The Greene Party

Burn it down. Start anew.

[reasonsforhope]

Bison Ranchers Return Thousands of Animals to Native Lands and Witness Total Rejuvenation of Ecosystem

The return of the bison means the return of the prairie, one of the three great grassland ecosystems on the planet.

"A tribal-led nonprofit is creating a network of native bison ranchers that are restoring ecosystems on the Great Plains, restoring native ranchers’ connections with their ancestral land, and restoring the native diet that their ancestors relied on.

Called the Tanka Fund, they coordinate donors and partners to help ranchers secure grazing land access, funds needed to install and repair fencing, increase their herd sizes, and access markets for bison meat across the country.

That’s the human part of the story. But as Dawn Sherman, executive director of the Tanka Fund, told Native Sun News, they’re “buffalo people” and these four-legged, 2,000 lbs. “cousins” are equal-part-protagonists.

The return of the bison means the return of the prairie, one of the three great grassland ecosystems on the planet, of which just 1% remains as it was when the Mayflower arrived.

“Bringing buffalo back to their ancestral homelands is essential to restoring the ecosystem. We know that the buffalo is a keystone species,” said Dawn Sherman, a member of the Lakota, Delaware, Shawnee, and Cree.

“Bringing the buffalo back to the land and to our people, helps restore the ecosystem and everything it supports from the animals to the plants to the people. It’s come full circle. That’s how we see it.”

As Sherman and the Tanka Fund help native ranchers grow their operations, everyone is well aware of the power of the bison to transform the environment: just as nations across Europe are, who are reintroducing wood bison to various ecosystems, for all the same reasons.

Sherman points out the variety of ways in which buffalo anchor the prairie ecosystem. The almost-extinct black-footed ferret, she points out, lived symbiotically with the bison, and with the latter gone, the former followed—nearly.

The long-billed curlew uses bison dung as a disguise to hide nests from predators. Deer, pronghorn antelope, and elk all rely on bison to plow through deep snows and uncover the grasses that these smaller animals can’t reach.

Everywhere the bison hurls its massive body, life springs in the beast’s wake. When bison roll about on the plains, it creates depressions known as wallows. These fill with rainwater and create enormous puddles where amphibians and insects thrive and reproduce. Certain plants evolved to grow in the wet conditions of the wallows which Native Americans harvested for food and medicine.

Native plants evolved under the trampling hooves of millions of bison, and that constant tamping down of the Earth is a key necessity in the spreading of native wildflower seed.

Indeed, Sherman says some of these native ranchers are bringing bison onto lands still visibly affected by the Dust Bowl, and already the animals are acting like a giant wooly cure-all for the land’s ills.

Since 2020, the Tanka Fund, in partnership with the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council and the Nature Conservancy, has overseen the transfer of 2,300 bison from Nature Conservancy reserves to lands managed by ranchers within the Tanka Fund network.

“[T]he more animals that we can get the more of that prairie we can restore,” said Sherman. “We can help restore the land that has been plowed and has been leased out to cattle ranchers.”"

-Article via Good News Network, February 13, 2025. Video via Tanka Fund, July 17, 2024.

[reasonsforhope]

Rewilding sites have seen 400% increase in jobs since 2008, research finds

A survey recorded a 412% increase in jobs at 13 major rewilding projects covering almost 60,000 hectares in Scotland.

"Rewilding in Scotland has created a more than 400% increase in jobs, research has found amid calls for it to continue.

Research by Rewilding Britain shows 35 jobs have been created at one site alone in the Highlands since 2008.

The research found there has been a 412% increase in jobs at 13 major rewilding projects covering almost 60,000 hectares, including sites owned or managed by charities, communities, private landowners, and public bodies.

Full-time equivalent jobs across the sites increased from 24 before rewilding to 123, across sectors including hospitality, estate management, ecology, environmental monitoring, rewilding interventions, recreation, and education.

The largest recorded rise in jobs was at Trees for Life’s 4,000-hectare Dundreggan estate near Loch Ness in the Highlands, a former deer stalking estate.

