries in places the people around him don’t really care about…….