#swmngpools

[onenicebugperday]

this daredevil had one hell of a ride on my sunroof. hung on the whole way to work going 55mph. i think she had fun.

Ooooo she likes to be FAST

[rebeccathenaturalist]

apologies if you’ve been asked this before, but do you know a good way to find local native plant nurseries?

@swmngpools So there are a few things I do if I'm trying to find native plant nurseries in a specific place.

First, I'll search online for "[location] native plant nursery". Here in the US I usually search by state, though sometimes I'll add in the nearest major city, too. If my search is only coming up with general native plant sites and not nurseries in particular, then I'll put the location in one set of quotes, and "native plant nursery" in another--for example, "Seattle, WA" "native plant nursery".

I also try Google Maps. I navigate to the general area where I want to look--not TOO specific, especially if it's an area that is less likely to have native plant nurseries; I have more options where I live now in the Pacific Northwest than where I grew up in the Ozarks. I'll search for "native plant nurseries" or "native plants". Unfortunately, this doesn't always work as well as a general search engine because if there isn't an abundance of native plant sellers in an area, Google Maps tends to be more likely to show me general plant vendors. Searching in the PNW I get several hits on Google Maps, but searching around my old hometown in Missouri I get....Lowe's.

To be fair, Google Maps did also show me the well-established general plant nursery that my mom used to take me to when I was a wee kiddo in the 80's, and which is still around today. So if all you're getting is places like these, email, call, or visit them if it's convenient, and ask whether they carry or can order native plants. Or if they don't, see if they know of a place that does. You might also try landscaping companies; most of them stick to whatever non-native plants are popular, but there are some landscapers who do use native plants as well and may be able to help with sourcing.

While we're on the topic of going directly to people, if you're in the US most states have a Native Plant Society that can help you find sources for native plants. Other conservation entities, both here and elsewhere, may be able to help as well. This includes any private businesses, nonprofit organizations, or governmental entities that may be involved in things like environmental protections, habitat restoration and preservation, outdoor education and other activities, etc. Even if they themselves aren't directly involved in native plants there might be someone on staff who knows more about it.

Another thing I might try if I'm feeling a bit stuck is to ask in a relevant online group. For example, on Facebook there are groups like Pollinator Friendly Yards, that aren't region-specific, but that have people from all over who may be able to help you with resources local to you. And, of course, this is another good place to look for groups with native plant enthusiasts local to you--use the same search terms in Facebook's search feature that you did for your general search engine search.

One last option--if you know of a few native plants you might want to try planting, search for "[plant name] seeds" or "[plant name] starts", or even "buy [plant name]". You may have to search through the results to find someone actually selling what you're looking for. It's also possible that the plant is difficult to cultivate--or no one has even thought to try cultivating it--and therefore can't be purchased. Make sure that the specific species/variety is the one found in your area; a lot of people trying to help monarch butterflies in North America, for example, end up buying non-native tropical milkweed instead of whatever their native regional milkweed species is.

On that note, there's a lot of debate over "nativars", cultivars of native species that may be bred to exaggerate certain traits or make them more suitable for a vastly changed landscape. On the one hand it may seem like a great idea to have a plant that is easier to grow. However, nativars may actually be less beneficial to insects and other wildlife. For example, some nativars are cultivated with altered flowers, such as a double flower that has more petals than the original type. Pollinators are often unable to reach the nectar or pollen of these altered flowers. Nativars of a plant that normally has green leaves but that has been bred for more red in the foliage will be less likely to be eaten by herbivorous insects because the anthocyanins that cause the red coloration give the leaves a bad taste to deter insect predation. All of which, of course, defeats the purpose of planting native plants, since you WANT your native plants to be eaten by insects and other wildlife. So get the "wild type" native plant rather than nativars.

So those are my suggestions for seeking out native plant nurseries. Again, I want to emphasize that some places will be more likely to have them than others; the Pacific Northwest US has a great abundance, whereas a few cursory searches didn't turn up any in the Czech Republic. If you're trying to find native plants in an area where English is not the most common language, search in whatever the common language(s) is and you'll be more likely to get results if there are native plant nurseries or vendors in the area.

I hope this helps! Let me know if I can help with anything else.

[monttagues]

do you think the dnd movie is worth seeing as someone who has never played dnd?

yeah i think if you don't know dnd, it'll just be a fun fantasy movie. there are some inside jokes you probably won't get and there are quite a few references to the game, but you'll still understand what the characters mean or what they're talking about, y'know?

