#redwooding

[anghraine]

@redwooding said:

My only quibble with the letter, by the way, is that in more than one annotated Austen novel, David Shapard says in those notes that it was proper for an unmarried man to write an unmarried woman, and for her to reply, *only* if they are engaged to each other. Marianne violates this informal but strong norm, and (IIRC) Elinor worries about this. It DOES seem out of character for Darcy to do something so improper. Yet the tone of the letter is almost business-like, as if he is writing to a man who has insulted him and they're gearing up for a duel. Obviously he is not planning to duel Lizzie, but it does have that tone of demanding satisfaction to the smear on his reputation, though it's much more correctional in tone than challenging. So maybe he disregards that norm for this important reason.

I wanted to respond to this specifically in case I forget to respond to your overall reply.

David Shapard's annotations are a very mixed bag IMO. His historical annotations are intriguing, as are plenty of the more literary interpretations, but he makes some peculiar mistakes in applying historical knowledge to the characters without always attending to their individual personalities or circumstances. I've used a case where he does this with Lydia as an example (in my prospectus) of why I think interdisciplinary readings need to be handled more carefully than they often are.

As for the particular matter of propriety wrt letter writing, I think it is very much dependent on how openly it's done. Significantly, Darcy doesn't send Elizabeth a letter, which would flout the norm and put Elizabeth in a very uncomfortable situation. He waits for her and delivers it by hand so that she doesn't have to deal with the social consequences of being known to have received a letter from him.

Elizabeth could then destroy the letter if she wanted to be completely secure, and he seems to figure she would (though Elizabeth's response after their engagement suggests she kept it the whole time). But the norm is, of course, why she doesn't and can't respond.

Darcy is maneuvering carefully around propriety here to strike a balance between defending his character and keeping social pressure off Elizabeth. And, after all, this is the same man who will try to give Lydia an out from marrying Wickham despite the dictates of propriety. Additionally, he tries to handle that situation in a way that will accomplish what needs to be done while keeping Elizabeth from feeling social or personal pressure. He cares a lot about propriety, but he's not unbending about it when it really matters.

This is also relevant to Mrs Gardiner's half-expectation that Elizabeth will (openly) receive a letter from Darcy after they leave Lambton. A letter received that way would be very improper without some kind of understanding between Darcy and Elizabeth (which Mrs Gardiner thinks might very well exist, as seen then and in her later letter to Elizabeth). So that would put Elizabeth under quite a lot of scrutiny in a way his earlier letter doesn't.

[maureen2musings]

Redwoods lightshow

@thecrispeoutdoors

[reasonsforhope]

Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds

Article | Paywall free

When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”

Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated [aka losing all their needles], mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.

“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.

Mild fires strike coastal redwood forests about every decade. The giant trees resist burning thanks to the bark, up to about 30 centimeters thick at the base, which contains tannic acids that retard flames. Their branches and needles are normally beyond the reach of flames that consume vegetation on the ground. But the fire in 2020 was so intense that even the uppermost branches of many trees burned and their ability to photosynthesize went up in smoke along with their pine needles.

Trees photosynthesize to create sugars and other carbohydrates, which provide the energy they need to grow and repair tissue. Trees do store some of this energy, which they can call on during a drought or after a fire. Still, scientists weren’t sure these reserves would prove enough for the burned trees of Big Basin.

Visiting the forest a few months after the fire, Peltier and his colleagues found fresh growth emerging from blackened trunks. They knew that shorter lived trees can store sugars for several years. Because redwoods can live for more than 2000 years, the researchers wondered whether the trees were drawing on much older energy reserves to grow the sprouts.

Average age is only part of the story. The mix of carbohydrates also contained some carbon that was much older. The way trees store their sugar is like refueling a car, Peltier says. Most of the gasoline was added recently, but the tank never runs completely dry and so a few molecules from the very first fill-up remain. Based on the age and mass of the trees and their normal rate of photosynthesis, Peltier calculated that the redwoods were calling on carbohydrates photosynthesized nearly 6 decades ago—several hundred kilograms’ worth—to help the sprouts grow. “They allow these trees to be really fire-resilient because they have this big pool of old reserves to draw on,” Peltier says.

It's not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”

... “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”

-via Science, December 1, 2023

[bc-jpeg]

redrawn an old sketch

[wachinyeya]

CA Redwoods to Be First National Park Co-Managed with a Native American Tribe That Used to Own it https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ca-redwoods-to-be-the-first-national-park-co-managed-with-a-native-american-tribe-that-used-to-own-it/

questionable headline aside this is good news

The Yurok will be the first Tribal nation to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed on Tuesday by the tribe, Redwood national and state parks, and the non-profit Save the Redwoods League, according to news reports.

The Yurok tribe has seen a wave of successes in recent years, successfully campaigning for the removal of a series of dams on the Klamath River, where salmon once ran up to their territory, and with the signing of a new memorandum of understanding, the Yurok are set to reclaim more of what was theirs.

[eregyrn-falls-art]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, once again, to DIPPER AND MABEL!

For this birthday, another hike amongst the redwoods on a misty day. This time, they're meeting up with Bigfoot, who became a friend during an encounter on the Stan Twins' birthday back in 2021 (see here, here, and here.)

I would very much like to go hiking in the redwoods again; it's a magical place!

