we all hear about kudzu being introduced as "erosion control" in the South but I don't think contemporary people understand on a gut level what that means
these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"
For context: erosion on that scale occurred as a result of our clear-cutting entire states. The land east of the Mississippi used to be covered in old-growth forest to an extent that we literally can’t imagine anymore, because most of us have never seen a forest over 100 years old. It turns out if you remove all vegetation from a landscape, you end up with a bunch of loose soil ready to move downstream. A fast-growing plant that covers everything in dense vegetation sounds like salvation when you’re surrounded by 40-foot deep gullies that get wider with every rainstorm.
A lot of the south too was covered in Canebreaks, basically bamboo forests like a lot of South Asia, I don't know the specifics of the ecology, but bamboo being a grass I assume is rhizomatic like other grasses and forms a big net of roots that prevent erosion. *I assume* (pleez ecologists weigh in)
Yes, the destruction of Canebrakes was a direct cause of this erosion we see here. Canebrakes were destroyed, using slave labor, to make room for cotton plantations. You can read about it here.
Canebrakes built up incredibly rich, fertile soil and are amazing at preventing erosion. They form incredibly strong mats of rhizomes. And their roots are known to go 10 feet deep into the soil.
The erosion we see in these pictures was a result, very much directly, of the Canebrakes being destroyed.
This is a case study in how violence against ecosystems goes so closely hand in hand with violence against people. The violence against the indigenous caretakers of the land, and the violence against the enslaved captives that were forced to clear the Rivercane and work the cotton fields that would degrade the soil into nothing.
“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”
— An excerpt from Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)
since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner
this is the origin of the slogan “i cant breathe”, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.
The Times of India brings the Latest & Top Breaking News on Politics and Current Affairs in India & around the World, Cricket, Sports, Busin
So among all the other varied things I do for a living, I've spent the tourism season this year guiding bus tours to Mt. St. Helens for Adventure Day Touring. We get to create our own tour scripts; as long as they're relevant to the trip, it's all good. Since it's a long drive from the Port of Kalama where we pick up cruise ship passengers to the mountain itself, there's ample time for me to talk about the geology of MSH, the two months leading up to the 1980 eruption, and the eruption and aftermath. I like to wrap up the talk with pointing out the ecological recovery of the landscape there.
While the first thing people often think of with MSH is the twelve mile high ash cloud that lasted all day and then circumnavigated the globe over the next two weeks, that wasn't the longest-term impact of the eruption. No, that honor goes to the lahars, volcanic mudflows that formed when the heat of the eruption melted the mountain's entire snowpack all at once, sending almost four million cubic yards of mud, rock, and dead trees racing down the mountain.
But the lahars didn't stop there. They flooded the North Fork Toutle River, then the main Toutle, then the Cowlitz, and finally the Columbia, where they filled the 40 foot deep shipping channel to just 13 feet deep. Along the way they took out almost 200 homes and two dozen bridges, largely powered by a 600 foot wide logjam at the head of the flood. When the lahars finally came to a halt, they left up to 600 feet deep mud deposits along their path.
But the mud isn't going to stay put. The Toutle keeps eroding it away as it flows, moreso with seasonal rains and snowmelt. The dam referenced in the article was completed in 1987 to help keep the mud from filling the Columbia again, and was supposed to not be full until 2035. (It was full by 2012). The Army Corps of Engineers has had to raise the height of the dam twice, and they can only raise it so much more.
While the MSH National Volcanic Monument is being allowed to recover without human interference, so scientists can see how the land responds to such a massive disturbance over time, the area referenced in the article is outside that boundary. Most of the human changes have been of the "timber company planting new tree plantations" variety. But I am loving seeing this effort toward bringing in beavers as ecosystem engineers.
See, it's estimated that there were once as many as 400 million beavers across North America. Excessive trapping for their fur, castor glands, or simply to get them out of the way meant that they were extirpated from most of their range, and today they are still commonly classified as nuisance animals, meaning landowners can exterminate them at will. The North American population has rebounded to about 15 million, but that's a tiny fraction of their prior numbers.
What we are finding when we reintroduce them to their old habitats is that they very often have positive impacts. In this case, they are slowing flooding and helping native ecosystems return. Beavers are a pioneer species, and were among the first animals to return to MSH after the eruption. Even if reintroduced beavers head upstream to the National Volcanic Monument, increasing beaver density there, it's only a reflection of the return of these ecosystem engineers to more normal numbers.
Aug 24th, 2026
Do you ever wish you could find your way to a certain Series 2 strip quicker? Well, three cheers for reader Julia, who put together this transcription of BF Series 2 for you to CTRL-F to your heart's content. Check out her own comic while you're roaming. And don't forget that new shirts are available!
joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.
literally ok so not a funny story but kind of funny? when I was nine I encountered rape in a book and I was like hey mom what’s this mean and she explained it and I was like oh. gross. and then like two weeks later a girl on the bus abruptly disclosed her csa and we were all like ????? what ???? but I was like wait hang on there’s a word for that ☝️🤓 and explained what it meant and that it was illegal and that you could talk to a teacher or my mom if it had happened to you and everyone was like ohhhhh I see I see and very somberly comforted the girl (she was safe she was removed from her home and living with my neighbor at the time so it wasn’t Urgent)
I'm obsessed with gardening systems that utilize rainwater without the use of barrels or cisterns. My ultimate fav is using bioswales to catch and filter stormwater on the street.
Fun addition: Dams that utilize trees to catch dirt/ stop erosion, and prevent disaster that can come from broken dams.
Also, using these to reduce stormwater loads in storm events, particularly in places with combined stormwater and sewage systems, could/would be helpful at reducing river discharges of raw sewage. (If climate change is factored in at system level cos more rain in less time needs to be accouted for at rhe large scale designs...)
Plus using constructed wetlands to retain these discharges and treat them before rivers too!
people who are like "but with universal healthcare you'll have to pay taxes!!!" Are so funny. Like as opposed to the 16% of my gross paycheck that goes to private insurance, that won't cover shit unless i call my insurance company, then my doctor, then my pharmacy, then my doctor again because theyre pretty sure insurance got approved then my insurance company because they didn't get the letter, then my doctor again, then the pharmacy again, and then the copay i still am on the hook for.
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.
Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.
So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.
if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge
Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.
my fucking bank account got frauded and overdrafted to the tune of more than $200 (: multiple transactions in london and munich and fucking slovakia. apparently that doesnt trip their fraud detection but stopping at a gas station 1 state over does
card is frozen and replacement is in the mail, bank said the investigation could take up to 90 days. they will give me a temporary credit, but only after 10 days have passed. so im flat broke until then because of their shit security
if u wanna help out an unemployed burnt out autistic trans girl who cant seem to catch a fucking break, heres my ko-fi. dm for other stuff, u know the drill. i can load whatever i get onto a paypal card to buy groceries and pay bills
well, yesterday was 10 days since i made the dispute, and they didnt give me my money. i can only assume that when the email they sent me said 10 days it meant 10 business days, even tho i just double-checked and it definitely says 10 days, no qualifier, just days
no sympathy from t-mobile to someone who got literally all of her money stolen bc of their negligence. im just supposed to beg to survive while they take their sweet time figuring out whether ive ever been to slovakia (i obviously havent)
10 business days will be next tuesday. til then i have to keep figuring it out on my own i guess. once this is over im finding a new phone provider and bank bc this isnt the 1st time theyve screwed me over
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