picking flowers

william bartram was called puc puggy by the Seminoles. it means "flower picker." the prairie is my home

[puc-puggy]

my parents straight up didn’t believe in sheltering us from adult themes in books and movies and they were so right for it. I genuinely think it was good for me and also I watched kill bill vol 1 for the first time in several years and truly. I deserved to watch this movie at age 7. it ruled then and it still rules now

[practicalsolarpunk]

Bokashi Composting

Some of the things I was told about bokashi composting when I started doing it weren’t accurate, and it was a struggle for a while. But I learned a lot after doing it for a year, and it’s actually an awesome composting option for apartments and other small and/or rented spaces.

So here’s Mod J’s Post on Why Apartment-Dwellers Should Do Bokashi Composting, with a few things I wish I’d known starting out.

What is bokashi composting?

Here’s what I understood when I started bokashi composting:

Bokashi composting is a method of composting that uses microorganisms in a powder called “bokashi bran” to speed up the composting process and eliminate the smell. Put your food scraps in the bin and layer with the bran. Once the bin is full, let it sit for two more weeks, and you’ll have good dirt ready for planting.

That’s not entirely accurate. Here’s a more accurate description:

Bokashi composting uses fermentation to turn organic waste into two components: a solid pre-compost and a liquid “bokashi tea.” The tea can be dilluted with water (a 1:100 ratio is recommended because of its high acidity) and used as a fertilizer. The pre-compost can be buried in dirt and within two weeks will become nutrient-rich compost dirt itself.

How does it work?

The bokashi method works by fermentation. Keeping it in an airtight bin allows it to ferment instead of rot, and the “bran” is supposed to help it along. (Sometimes white mold grows on the stuff inside -that’s perfectly fine and normal.) Fermenting breaks down the organic material a lot faster than ordinary composting. You end up with two components: The solid pre-compost and the liquid bokashi tea. The tea needs to be drained from the bin regularly so the excess liquid doesn’t impede the fermentation process, which is why bokashi bins have a spigot at the bottom.

Does it really have no smell?

Yes and no. If the bin or bucket you’re using has a good seal on it, you won’t smell it while the bin is closed. However, the fermenting stuff inside and the liquid that comes off it smell absolutely vile, and you will smell it when you open the bin or drain the liquid.

Do I need to use the bokashi bran?

All the companies selling bokashi stuff say you do and it helps the process along and whatever. But never trust marketing. I’ve done full bins with a lot of the bran, some with a little bran, and some with none at all, and I’ve noticed no difference. You can try the bran and see if it works better for you, but if you don’t have any or don’t want to buy more you don’t have to.

Do I need a specific bokashi bin?

It’s definitely helpful. Bokashi bins are set up with a seal in the top to keep it airtight and seal off any smells, a bottom that tapers down to a spigot for draining off the tea, and a screen to keep the solid stuff from going all the way to the bottom and clogging up the spigot. You could absolutely build your own, but I recommend a similar setup just for ease of use.

What can I put in my bokashi bin?

Anything you would put in regular compost - vegetable scraps, leftovers, eggshells, etc. Moldy food you forgot about in the refrigerator is also great, and since bokashi uses fermentation instead of rotting, even cooked meat can go into the bin. I’ve thrown in everything from paper napkins to whole zucchinis to a compostable toothbrush (although admittedly, that last one took closer to four weeks to fully break down). There’s no need to worry about ratios of anything - the fermentation will do the work for you.

Why use bokashi?

Turn foods scraps into dirt that you can use to grow more food even while living somewhere you can’t have a compost pile. It’s faster than regular compost (a full bucket takes two weeks of fermenting and two weeks of being buried until it’s done), there’s no smell when the lid is closed, and a lot of bins will fit under a kitchen sink. It’s great for apartments, rentals, and small spaces.

The one downside is that it costs a little more to buy a bokashi bin than it does to just throw some old vegetables in a pile. (I got my bin on eBay for about $50, and many of the name-brand ones are more expensive.) But I live in an apartment, and bokashi composting lets me still have the benefits of turning my food waste into good dirt that I can use to grow more food without needing a yard to put in a full compost bin. That makes it worth the investment for me.

- Mod J

[ororium-z]

Happy Pride!

[rootbeergoddess]

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

[thesaltofcarthage]

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.

[hope-for-the-planet]

70% Drop in Levels of Forever Chemicals Observed in Seabird Eggs Tracks Regulatory Success

These pescatarian birds are directly exposed to PFAS contamination due to the island's position near the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

While continued vigilance a regulation is needed, this data indicates that regulations are working to reduce PFAS concentrations in marine ecosystems.

