#mineral processing plants

[chanderpurgroup]

Mineral Processing Plants Manufacturers and Suppliers in India

Chanderpur Group is one of the most trustworthy names in offering a myriad of high-end engineered products and turnkey products. We are a multi-solution, internationally recognized engineering company. The success lies behind many different factors such as a high level of consistency, standardization, and flexibility. Our forte is our experience of over 60 years and our dedicated skill set who are an asset to our company.

We have a great reputation for providing several cutting-edge products to different industries. Our products include ball mills, rotary kilns, material handling systems, fly ash grinding solutions, etc. Not only that, but we also have turnkey products such as cement plants, mineral processing plants, fertilizer plants, paper plants, etc. We have been supplying solutions to the industries for over 6 decades. This factor makes us the top choice for our clients.

Some exceptional factors which make us a successful company are mentioned below.

We have the specialized engineers of third and fourth engineering entrepreneurs with first-hand knowledge of technology.

We have a great expansion so we can serve our clients on the global level.

Capable, highly educated, and experienced skill-set who are working with us for prolonged years

A team of young, dedicated, and dynamic mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, process engineers, industrial engineers

Loyal vendors from micro and small companies

A flexible approach towards the industries and their needs

Our expertise in a wide array of operations such as engineering, procurement, and commissioning is matchless. Moreover, what makes us matchless is our ability to turn the success story of one industry into another sphere.

CPG has a welcoming attitude toward new mineral processing plants technologies and advancements and does not hesitate to provide our customers with the best technology. Additionally, our clients benefit from a highly advanced environment of electrical systems, energy-efficient products, and automation systems.      

[websubmission]

Demineralisation Plant Service Provider in Noida

[skyvlogg]

Nutrition tips for a healthier lifestyle

A healthy diet is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle A balanced diet can help you manage your weight, reduce your risk of chronic disease, and improve your overall health and well-being Here are some nutrition tips that can help you make healthier choices and reach your health goals.

Eat a variety of foods:

It is very important to eat a variety of foods to get all the nutrients your body needs Include a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats in your diet Try to eat a rainbow of colors every day to make sure you're getting a wide variety of nutrients.

Check the portion sizes:

One of the key elements of a healthy diet is portion control Eating large portions of high-calorie foods can lead to weight gain, so it's important to know how much you're eating. Using a food scale or measuring cups can help you get a good idea of ​​portion sizes.

Reduce your sugar and salt intake:

Too much sugar and salt can have negative health effects, such as increasing the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and obesity Try to limit your intake of added sugar and salt, and instead choose natural sources of sweetness, such as fruit.

Choose healthy fats:

Not all fats are created equal While trans and saturated fats can be bad for your health, unsaturated fats like those found in nuts, seeds, and avocados can be beneficial Make sure you include healthy fats in your diet to improve heart health and cholesterol levels.

Drink plenty of water:

Staying hydrated is essential for overall health and well-being Drinking plenty of water can help you maintain a healthy weight, improve digestion, and flush toxins from your body Try to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day to stay hydrated.

Plan your meals:

Planning your meals ahead of time can help you make healthier choices and avoid unhealthy last-minute choices. Make a grocery list and stick to it to avoid impulse purchases of high-calorie processed foods.

In short, incorporating these nutritional tips into your daily routine will help you maintain a healthy, balanced diet Remember, it's not about perfection, it's about making small positive changes in your diet that can have a big impact on your overall health.

