this started off as a cryptid blog and now it's just a blog of "I would totally research the hell out of this if I would just remember when I actually have time". and cryptids. and whatever.
1915 c. Doctor Louisa Garrett Anderson was a suffragist and a doctor who established and ran Endell Street Military Hospital during World War One. Pictured with Dr. Anderson is Dr. Flora Murry, her life and work partner. Pinterest.
The way Europeans talk about North America when they say it reveals everything about the way they think.
To them, history here didn’t start until they arrived. Not until the so called real people with real culture and real architecture and real timelines stepped off a boat.
Everything before that gets treated like fog, like background noise, like a blank landscape waiting to be drawn on.
Like the Europeans arrived here and just found a land untouched by human hands ready for them to Manifest (European) Destiny in, instead of, like, a continent full of nations older than most European countries, with civilizations, trade routes, astronomy, agriculture, laws, stories, cities, innovations, relationships to the land that go further back than many of the languages used to belittle them.
When Europeans say “America is big,” they don’t even mean the actual land full of over 500 nations of distinct peoples.
They mean the unmarked page they imagine they wrote on. When they say “Europe is old,” they mean “ours is the old that matters.” The implication is always that Indigenous history doesn’t count as history at all, that Indigenous people were somehow outside the timeline until colonialism kicked the clock into motion.
I’m tired of watching it walk by unchallenged and seeing it drift by unchallenged.
North America wasn’t waiting to be discovered.
It wasn’t empty wilderness.
It wasn’t without time or culture or memory.
It was already ancient when the Europeans arrived.
Treating Indigenous people like footnotes or shadows just makes it embarrassingly obvious that a lot of Europeans still don’t see them as real people with real history, real innovation, and real presence.
This continent has been old for longer than Europe has had its current borders. The only thing that’s new here is the colonial amnesia.
The oldest buildings you can find in the Americas are all indigenous. The oldest artifacts ever discovered in the Americas are indigenous. The oldest cultures in the Americas are indigenous. Everything you think is new is only new because what was old has been destroyed or omitted or hidden from you; that is because it is all indigenous. It is easy to justify Manifest Destiny when you believe that everything old belongs to the white man— it is easy to justify it when you believe that there is no history to speak of before his arrival. But there is. Ignorance is a weapon in the hands of fascists; it is your responsibility and your duty to learn. Do not allow yourself to be weaponized by the state. Listen to indigenous voices and fight back against every effort to silence them.
A brief guide for Resource Generation members and other folks with access to land to support in education and resource sharing around land r
Why break the bank to visit archeological sites such as the Pyramids of Giza when you can search out similar locations right in America?
Who says the United States doesn’t have historic sites?
Footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back
Archaeological discoveries throughout the Americas are pushing back the date for when humans reached the New World by thousands of years, re
Archaeology of the Americas - Wikipedia
Archeology and Preserving America's Past (U.S. National Park Service)
Alaska Native Heritage and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve
Visit Alaska's premier cultural center. More than a museum—experience traditions, languages & arts of Alaska Native cultures through live pr
A research guide focusing on materials and resources for discovering Native North American voices across genres and mediums.
As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000
As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.
Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”
Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”
Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...
To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.
During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.
On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.
As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”
LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.
So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.
The infrastructure to make the county more "spongy" is also used in the dry season to remediate contaminated groundwater and to return recycled water to the aquifers.
There have also been some pilot projects to make flood-prone neighborhoods more spongy on a small scale by distributing water barrels (to hold more water out of the storm drain system) and regrading the edges of roads in areas without sidewalks to allow for greater ground infiltration. I've been studying this for a while because we had to deal with a grading problem that caused a lot of water to build up against our foundation (thankfully poured concrete rather than a raised foundation, but it's still not great). There's a lot of small scale ways to reduce runoff that contribute to the overall sponginess while improving quality of life in other ways.
Making the average yard (at least in the Midwest) more capable of holding water is so easy that it's nuts that more people don't do it. Every bit you put back into the soil instead of letting run off mitigates flooding and stores water in the ground for dry periods.
The mantra for rainwater management is slow it down, spread it out, soak it in. Water soaks into the ground more easily when it moves slowly, so plant every bit of soil you can. You can force water to move over stones or other obstacles to slow it down as well. If you can spread the water over a larger area, it will naturally move more slowly, also soaking in more easily.
Rain gardens are just shallow depressions, usually 6" to 12" deep at most, designed to to hold water for 24 or 48 hours until it soaks into the ground. All you need is a shovel and plants native to your area that have deep roots.
I made a rain garden in my front yard that takes the discharge from my sump pump as well as a gutter. Even in a big storm, I have no runoff from that side of the yard. I have been know to take videos of my rain garden in a storm and send them to my gardening friends. Check out the rainscaping page at Missouri Botanical Garden for more methods of managing rainwater.
My friend rappelling into the Rumble Room, the second largest cave room in the US. During this rappel I was unable to see any of the walls or even the floor except for the last 50 feet. All I could see was the murky darkness surrounding me.
If anyone is interested in a longer history on black trans people, Black On Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton has been on my to-read list for a while now, and has some pretty excellent reviews.
Carriola Tussock Moths: these moths have translucent patches (i.e. hyaline windows) on their wings, and their green-tinted veins are clearly visible within
Above: Carriola witti
Moths of the genus Carriola have a very unusual appearance, as their wings are covered in translucent patches that reveal a delicate network of greenish-yellow veins. The green coloration is caused by the haemolymph (i.e. "blood") that passes through these veins.
Above: the male form of Carriola thyridophora, with a close-up of the hyaline windows and bright green veins on its wings
The males of this genus typically have brown or beige borders around their wings, while the females have pink or white borders instead. The hyaline windows also tend to be much clearer and more extensive in the females.
Above: the female form of Carriola seminsula
This article describes the adaptive benefits of wing transparency in moths:
The coevolutionary arms race between prey and predator has generated some of the most striking adaptations in the living world, including lures, mimicry and camouflage in prey. Transparency, by definition, constitutes the perfect background matching against virtually all types of backgrounds. Transparency is common in pelagic environments where there is no place to hide.
Above: genus Carriola
Carriola tussock moths can be found in many different countries throughout Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines and Malaysia. They also inhabit certain parts of China, India and Sri Lanka.
Above: Carriola seminsula
This is one of my very favorite moths, tbh. I love it when moths have hyaline windows on their wings, and this genus is especially beautiful and bizarre.
Sources & More Info:
Nota Lepidopterologica: Review of the Genus Carriola with Descriptions of Four New Species
Singapore Biodiversity: Carriola ecnomoda
Grokipedia: Genus Carriola
iNaturalist: Genus Carriola
BioRxiv: How Transparent Wing Windows Reduce Detectability in Moths
Journal of Evolutionary Biology: Transparency Improves Concealment in Cryptically Colored Moths (PDF)
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