[puc-puggy]

the self tanner situation in bodybuilding should be classified as an epidemic like what is going on

[puc-puggy]

admittedly these are the worst offenders but this is crazy. either the face is an entirely different color than their body or they are landing somewhere in blackface territory and i am really worried that they need to be told you NEVER want to be anywhere NEAR there

[puc-puggy]

the self tanner situation in bodybuilding should be classified as an epidemic like what is going on

[mattoidal]

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

[kuttithevangu]

Gentle notice that “highbrow” and “lowbrow” are eugenics/race science terms and it may be better to just quietly retire them in casual discussions of art

[puc-puggy]

we had tornado weather for the first time this season a few days ago. the winds whistled and howled outside rattling windows, and i sat at the window and stared at sickly yellow streaks through the clouds and felt relief. relief and a strange, possessive longing.

when i was a child, i would sit next to a window or on the front porch of my grandmother's house surrounded by aunts and uncles or on the roof of my father's car and watch the skies enforce themselves upon the earth. wicked color twisting across the sky until it met cornfields and tallgrass remnants undulating in their fields and highway ditches, trees and branches poised like ballerinas into perfectly halved arches, the wind keening across rivers and roads and ripping up what wasn't deeply rooted enough as if consumed by destructive grief for a lost love.

we aren't in tornado alley anymore. it's shifted a few hundred miles east, away from home— towards peoples and places who fear it and aren't prepared to withstand it. instead of watching the skies churn every summer and greeting the storms with well-worn caution and familiar awe, the air is calm and heavy and humid and presses down on my shoulders like the world upon atlas.

[puc-puggy]

Sex education — both the Netflix show and the class in school — often leaves out important information about our bodies and sexual and vaginal health. We’re expected to figure it out on our own, often through watching bad porn, googling, and experiences with partners that we wish we could erase from our memories. Doctors and nurses can help, but even if you have a great ob-gyn, asking about how to pick out your first sex toy can be, um, awkward.

So, we turned to Dr. Jen Gunter, an ob-gyn, women’s health writer (for her own site and places like the New York Times), prolific tweeter, and author of the upcoming book The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina—Separating the Myth from the Medicine, for answers. She gave it to us straight up, from intel on Kegels to treating UTIs, and if there’s such a thing as a “normal” vagina.

What You Should Know About Your Vagina Before College

Dr. Jen Gunter answers your biggest vaginal questions.

[puc-puggy]

I'm not sure europeans truly understand the Drama of an american saying “stop the car” and actually getting out. like you are good and stranded if you do that

not in an insulting way, just because of the trains and general walkability of europe. like if you get out of the car in europe, i bet chances are pretty high that there's a train station within 2-3 hours walk and it's probably a pretty safe walking route.

if i were taking a day trip to my hometown about an hour away from where i live and i got out of the car, i would have to walk for 25 hours on the side of the highway to get home or pay over $1000 for an uber. there's no public transport between cities and towns and there's very little public transport when you do get to a city and walking is straight up unsafe. not even a sidewalk. just 3 feet between you and a 2000lb hunk of death hurdling down the highway at 80mph (120ish kmh)

anyway i'd get out of the car too if my partner tried to equivocate between his mother's womb and her vagina when discussing his incestuous relationship with her

[puc-puggy]

THIS IS A TEXT POST WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN MATURE CONTENT

[puc-puggy]

I'm not sure europeans truly understand the Drama of an american saying “stop the car” and actually getting out. like you are good and stranded if you do that

not in an insulting way, just because of the trains and general walkability of europe. like if you get out of the car in europe, i bet chances are pretty high that there's a train station within 2-3 hours walk and it's probably a pretty safe walking route.

if i were taking a day trip to my hometown about an hour away from where i live and i got out of the car, i would have to walk for 25 hours on the side of the highway to get home or pay over $1000 for an uber. there's no public transport between cities and towns and there's very little public transport when you do get to a city and walking is straight up unsafe. not even a sidewalk. just 3 feet between you and a 2000lb hunk of death hurdling down the highway at 80mph (120ish kmh)

anyway i'd get out of the car too if my partner tried to equivocate between his mother's womb and her vagina when discussing his incestuous relationship with her

[chimaerakitten]

I’ve been kicking around a thought lately that when it comes to SFF we could probably bypass some of the perennial political vs. apolitical vs. everything-is-political-apolitical-storytelling-doesn’t-exist by instead formulating a spectrum from politically coherent to politically incoherent

Essentially, politically coherent works are works where the political message of the story is supported by all (or at least most) of the major story elements, and a politically incoherent work is a story where the political messages of different elements are seemingly all shooting off on different vectors.

