The polar opposite of corporate accounts trying to come across as hip and super friendly are the ones for libraries, aquariums, parks systems and the like, that are basically just trying to get people excited about learning and the wonder of history/science by posting things like this:
invasive species are a real thing, but there is a reason why (in USAmerica and elsewhere I reckon!) invasive species are the most widely understood and easy to teach about ecological concept.
this reason is very bad and has nothing to do with ecology
invasive plants and invasive animals tend to be different in some ways, and also all invasive species are different from all other invasive species. so basically don't generalize this
but the history of many invasive species is totally inseparable from the ways the landscape was altered to create niches for those species. European style farming, surface/strip mining, construction, roads and railroads, etc. created novel ecosystems with novel disturbance regimes that the "invasive" species are highly capable of taking advantage of.
There is nothing wrong about Kudzu that makes it invasive in Appalachia, but there is something wrong with Appalachia that makes it so extraordinarily invasible by kudzu, and that thing is "you exploded the tops off the mountains, scraped the whole entire surface of the land away, and put a bunch of fucking highways through the wreckage."
I believe that the history of destruction and exploitation could possibly still be present in the evolutionary history of the invasive species even when the destruction is no longer visible.
In the case of Kudzu, Chinese scientists have compared USAmerican kudzu to Chinese kudzu and found evolutionary changes in the USAmerican kudzu's DNA that come from its adaptation in the environments in the introduced range. I can't find the article right now I'll look for it later
but, think of this: entire eastern half of the USA was laid waste, logging strip mining and destructive methods of farming obliterating the soil and previous landscapes. during the same time non-native species are introduced. The wasteland left over is poorly suited for native species, but the non-native species are weeds, they are adapted for this stuff. So the non-native populations become huge because there is so much destroyed habitat, and they have lots of genetic diversity. They breed and breed and breed and they evolve and evolve and evolve. Then, even when the forests are partly restored and the land starts to heal, the non-native species are highly adapted to the new environment due to having been able to breed, evolve, and spread widely in the previous state of destruction.
that is my thought anyway, I would have to study it more to confirm.
Cities, at least in the contemporary, concrete-jungle sense of the word, are novel ecosystems; they have notably different climate than the surroundings due to urban heat island effect, and the soils can be highly depleted or highly over-fertilized, depending. They have tons of non-native species that wouldn't otherwise survive being kept alive in landscaping and gardens. Basically it creates lots of tiny local niches where non-native species can survive, and where a population survives and reproduces, it evolves.
Within the special novel ecosystems of cities, populations evolve and evolve and evolve and with every generation there is a chance that an individual will emerge that is capable of surviving a little outside the novel ecosystem. And then, when the species is able to expand to live in new conditions, the new genes are spread widely because they are so helpful.
humans introduce species to new places, but we also cause evolution of species through our creation of new habitats. there is even a word for plants that are adapted only to live in human created habitats, and have no apparent "wild" populations because human habitats ARE their habitat: they are called anecophytes and the word has mostly been used by urban ecologists studying central Europe but it is a very intriguing concept. here is PDF of an inventory of Czech Republic flora that uses the term extensively.
Kudzu itself is adapted to live alongside humans: it has been used by human beings for over 6,000 years in its native range and its genetics have been strongly affected by human selection and breeding for various traits. It is considered possible that kudzu is not controlled by "natural enemies" because its "natural enemy" is, in fact, humans. here is article about it
the history of destruction and exploitation of the land has profoundly affected the evolution of invasive species. the presence of invasive species on the land often communicates the violence that was done to the land.
the natural state of an ecosystem is seen as passive, whereas invasive species are considered beings with destructive agency. But the invaded territory is not a passive state of nature, it is a bleeding wound in need of immediate attention and care, and a state of chaos and upheaval that invites WEEDS to intervene
In the case of Kudzu, the plant arrived to stop the bleeding, quickly growing and overtaking the obliterated wasteland to which it was introduced and beginning to reverse the loss of soil. you can read here about it in this article about Copper Hill, Tennessee, a place where literally all vegetation was dead from sulfuric acid pollution from mining and refining copper.
Oh my gosh this is WILD because literally yesterday I was thinking about how the First Nations folks used to maintain salmonberries (native to my area) (they'd fertilize them with salmon guts it's so cool) but now Himalayan blackberries (invasive) are far more abundant and it HAS to be partly because we inadvertently maintain the Himalayan blackberries by creating spaces they thrive in: vacant lots, roadside ditches, anything clearcut. They love being cut back, too, so roadside maintenance is basically blackberry farming! Honestly I'm not complaining at the moment since I have a freezer full of free fruit, but we don't do anything to maintain the salmonberries so it's unbalanced.
It is so cool to see someone else talking about this and I really hope I get the opportunity to research other ways to use invasive species in my area and it's nice to get this excited about something because depression has been kicking my butt so. Thanks @headspace-hotel for once again being an inspirational human despite all the stuff trying to kick your butt. Seriously rooting for you. 💜
Exactly. In fact the term "anecophytes" though highlighting something real, also highlights a gap in our understanding through what the word does and does not signify. It is only an intelligible concept if you recognize a division between the human and "natural" worlds.