[rtechnoindia]

Royal Minerals Processing Systems crushers Royal Minerals Processing Systems” are a leading Manufacturer, Importer and Exporter of a wide range of Dewatering Screen, Crushing Plant, Bucket Elevator, Grizzly Feeder, etc. Call us at +91 94273 55384, +91 97256 69755, or contact us today for more information!! Email: rtechnoindiaa@gmail.com

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[bogleech]

I see a looot of people in plant groups asking why their carnivorous plant is dying and it almost always turns out that they thought "distilled water only" was like just a strong recommendation, something they could just play loose with. Other times they just didn't understand what that meant and assumed filtered water would be just as good, or also assumed perhaps understandably that water from any healthy, natural pond should work, but it will not. If you transplant a Venus fly trap or a sundew to just the wrong type of wetland one mile down the road, you've already killed it! Giving them tap water just once can doom them irreversibly! Distilled seriously means distilled which is a "special kind" of water, or rather it's just water that condensed from vapor by a process that excludes most minerals and nutrients! If you don't own a reverse osmosis filter (a very specific and expensive thing for plant growers, not a brita filter!!!) You can use fresh rain water in most environments, as long as it didn't hit the ground first, which could have already changed its composition. Otherwise you should be able to just buy distilled water in any store:

It's the same quality of water that collects in peat bogs, which is what triggered the evolution of carnivorous plants in the first place; low nutrient, highly acidic water, purer than what you'd find in just a lake or a river.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers reshape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making. Fire was a tool for early humans not just to cook but also to burn the landscape, encouraging edible bulbs and grasses that attracted animals for hunting. Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans; pines and fungi work together to take advantage of bright open spaces and exposed mineral soils. Humans, pines, and fungi make living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others: multispecies worlds.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Some European Renaissance Art Vocabulary

for your next poem/story

Acanthus - A prickly plant with large leaves; used as ornament in ancient Greece and the Renaissance.

Altarpiece - A religious painting composed of one or several compartments or panels; intended to stand on or hang above an altar.

Apocrypha - Literally, things that are “hidden.” The Apocrypha are not universally accepted as official scripture and are excluded from the old and new Testaments.

Blue - The color of the sky. In Christian painting, it symbolizes Heaven. Mary, known as the Queen of Heaven, wears a blue mantle. Blue pigment was derived from either the mineral azurite, a copper carbonate mineral, or ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli. The latter was very costly.

Burin - A pointed tool used to engrave lines into a metal plate that is used for printmaking. Ink applied to the plate will sink into the engraved lines and transfer to the paper.

Cartouche - An ornament in the shape of a scroll with ends folded back.

Coffered - “Divided in squares,” usually refers to a popular Renaissance ceiling treatment that used recessed squares.

Coat of Arms - A heraldic device identifying a person, family, or institution of the nobility.

Confraternity - An assembly of lay persons dedicated to strict religious observances.

Cronice - A horizontal band that crowns the top of a building.

Cuirass - A piece of close-fitting armor for protecting the chest and back.

Damascened - Metalwork ornamented with an inlaid design.

Diptych - A painting, usually an altarpiece, made up of two hinged panels. A triptych has three hinged panels.

Doge - The chief justice in the republics of Venice and Genoa.

Embossed - Metal that is hammered, molded, or carved so as to create a bulge or an image in relief.

Engraving - A process used by printmakers who cut grooves or pits into a wood block or metal plate with a sharp tool called a burin. When the plate is inked, the printer’s ink sinks into the grooves; then the plate is wiped, to remove the ink from the smooth areas. The inked plate is pressed against damp paper by running both between two heavy rollers. The pressure forces the softened paper into the grooves to pull out the ink, which we see as lines.

Entablature - The part of the building that is above the columns, encompassing the architrave, the frieze, and the cornice. This element was first found in Greek architecture.

Foreground - The part of the painted image that appears closest to the viewer, usually the lower area of the painting or other composition. The background, usually the upper area of the painting, appears to be farther back. The middle ground is everything in between.

Gold - A symbol of pure light, the heavenly element in which God lives.

Grotesque - A type of decoration found on Roman wall paintings that we reexcavated in the sixteenth century, especially in Nero’s Golden House. The wall paintings were found in underground caves called “grottoes,” thus, the newly discovered ornamentation was called “grotesque.” These wall decorations featured motifs characterized by imaginative, organic connections between disparate elements, including human figures, animals, insects, and birds, mythological and other fantastic beasts, architectural and plant elements.