[alicecullenslefttit]

Anyone who is interested in reading about exactly this (reflecting on the tree/life you are infringing upon and whether it’s truly necessary) and other really cool and pleasant observations about nature and human’s interactions with it should read “Sandcounty Almanac” by Aldo Leopold. He was a conservationist (meaning he believed that people do have some right to use natural resources but we need to be thoughtful of how, when, and where) that did a lot of cool work, and the book is just a collection of essays he wrote about the woods near his farm it’s really great. It’s insightful about environmentalism without it feeling very “political”. I’d definitely recommend it to people who like the idea of doing rituals and sacrifices for trees, but aren’t super behind the religious/spiritual aspect of it

I also refuse to believe that swmngpools is actually in their 4th year of college in natural resource management because as someone who is in the middle of doing a very similar major, that is the most basic, bottom of the barrel take you could have on this, especially since you usually learn about the importance of things like environmentalism (also the fact that trees “being too tall for deer to eat them” is not a valid reason to cut them down as they have half a million other purposes???) in resource management during like. Your freshman year courses. Also that people who cut down a lot of trees would not benefit from, ya know, there not being enough fully grown trees to cut down. Because they’ve all already been cut down. And they aren’t being planted again fast enough for us to keep cutting them down at this current pace.

Was reading on wikipedia about how lots of ancient cultures had beliefs and traditions where you had to offer prayers and/or sacrifices if you wanted to cut down a tree because you were basically killing the spirit that lived within the tree and if you did that without good reason bad stuff would happen to you

we should bring that back. if you want to clear cut a forest you have to pray and sacrifice on behalf of every single tree

[mosticonicposts]

the post that’s like. 2020 plague

the what

[lilabard]

beauty queens by libba bray, the wolves of mercy falls, what’s left of me by kat zhang?

thank you!!

beauty queens -  added to TBR | on my TBR | couldn’t finish it | did not enjoy | it was OK | liked it | loved it | favourite | not interested

the wolves of mercy falls -  added to TBR | on my TBR | couldn’t finish it | did not enjoy | it was OK | liked it | loved it | favourite | not interested

what’s left of me -  added to TBR | on my TBR | couldn’t finish it | did not enjoy | it was OK | liked it | loved it | favourite | not interested | interested

ask me any book title?

[demondarlington]

milk chocolate is gross it’s so creamy and it makes me want to throw up. dark chocolate only.

disagree. look, the real chocolate enemy is white chocolate.

send ☕️ and a popular/unpopular opinion

[officialweezerelections]

@swmngpools unfortunately

Speaking of baby birds, this sparrow has been eyeing an old robin nest and I’m hoping that there will be baby sparrows this year. Little peepers.

-🦢

[annbeth]

i voted for literary science because that seems like a good fit for you. whichever one you end up choosing i hope it works out!

thank you so much lovely💖🍪💖🍪

url: i don’t get it, but it’s amazing! | wow?! | who did you bribe to get it? | ginny weasleyicon: cute | amazing | absolutely stunning | jesper faheymobile theme: cute | amazing | absolutely stunning | richard ganseytheme: cute | amazing | absolutely stunning | nina zenikposts: great | amazing | um, WOW?! | simon spierfollowing: no, but i love you | how wasn’t i following you? | of course | till the very end 

help me decide what to study and get a free blograte (and cookies)

[ecostudyy]

I just realized i never made an introduction post? Anyways, I’m Mary and I’m a sophomore in high school trying to balance school, friends, athletics, and an existential crisis. I’m currently taking Algebra II, AP World History, Honors World Lit, Chemistry, Spanish 3, and Photography. This is a sideblog so you probably wont see me following you, but my main account swmngpools instead. As you can tell i dont go on this account all that much but I am trying to get more into it. I reblog a lot of playlists and study tips more so than motivation and desk layouts. I will also make my own posts from time to time too! i organize in the tags and you can see them in the tags tab on my blog. 

[onenicebugperday]

kinda freaky

Piggy back ride :)

[figbian]

@swmngpools yes sorry there’s not much context here. i’m currently writing a paper on walafrid strabo’s poem about plants sprouting from the bones of a deer, a scene potentially he stumbled upon in a caroligian hunting park. it’s a weird and neat little poem, playing with the idea of an unnatural natural world (the hunting park is man-made, created to be good for hunting etc, and sometimes is thought about as an artificial eden in medieval writings, but ultimately we know now the hunting park is an ecological disaster bcs they’re bringing in invasive species etc. the hunting park destroys natural diversity, the very thing it strives to create, etc. the violence of planting trees.)

on top of that, the poem is about the sort of life in death and life from violence, where the trees are bones, which again has this idea that trees come from violence: to make a forest is to sacrifice & hunt & kill. my thoughts r rlly disjointed on this rn bcs im supposed to be focusing on alcuin but if there are any walafrid strabo ppl out there . I Am So Into How Weird His Poems Can Be

also weird little seneca references :-)

frothing at the mouth again abt the violence of planting trees

[swmngpools]

i've decided i'm gonna write a thirteenth year au fanfic where cody has been deaf his whole life and now they know why-he's a merman. it's gonna be written mostly over the summer on a doc on my phone but i will post it on both my ao3 (melchoritz) and my fanfiction.net (swmngpools) because i will never find closure until i finish this myself.