But everything is nature: the roadside ditch, the vacant lot, the clearcuts. Wherever something moves, wherever something changes, there Nature is.
We humans are ecosystem engineers. We are Caretakers. That is our ecological niche. On the continent of north america an idea of hierarchy and domination was imported by settlers colonizing the land.
The dominant view is to see humans as separate from nature, and that means we often cannot recognize what we are doing when we alter ecosystems. When you mow a lawn, that is maintaining a particular ecosystem. Lawn-mowing acts upon every life form in the ecosystem, creating an ecosystem where some creatures thrive and others are eliminated.
Now think of how an ecosystem is changed by all the other ecosystems it is connected to. A lawn next to a pine forest is not just a lawn, and a pine forest next to a lawn is not just a pine forest. They are a lawn-next-to-a-pine-forest, and a pine-forest-next-to-a-lawn, and every part of each part of that whole is a different microhabitat depending upon its proximity to the other. Fascinating!
I became overwhelmed trying to understand edge habitats and ecological succession. It requires more dimensions than I know how to think in. I'm not a goddamn tesseract.
Anyway, the important thing is that humans are creating specific ecosystems with specific characteristics all the time, and due to the dominant philosophy of humans and nature as separate, most humans(atleast in my area of my country) are unable to even notice it. It's just "mowing the lawn," "maintaining a powerline cut," and so on.
I thought to myself, we do it on accident....that means we could do it on purpose.
Oh, to be a little kitten who just got vaccinated and then taken to a high-end restaurant and tasted the best food the chefs could offer and then fell asleep in a basket.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important equity issues of our time. Yet at this rate it will be another 75 years before men do half the work.
The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.
Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?
The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.
Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”
While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”
Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and it’s clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work “because they’re expected to.” The men “come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.”
We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didn’t seem to realize there was a problem.
The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.
A mother in California said: “It’s important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that they’re not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.”
The dad in Vermont explained: “I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”
The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”
A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”
Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.”)
A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”
Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,” she said. “How much convincing of the other person can you do?”
All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.
If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting. Gendered parenting is kept alive by the unacknowledged power bestowed upon men in a world that values their needs, comforts and desires more than women’s. It’s up to fathers to cop to this, rather than to cop out.
Reading old books gets an extra layer of fun when you start to piece together how all these historical eras run together. The heroes of one era become the stodgy out-of-touch parents of the next. 1920s Bright Young Things are calling people "Victorians" in an "okay, Boomer" way. Victorian novels have Regency rakes hanging around like old hippies. Regency novels have old Georgians who still powder their hair. It's just fun to see the mixing of generations, the mix of old and new, because history's not neat little boxes, it's life all jumbled together.
My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.
The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.
This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael's or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It's the jeans problem again.
The fact that this is perpetual may be best shown by the fact that I have encountered this as Aesthetic Mason Jar Problem.
Canning used to be...well, it was never cheap, but it was cheaper than it became. And the thing is, when you had empty jars and nothing to can, you could use them for other stuff, and then just wash them when it was canning time again (as long as you hadn't used them for, you know, paint or something).
And so people started using them to make cheap centerpieces for DIY weddings, which were popular in the 00s. You'd pour in some glass beads and stick something interesting in the beads, or stuff them with battery-operated fairy lights and ribbon, or tape photos to a roll of kraft paper that then went inside the jar, and so on. Because they weren't terribly expensive. You could do a ten-table wedding for $25, easy.
And this turned into "wouldn't it be cute to use them as the glasses, too?" And so you would. Because again, remember, they're relatively inexpensive. And people already did this at home when it was the off-season for canning! If you had thirty guests you probably had enough jars for everyone, and if you didn't, buying a single pack would probably fill the gap!
And along the way someone came up with "what if we got hemp handles so you didn't have to deal with condensation on your mason jar glasses."
And that's where it all went wrong.
Because suddenly you could get mason jars already designed to be mugs (that could not be used for canning because they had glass handles and no lid threads). You could get itty-bitty mason jars good for absolutely nothing except maybe a tablespoon of honey as a wedding favor. You could get mason jars designed for crafting, which weren't necessarily safe to can with. You could get PLASTIC mason jars, which would melt when put in a water bath.
And the original mason jars? The ones that were designed for canning, the ones we knew were sturdy and food-safe?
Well, I get mine from the thrift store these days. Because the world is fucking overrun with not-necessarily-safe jars and the ones we know are safe now cost over a dollar a jar brand new, and you can't always find them.
And that's how it went from "this is a nice practical way to use your extra garden veggies" to being a luxury.
cocoa powder and powdered sugar are beautiful sisters whos prefered habitats are in order: the air , the countertop you just cleaned, and y our lungs ☝️
invasive species are a real thing, but there is a reason why (in USAmerica and elsewhere I reckon!) invasive species are the most widely understood and easy to teach about ecological concept.
this reason is very bad and has nothing to do with ecology
Poem by L. Mantis titled "My coworker asks who's the man"
Susan, are you asking me who buys
the flowers and who wears the dress?
Or are you wondering who feels like
they're allowed to be soft, and who
thinks they have to hide their feelings?
Or did you mean, who pays for the
dates, and who pays to groom themself?
Are you asking for permission? Are
you asking me to remind you that
flowers bloom in every direction,
wherever they find sun?
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