Source ⚜ More: Word Lists

[azzayofchaos]

You said you wanted art requests, how about tango trying to bake something?? :D

Not me getting busy and then procrastinating this for a month and a half. O_O

oops.

Here’s the guy! I think he’s probably a good cook, and at least a decent baker, he’s been alive for far too long to have not figured it out. Unfortunately he’s partial to Nether food which doesn’t always sit well with his non-nether companions.

Probably not the image either of us would have thought of but it was interesting to draw at any rate. He’s making a ghast-jelly soufflés or something!

Some thoughts about food and the Nether? (You didn’t think you could escape my world building, did you?)

This particular dish I image to be a fluffy soufflé or mousse-like texture. It’s a relatively sweet dish, a rarity it the nether, though it could easily be modified for a more savory flavor.

The list of ingratiates might look something like this:

- The luminescent, warped-vine fruits that grow at high altitudes in the temperate zone. They are much smaller and more fragile than shroomlights, and are a rare source of sugar in the Neth. Most nether plants are savory, umami, or sour/biter,

— The viscous ichor from a ghast’s innards that whips up much like egg whites (there are eggs produced by some nether species but not ones well suited for this process)

— Aromatic herbs and spices that can be found in various biomes are a good addition especially when combined with the fruit juice to make a sauce. The specifics would vary from recipe to recipe, but the benefit of the dish is that it can easily be made with ingredients that don’t contain capsaicin which is present in many nether plants. (this dessert is considered one of the most palatable for overworlders as long as you can get past the use of ghast ichors.)

— some fat source, generally a hoglin lard or oil from stems.

— Salt! Readily available. It can often be found in large mineral deposits or salt flats in the rime zone or wastes.

Additionally, adding other ingredients can alter the sort of dish.

— The texture can be made more cake-like for example with the use of spore-flour, and hoglin or nut-based milks.

— Things like cacao, sugars, and fruit are coveted goods that the Neath has historically traded with the overworld for.

— I thought it would be interesting if there was a certain type of heat-resistant but heat-sensitive plant that curls/uncurls based on refined temperatures. It could be used as a thermometer!

[mindblowingscience]

Most animals and plants never fossilize. For those that do, it's usually only hard parts such as bones and shells that preserve. However, in some exceptional cases, soft tissues such as muscles and gills survive the fossilization process and can present a wealth of information about the biology and ecology of ancient organisms. In a paper recently published in Palaeontologia Electronica, Dr. Adiel Klompmaker, University of Alabama Museums' curator of paleontology, and colleagues reported on a remarkable crab with multiple mineralized soft tissues preserved. This crab lived 75 million years ago during the Cretaceous in the area of present-day South Dakota in an ancient sea known as the Western Interior Seaway.

Continue Reading.

[theactualsunshinechild]

I know Wriollette shippers are probably going feral about day 4 of the 4.4 Lantern Rite event quest, and like I can see where y'all coming from of course, but I'm wired differently and have instead been flung headfirst into the significantly funnier "actual enemies to lovers old men yaoi" that is Zhongli and Neuvillette with Hu Tao and Furina furiously wingwomaning their asses off (and also dating because I've latched on to that as well) and Wrio getting the honor of being the guy all the courtship gifts get run past and having to be like:

"I'm not gonna lie, I don't know if.... 'Cider Lake water infused with the essence of an eye of the storm' is gonna fly"

"well, technically it is merely levitating, but-"

"No, I mean, it's not exactly catering to the taste of the person receiving the gift, now is it? When giving a gift you have to keep in mind what the other person would enjoy receiving from you."

"That is insightful advice indeed. Thank you, Wriothesley. It seems I shall have to think on this matter for a while longer."