(As mentioned before, I’ve loosely based my Bigfoot design on the life-sized figure – made of grizzly fur I believe – at the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine (my photos here).  Only, I’ve tried to make his fur a bit more redwoods-colored, and my take on his skin color is a sort of moss/lichen green, perfect for blending into the woods.)

[aestum]

(by Vasilis Karkalas)

[graveyardrabbit]

textures and colors of the bark of Methuselah the coast redwood

[emperornorton47]

[leahberman]

redwood rendezvous

instagram - twitter - website

[expressions-of-nature]

by Willie Huang

[anghraine]

Why P&P 1790s? I'm familiar with its writing history, so I know it's one of two plausible periods, but I prefer thinking about it as 1810s. OTOH, how much of my preference was unconsciously formed by actual publication date or by the adaptations (especially 1995) I don't know, so I'm open to your argument for the 1790s.

ETA: I do have another, probably more coherent, post about this here, but I rambled about it again anyway.

Partly it's similarly subjective, to be sure. I don't like the identification of Austen with the Regency when she did so much work before it. I don't like the 1995 P&P or its stranglehold on Austen fanon. I don't like post-Regency fashion and don't want to inflict it on 30- and 40-something Elizabeth and Jane, lol. And I simply find the eighteenth century more engaging than the nineteenth (I started my PhD program intending to study both, as I did in my MA, and ended up gleefully escaping into studying early modern+long 18th-century British lit instead).

I also find the eighteenth century more pertinent to Austen and particularly to her earlier novels, in addition to finding it more personally engaging. And more vaguely, those earlier novels—S&S, P&P, and NA—feel to me like they exist in a significantly different and earlier world than Persuasion or Sanditon do.

The cultural referents in her earlier work can be a bit of a jumble, to be sure. And I think it's clear that Austen didn't want any of her published work to feel out of date, but at the same time, didn't want to overhaul those works to the point that they were no longer recognizable in essentials. This is most glaring an issue with Northanger Abbey (NA without Udolpho??), but even little things like Marianne's hair or Mr Bennet's powdering-gown just seem to fit best with a c. 1790s setting.

Those kinds of things can be fanwanked into "Austentime"— the popular, vaguely 1810s setting as depicted in most Austen adaptations and related genre conventions (there's an article about this that I've been trying and failing to dig up, but that's how I always think of that sort of amorphously Regency setting now). But the explanations for the little details being totally 1810s details do feel like fanwank to me.

And of course, the militia subplots in P&P seem clearly influenced by the 1790s militias and the Brighton camp that closed shortly before Austen started writing P&P. The Broadview edition of P&P, for instance, unhesitatingly dates P&P to the 1790s based on that.

I've talked before about other specifics that IMO align better with the 1790s than 1810s, too, and I do stand by those. But for me, the strongest reason for my personal preference is that feeling that P&P and Persuasion/Sanditon are not happening at anywhere near the same cultural moment. While P&P is very different from S&S and NA, they strike me as much more akin in this sense than any of them are to the late novels, and to me, it makes the most sense to place them at or near their original creation to both fit the 1790s vibes I get from them and to gain some distance from the late works.

[reasonsforhope]

"The Yurok will be the first Tribal nation to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed on Tuesday [March 19, 2024] by the tribe, Redwood national and state parks, and the non-profit Save the Redwoods League, according to news reports.

The Yurok tribe has seen a wave of successes in recent years, successfully campaigning for the removal of a series of dams on the Klamath River, where salmon once ran up to their territory, and with the signing of a new memorandum of understanding, the Yurok are set to reclaim more of what was theirs.

Save the Redwoods League bought a property containing these remarkable trees in 2013, and began working with the tribe to restore it, planting 50,000 native plants in the process. The location was within lands the Yurok once owned but were taken during the Gold Rush period.

Centuries passed, and by the time it was purchased it had been used as a lumber operation for 50 years, and the nearby Prairie Creek where the Yurok once harvested salmon had been buried.

Currently located on the fringe of Redwoods National and State Parks which receive over 1 million visitors every year and is a UNESCO Natural Heritage Site, the property has been renamed ‘O Rew, a Yurok word for the area.

“Today we acknowledge and celebrate the opportunity to return Indigenous guardianship to ‘O Rew and reimagine how millions of visitors from around the world experience the redwoods,” said Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League.

Having restored Prarie Creek and filled it with chinook and coho salmon, red-legged frogs, northwestern salamanders, waterfowl, and other species, the tribe has said they will build a traditional village site to showcase their culture, including redwood-plank huts, a sweat house, and a museum to contain many of the tribal artifacts they’ve recovered from museum collections.

Believing the giant trees sacred, they only use fallen trees to build their lodges.

“As the original stewards of this land, we look forward to working together with the Redwood national and state parks to manage it,” said Rosie Clayburn, the tribe’s cultural resources director.

It will add an additional mile of trails to the park system, and connect them with popular redwood groves as well as new interactive exhibits.

“This is a first-of-its-kind arrangement, where Tribal land is co-stewarded with a national park as its gateway to millions of visitors. This action will deepen the relationship between Tribes and the National Park Service,” said Redwoods National Park Superintendent Steve Mietz, adding that it would “heal the land while healing the relationships among all the people who inhabit this magnificent forest.”"

-via Good News Network, March 25, 2024

[rosechata]

amongst the giants

[bluebelly-sun-serpentine]

September 22nd, 2024

[coolthingsguyslike]