[palominoriver]

I love Norman and Nancy Blake <3 ❤️💕

[canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit]

I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn't sleep and now she's been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick

[edgelessuniverse]

She's right!!

Chestnut trees used to define forests in the South -- some estimates say about 1/4 trees was a chestnut tree. And they were huge! Growing more than 100 feet tall (with trunks more than 10 feet in diameter), they were called the "redwoods of the East." They were a characteristic food source of the South, too. A mature chestnut tree can produce upwards of 50 lbs of nuts a year -- many of these were gathered and eaten by poor families, or turned into chestnut flour and used to make "poor man's bread."

But, at the beginning of the 20th century, a fungus called the blight was brought over from Asia. Over the next 50 years, every single American Chestnut was infected and died. While some root systems are still alive, they're considered functionally extinct.

People cut down huge areas of forest trying to prevent the spread of the blight and save the trees -- but they failed. And now several generations have never even known the chestnut tree. We don't even know enough to miss them.

But now, with advances in genetic technology, the chestnut trees may be coming back! Through a group scientific effort led by the American Chestnut Foundation, researchers have created a "transgenic American chestnut tree with enhanced blight tolerance" called Darling 58. Darling 58 is genetically modified to be able to coexist with the blight.

Darling 58 American chestnuts are currently being reviewed by the USDA-APHIS, EPA, and FDA. But researchers hope to be able to reintroduce them soon -- one huge step towards restoring our forests.

You can follow the chestnut trees' progress (and request a Darling 58 tree when they're available) at https://acf.org/ .

[canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit]

Thank you I'm gonna share this chestnut revitalization news with her!

[mybigfatgaylife]

There are many American chestnut trees still living outside their original natural range. Michigan, for example, has a large number of chestnut farms and is the biggest grower of chestnuts in the US. The species is listed as endangered but is not extinct.

[spyderqueen]

Where I grew up is considered oak/hickory forest now but was once oak/chestnut. Even the corpses of the chestnuts are gone now. It's a wood that takes a long time to decay and there was at least one fallen trunk still somewhat recognizable when I was a kid, but it too is just a mossy spot now. We're still seeing the impact of the loss on local wildlife.

If Darling 58 gets approved I'm going to have to see how many we can plant on the property.

[palominoriver]

best song ever made

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.

Nobody my age is voting republican. Let's be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We're all afraid of dying of thirst because there's no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they're trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.

This liberalism and party affiliation doesn't preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is... Well

No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic but they're still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn't have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can't avoid it you're a sex addict. That's a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist

If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can't understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it's because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent's nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don't know how to organize because we're raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.

They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than "young people vote republican and watch Fox news"

[hairasuntouchedaspartoftheamazon]

I've never seen anybody explain it so well

[unsubconscious]

Jane Lund (USA, b.1939) My Mother’s Hands, 2000 Pastel on paper, 33 x 47cm

[palominoriver]

Had dreams where me and my cousin were traveling together on buses/ trains/ in cars for the past three nights. This getting ready to go to college shit is wild

[billdauterives]

:)

[rongzhi]

OP: 爬完泰山的大学生

↳ University students after climbing Taishan

Taishan is one of the Five Sacred Mountains (in Daoism and Chinese Buddhism) and people often climb it to watch the sunrise. This practice and the mountain in general have become popular with university students and young people wishing to blow off steam especially.

They will often take the train to visit, arriving to Taishan at midnight and climbing five hours and nearly 8000 steps to catch the sunrise. The location above is a train station.

Watch an example of a Taishan trip here.

English added by me :)

[art-is-art-is-art]

The Bather, František Kupka

[envaituri-deactivated20160111]

The sunset illuminated my dog into the laptop screen

[palominoriver]

turning into cool river sand at the bottom of the river again y’all

[mtfhimejoshi]

[suredisaster-deactivated2024022]

help me secure & fund my FFS!, organized by Jasiri Danjou

Hi all! This is jasiri and I’m making this fundraiser to secure my upcoming FFS appointmen… Jasiri Danjou needs your support for help me sec

reposting for an irl friend, her funding deadline is coming up next month but so far she's only gotten up to 10% of her goal :( help her out rbs appreciated

[max1461]

Nobody falls in love anymore. It's all red flags and do you go to therapy. How about do you have a burning passion in your soul and a little bit of madness.

[marlbororeds100s-deactivated202]

99.99% of rap haters have never even listened to rap. or if they have it's like one gangsta rap song & they treat the genre as a monolith and act like it's representative of every rap song ever. and well of course they are also just racist

[marlbororeds100s-deactivated202]

first & last line still stand even if rap was a monolith and all rap was gangsta rap. btw

[i-liked-pluto]

Rap is great! Everyone knows the worst genre of music is country

[marlbororeds100s-deactivated202]

99.99% of country haters have never even listened to country. or if they have it's like one post-9/11 pop country song by a rich poser & they treat the genre as a monolith and act like it's representative of every country song ever. and well of course they are also just classist

[joeinct]

Amateur Boxing, Photo by Carl Mydans, 1955

[kafkasapartment]

Low Tide, 1979. Eric Sloane. Oil on Masonite. The lighthouse in the painting is the Egg Rock Light, located in Maine.