Anyway, I think Hu Tao is completely correct that Zhongli and Neuvillette would get along to an insane degree always happy to give each other mini lectures about various interests.... if not for the whole mortal enemies thing. But that makes it that much more interesting to contemplate! Nothing like some major initial tension to spice up the dynamic and make the sweet moments sweeter, right?

Also I love the idea of them being their incredibly odd strange selves in public together. Most fascinating, polite, and strangely knowledgeable couple you'll ever meet. It is said that freaks are in the sheets, but these two are being freaks in the streets by their very nature.

They go out to eat and one requests a highly specific tea and spontaneously tries to teach the staff how to make it correctly, and the other requests water and compliments the mineral deposits of the local well and suggests planting mist corrolas and mint around it for a more refreshing undertone. The bits of conversation the waiter can catch covers topics ranging from the manufacturing process of Liyue silk to the exact details of paragraph 17 article 36 of Fontanian Law to do with permitted height of buildings, airspace allowance, and the recent conflicts surrounding it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[chanderpurgroup]

CPG is a platform that provides high-end mineral processing plants for gold. Our machinery is equipped with state-of-art features that facilitate the overall experience. It improves uptime, efficiency, and outcomes. The mining equipment has cut down the waste and chemical exposure that was common during the different phases of gold mining. 

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Existence Value: Why All of Nature is Important Whether We Can Use it or Not

I spend a lot of time around other nature nerds. We’re a bunch of people from varying backgrounds, places, and generations who all find a deep well of inspiration within the natural world. We’re the sort of people who will happily spend all day outside enjoying seeing wildlife and their habitats without any sort of secondary goal like fishing, foraging, etc. (though some of us engage in those activities, too.) We don’t just fall in love with the places we’ve been, either, but wild locales that we’ve only ever seen in pictures, or heard of from others. We are curators of existence value.

Existence value is exactly what it sounds like–something is considered important and worthwhile simply because it is. It’s at odds with how a lot of folks here in the United States view our “natural resources.” It’s also telling that that is the term most often used to refer collectively to anything that is not a human being, something we have created, or a species we have domesticated, and I have run into many people in my lifetime for whom the only value nature has is what money can be extracted from it. Timber, minerals, water, meat (wild and domestic), mushrooms, and more–for some, these are the sole reasons nature exists, especially if they can be sold for profit. When questioning how deeply imbalanced and harmful our extractive processes have become, I’ve often been told “Well, that’s just the way it is,” as if we shall be forever frozen in the mid-20th century with no opportunity to reimagine industry, technology, or uses thereof.

Moreover, we often assign positive or negative value to a being or place based on whether it directly benefits us or not. Look at how many people want to see deer and elk numbers skyrocket so that they have more to hunt, while advocating for going back to the days when people shot every gray wolf they came across. Barry Holstun Lopez’ classic Of Wolves and Men is just one of several in-depth looks at how deeply ingrained that hatred of the “big bad wolf” is in western mindsets, simply because wolves inconveniently prey on livestock and compete with us for dwindling areas of wild land and the wild game that sustained both species’ ancestors for many millennia. “Good” species are those that give us things; “bad” species are those that refuse to be so complacent.

Even the modern conservation movement often has to appeal to people’s selfishness in order to get us to care about nature. Look at how often we have to argue that a species of rare plant is worth saving because it might have a compound in it we could use for medicine. Think about how we’ve had to explain that we need biodiverse ecosystems, healthy soil, and clean water and air because of the ecosystem services they provide us. We measure the value of trees in dollars based on how they can mitigate air pollution and anthropogenic climate change. It’s frankly depressing how many people won’t understand a problem until we put things in terms of their own self-interest and make it personal. (I see that less as an individual failing, and more our society’s failure to teach empathy and emotional skills in general, but that’s a post for another time.)