[thepromise1988]

∞

up for air from the swimming poolyou kneel down to the dry landkiss the earth that birthed you

- pink + white by frank ocean

send me an infinity sign!

[headspace-hotel]

@swmngpools The two questions I always have about this are the following:

How did we come to the conclusion that we need 'fewer humans' and not 'change in the way resources are used'. The current system is WILDLY inefficient and wasteful. So many resources are being wasted/destroyed by consumerism, planned obsolescence, entire industries that are totally unnecessary and exist only for profit...that it just doesn't make sense in my head how we could be past the hard limit for a population Earth can support while squandering resources at a rate many times the amount needed to support its people.

What can we possibly do to slow down population growth any faster than is already happening?

I'm exhausted right now so i'm not going to pull up links about it just at this moment...but fertility rates have already dropped to or below replacement in half the world. This is only going to keep dropping (ironically, abortion bans in the USA are helping, since at least where I live, there's been a huge rise in people deciding to be permanently sterilized).

The proposals i've seen are all like "we should empower women in impoverished countries and give them access to birth control..." and like first of all, who is "we", and second of all, we should have been caring about that the whole time...right?

Why don't they have access to birth control. What is already being done about this and by whom. If a formalized policy was created to "empower women" worldwide, what would this be and who would be carrying it out. I don't know what I'm saying it's just a little like saying, "All we need to do is simply, end poverty worldwide..."

There have already been efforts in recent history to reduce population within a country and they were Not, Broadly Speaking, Good (e.g. China's one-child policy).

Also, there are limits to how quickly a population can sustainably downsize. I know everyone clowns on the writings treating Japan's elderly like some kind of problem, but if the fertility rate drops to, say, 50% below replacement, that generation is going to be half as large as their parents' generation, and as their parents' generation grows old, most of them will WANT to retire and many eventually will no longer be able to live independently.

Obviously it should not be expected for children to provide 24/7 care to their elderly parents, but to even have the infrastructure to provide support and care to these people, there needs to be some number of younger able-bodied people working. IMO elder care is already a huge humanitarian crisis even here in the USA, where so many nursing homes are terrible and neglectful places.

Is there no possibility that we could simply divert some of the resources being used for funko pops, 34 types of oreos, billboards, junk mail, the lawn care industry, giant yachts, amazon alexas, printers that break irreversibly after using them 3 times, etc. into something better? The other day I tried to print a recipe and there were so many ads on the page that the print job initially was 27 pages long, with only two pages actually containing recipe. How much energy is being poured into advertising? Every day I think of it

The thing is, I don't think most things (rightly) criticized as ecofascism are actually fascism. The main characteristics of fascism are authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, preoccupation with the military, and anxiety about corruption of culture and moral degeneration brought on by cultural "others."

Sentiments like "people using up resources is killing the planet, so we need to reduce the human population," while they WILL be co-opted by fascism, are not fascist themselves.

Colonialist? Absolutely. Genocidal? Ultimately yes. Bioessentialist and racist? Totally. An excellent companion to fascism? Certainly. Consider how indigenous people have been removed from their lands and denied the ability to use the animals and plants as they always have because conservation efforts by colonial governments wish to "protect" those lands from human influence. Consider how the population idea means the responsibility for climate change is placed on countries with the highest fertility rates, never mind that the countries using the most resources most have fertility rates at or below replacement. Consider how overconsumption is framed as a matter of personal choice, rather than a matter of companies with godlike power enforcing dependency on cars, restricting access to low-impact foods, and utilizing planned obsolescence.

But "humans are bad and nature is better with less humans" isn't fascism by itself, it's just anti-human and blaming the oppressed for their oppression.

Basically it's bad to hate "humans" as a species and it's a great companion to fascism because "humans are bad" can be enforced selectively against the members of the human species labeled "Least valuable"

[onenicebugperday]

the submit button STILL isn’t working for me but i was doing some mop up and when i opened a stump i accidentally opened up their house! we have snow coming so i put it back to how i found it as best i could.

Oops! Accidentally ripped open their living room! I'm sure they'll be fine and maybe just move to a new part of the stump :)