The nice thing about this is it can bypass authorial intent (and the discussion of whether intent matters). This is about the text.

Like, politically incoherent works that had no authorial thought behind them are a dime a dozen of course, and politically coherent works that clearly had a lot of authorial thought are if not equally common than at least easy to spot. But there are also plenty of works that are politically coherent without the author intending them that way—like, whatever faults there are with Project Hail Mary, the overall opinion the book has about the nature of humanity & of science is consistent throughout. Likewise there are stories where the authors clearly meant a coherent political point and totally wiffed it. (The works @specialagentartemis has collectively termed “cozy colonialism” come to mind)

So there’s a utility in replacing the question “is this story political?” (Yes, always, but if the answer is always yes the question becomes kinda useless) with “Is this story politically coherent?” Because a yes or no there will tell a prospective reader something about what to expect.

[typenull]

[chase-solidago]

I got my Masters and PhD where Leopold taught, I went to his Shack twice a year, I worked in his archives, I've read his letters and journals, I've studied under his biographer, my Masters was partially about him, my PhD is structured around one of his speeches. I feel like I have the Credentials to have Refined Feelings about Leopold

I hate this passage.

Setting aside "alone" ("Only I, the pure and noble white male university scientist can see this pain, unlike the uncultured masses")...

If you have decided that you live in "a world of wounds" then you have already decided the world is damned. If you are looking for wounds, you will always find them. Things like climate change and ecosystem destruction and extinction are "wounds" that can never be "healed." New ways of being, like peregrine falcons on skyscrapers or novel ecosystems can only be seen as "wounds." The metaphorical "body" will never be "whole." If, no matter what you do, the environment will always be damaged/flawed/corrupted, what's the point in even trying?

In Leopold's context, the only Correct ("healed") way for the natural world to exist is to restore it to its corresponding historic pre-settlement ecosystem, the state it was in prior to the "wounding." This is concretely and objectively impossible. We've had 90+ years of ecological restoration as a science (NOT INVENTED BY LEOPOLD, DON'T LISTEN TO HIS PROPAGANDISTS) to firmly establish there is no magic time machine process to "heal" these "wounds." Instead, we can change spaces, help rebuild ecosystems into something new that may have things in common with the past.

I find it a much more useful framing to think in terms of change. There was never a moment in history where an ecosystem was static, things were always changing, they always will be changing. This is especially true in the Indigenous people-driven ecosystems Leopold is talking about here. His writings all assume that these ecosystems were static prior to settlement, the "whole, healthy body" in the metaphor. That "whole, healthy body" never existed in the first place.

This is why I like to thinking of us, environmentally-minded people taking action, as members in a very old community of beings who have made environmental change. Rather than metaphorically putting bandaids on Mother Earth's body that is separate from us, we can take actions as members in the community of ecosystems to help all of us thrive, together.

[puc-puggy]

via Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez

Why Banana Leaves?

My father not only used nature (banana trees) as his shield to protect him from war, he used it as his food source during this time period. He is right; banana trees are not native to our El Salvador. Banana trees were introduced during colonialism between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Latin America through the development of plantations. Banana trees are indeed native to the South Pacific and Southeast Asian regions. Yes, under the lens of Western environmentalism, banana trees are an invasive species to my ancestral native lands. However, to us, bananas are not invasive; they are displaced relatives that have adapted well to our climates and are now incorporated into our traditional diets. Ultimately, the kinships and relationships we have developed with them have made them our relatives as well. All I can think of is that, like me and many Indigenous peoples in the diaspora, banana trees have also been displaced. We have been displaced from our native and ancestral lands and forced to adapt to our new environments and form new kinships with our new land.

[mothclock]

Trabala pallida

[littlenapss]

[toasthaste]

according to An Immense World, apparently giant squid eyes are, like, UNREASONABLY large, even for something their size living at those depths. the next largest eyes on earth, blue whale eyes, are less than half the size, and swordfish, who live at similar depths as giant squid and have the largest eyes of any fish, have eyes that could fit inside a giant squid's pupil.

eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??

turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.

sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around

and also I gotta say, the imagery... the huge lurking threat betrayed only by the ambiguous glowing shape of its movements through the water, is really evocative, if spooky deep-sea games aren't already using that to make things extremely ominous then they should really start