Existence value flies in the face of all of those presumptions. It says that a wild animal, or a fungus, or a landscape, is worth preserving simply because it is there, and that is good enough. It argues that the white-tailed deer and the gray wolf are equally valuable regardless of what we think of them or get from them, in part because both are keystone species that have massive positive impacts on the ecosystems they are a part of, and their loss is ecologically devastating.

But even those species whose ecological impact isn’t quite so wide-ranging are still considered to have existence value. And we don’t have to have personally interacted with a place or its natural inhabitants in order to understand their existence value, either. I may never get to visit the Maasai Mara in Kenya, but I wish to see it as protected and cared for as places I visit regularly, like Willapa National Wildlife Refuge. And there are countless other places, whose names I may never know and which may be no larger than a fraction of an acre, that are important in their own right.

I would like more people (in western societies in particular) to be considering this concept of existence value. What happens when we detangle non-human nature from the automatic value judgements we place on it according to our own biases? When we question why we hold certain values, where those values came from, and the motivations of those who handed them to us in the first place, it makes it easier to see the complicated messes beneath the simple, shiny veneer of “Well, that’s just the way it is.”

And then we get to that most dangerous of realizations: it doesn’t have to be this way. It can be different, and better, taking the best of what we’ve accomplished over the years and creating better solutions for the worst of what we’ve done. In the words of Rebecca Buck–aka Tank Girl–“We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn this shit around.”

Let’s be clear: rethinking is just the first step. We can’t just uproot ourselves from our current, deeply entrenched technological, social, and environmental situation and instantly create a new way of doing things. Societal change takes time; it takes generations. This is how we got into that situation, and it’s how we’re going to climb out of it and hopefully into something better. Sometimes the best we can do is celebrate small, incremental victories–but that’s better than nothing at all.

Nor can we just ignore the immensely disproportionate impact that has been made on indigenous and other disadvantaged communities by our society (even in some cases where we’ve actually been trying to fix the problems we’ve created.) It does no good to accept nature’s inherent value on its own terms if we do not also extend that acceptance throughout our own society, and to our entire species as a whole.

But I think ruminating on this concept of existence value is a good first step toward breaking ourselves out first and foremost. And then we go from there.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes or hiring me for a guided nature tour, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[natalieironside]

It's unhealthy to eat unnatural processed foods like fungi, plants, and animals. I stay fit by only absorbing natural minerals directly from the soil.

[windvexer]

Heylo! I wanted to ask about your experience post initiation if that's alright .i recently did a tarot reading and got told that to please spirits in order to begin a good working relationship, i must contemplate and be ready to be Changed. there were lots of signs that it could lead to feelings of isolation, and otherness but it will lead me deep into myself (sry if this is too long.) i want to know if u went through something similar, or something else, and is it worth it personally for you. I would also love some pointers as to what I'm supposed to contemplate about. I don't mind the isolation but maybe I'm not understanding some key aspect of it. anyway thank you and i love your blog it's an irreplaceable resource for me. :)

Hi :)

Spirit-lead initiation into witchcraft is a controversial topic, I think in part because it can be very uncomfortable to discuss.

I have been relatively open on my blog that my initiatory experience was extremely painful and required a level of sacrifice and transformation that I was too immature to comprehend at the beginning of the process. Even now it's not something I'm sure I could articulate.

For me it was a process that lasted the majority of a decade. I think this is a relatively average timeline - which I just bring up because I think it's useful to point out that if you are facing the same sort of thing that I faced, it's not just going to be over in a few weeks or months.

Was it worth it personally for me? I don't know. Right now, my answer is that I love who I am and I like my life, and I wouldn't be who I am or have this life if I didn't go through that process. I used to say I'd never do it again if I had the choice. Now, a few years after the fact, sometimes I say I'd do it again. Maybe in a decade I'll think it was worth it.

It's my belief that the sort of initiatory process I, and others, have gone through, isn't necessary for most people to form a good working relationship with the spirits.

I believe that if you have the choice, you should very, very carefully contemplate initiation and only agree to it after a prolonged period of reflection.

So, what's there to contemplate? I dunno. Otherness on the path to spirit-working was a major part of my trip, so if we are kindred, here's maybe something to contemplate:

You are a boulder. You are a very nice boulder in the wilderness. You're composed of many varieties of minerals and metals. You are a gorgeous boulder, glittering in the sunlight, hosting a unique map of inclusions and ore veins unlike any other boulder in the world.

You sit high up on a mountainside. A few meters behind you is a river. Below you is a dry valley.

The waters of the river are pressing up behind you. They rush past you, sweeping by, continuing their eternal circuit in the mountain-range, but rarely trickling into the dry valley below.

One day, you gain an interest - as some boulders do - in allowing some of the water to trickle past you into the valley below. The secrets of nature will allow you to sometimes let water to lap up over your sides, and through narrow crevices, to water the plants you find to be most beautiful, and provide drinking pools for the little animals you hold most dear.

Little by little, the valley beneath you begins to change as you apply yourself to learning the secrets of nature and letting the water flow past you.

After some time, the water begins to whisper in your ear. It appreciates your interest in its flow - it likes your focus on the river. A deal can be brokered:

The river will dissolve only some of the minerals and inclusions that run through you, creating hollow tunnels. Through these tunnels, the water can flow much more easily and rapidly.

But there are conditions.

The conditions are that whatever is washed away can never be returned. How could it? What force in the universe could restore the crystalline structure within you once the waters have carried it away?

And, the river chooses which inclusions will be removed. The river is very wise in these matters; it knows better than anyone how water can best flow through any boulder. It isn't up to you to choose what leaves, and it isn't up to you to choose the nature in which the water will flow through you.

Finally, if you use the secrets of nature to ever stop the flow of water through the new inclusions, you are at risk of crumbling away. The empty caverns within you will dry up and leave you empty in places that should be whole.

The river asks you to contemplate and return with an answer.

Of course it leads you deep into yourself. The river is going to run right through you.

[servantofthefates]

Leap Day Spell

The Earth takes 365 days and roughly six hours to orbit the Sun. Leap Day, occurring on February 29th, is a corrective measure to include those extra hours.

Do you work very hard but are not appreciated at your job? Do you give generously in a relationship but are not reciprocated? Have you been eating healthy without noticing any effect on your body?

As above, so below. Leap Day is the time for correcting mismatching things in life.

STEP 1: The Protest

At any time during the 24 hours of a Leap Day, write down on a piece of paper, in just one sentence, what you wish to correct in your life.

If you have more than one grievance, choose that which pains you the most. The one that, if set right, will give you the greatest relief.

Using natural paper uncoated with polymers, as well as pencil instead of processed ink, will help you connect to nearby supernatural earth-dwellers.

STEP 2: The Appeal

On the back of the paper, write with your non-dominant hand these eleven names:

Abbac, Abdac, Istac, Audac, Castrac, Cuac, Cusor, Tristator, Derisor, Detestator, Incantator

They are demons who work for the old gods. They punish the mischievous and the cruel with scorn and ridicule.

The struggle you feel while using your opposite hand is what will make them take notice of you.

STEP 3: The Judgement

Put your paper and a single banana peel in a small unpainted metal pail. Fill it up with water. Place it where the light from the Sun or the Moon can reach it.

A banana peel, though considered trash, is rife with vitamins and minerals. Your protest will be weighed by the demons against it: What has more worth, your complaint or a piece of garbage?

STEP 4: The Waiting

After exactly eleven hours have passed, use the liquid in the pail to water a plant. Respectfully dispose of the paper and the banana peel together.

If the old gods’ minions have found your protest worthy, that aspect of your life will begin correcting itself in the next few days.

If nothing has happened in eleven days, it means they have decided that whatever unfairness you are suffering is well-deserved. That it is payment for how you too have treated others unfairly before.