Since 2008, some 35 jobs have been created in addition to the sole previous position, while volunteer numbers have risen from zero to 100.

A rewilding centre was opened at the site last year and an open invitation has been extended to Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio to visit it after he backed a campaign for Scotland to become the world’s first “rewilding nation”.

All the sites are more than 100 hectares in size and are part of the Rewilding Network managed by Rewilding Britain.

The research found combined volunteer numbers at the sites increased from zero to 435...

The Scottish Government has been urged to commit to nature recovery across 30% of land by restoring habitats including peatlands, native woodlands, wetlands, rivers and seas, with no loss of productive farmland.

Kevin Cumming, rewilding director at Rewilding Britain and deputy convener of the Scottish Rewilding Alliance, said: “These remarkable job creation figures show how rewilding can turbo-charge social and economic benefits, while offering hope for reversing biodiversity loss and tackling climate breakdown.

“This is yet another powerful illustration of why the Scottish Government should declare Scotland a rewilding nation.

“The opportunity is huge – for jobs and local economies, better health, food production, access to fresh water and clean air.”

The alliance’s Rewilding Nation Charter – including representations from more than 20 organisations – has been signed by thousands of people since it launched in the spring.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Restoring Scotland’s natural environment is a key way that we can help address the twin challenges of nature loss and climate change, including many of the interventions championed by the Scottish Rewilding Alliance.

“We welcome this evidence of employment in rural communities and will consider this research as we continue to work towards our commitment to protect and restore 30% of Scotland’s land and seas for nature.

“Our £65 million Nature Restoration Fund has committed nearly £40 million since 2021 to unlock the full potential that nature restoration projects can bring to communities.

“The fund has supported local businesses, helped landowners with pollinator projects to boost food production and supported improved access to green spaces throughout Scotland, alongside restoration of our marine environment.”

The charter can be viewed at www.rewild.scot/charter."

-via The Independent, June 19, 2024

[reasonsforhope]

Century of Tree Planting Stalls the Warming Effects in the Eastern United States, Says Study

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, and massive reforestation took place.

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

[reasonsforhope]

Reblogging to show the temperature maps that are featured in the original study (and the Guardian article about it), because the visual difference really is so striking and so encouraging.

As you look at these maps of forests vs. temperature trends, remember that the temperature map is showing large-scale, very long-term averages, especially on the temperature map. Because of that, the map data doesn't reflect how very, very big a difference it can make on a local scale, e.g. those 9°F summer temperature conditions. And those local scale changes are the changes that people actually live in.

This is hugely

Forest Age vs. Warming Maps

Pictured: Guardian graphic. Source: Barnes, et al, 2024, ‘A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States.’ Note: Forest age data from North American Carbon Program. Age estimates as of 2019 at 1km resolution. Temperature data from Delaware Air Temperature & Precipitation Dataset.

Source: The Guardian, February 17, 2024. And the original study is here, from the journal Earth's Future, first published February 13, 2024.

(Also, btw, for any non-US and/or non-geography people, don't worry about the fact that there aren't any forests in the middle of the country. That's the Great Plains. Like we definitely did turn most of it into cropland, but it's not supposed to have forests.)

This is huge.

Even the small pockets of new reforestation elsewhere in the country are usually correlated with small pockets of cooling. (And of course correlation by itself does not equal causation, but that's what the rest of the study is for.)

This is genuinely strong evidence that the massive tree planting campaigns of the last 25 years are going to pay off dramatically much sooner than we thought.

The study found that the coolest forests were ones planted planted 20 to 40 years ago.

That means that trees planted in the 90s through 2004 are in that stage and causing the most cooling right now.

It also means that the ongoing, absolutely massive recent reforestation efforts are going to pay off a lot between now and 2050.

That means campaigns like China's 2022 pledge to plant or conserve 70 billion trees by 2030. Or India's annual tree-planting drive, which in 2021 saw 250 million trees planted in just one day. Or Kenya's new tree-planting holiday, started in 2023, to plant 100 million trees each year.

This study also gives strong evidence that newer forests don't have vanishingly few benefits compared to old growth forests - they do have benefits (if not as many), just different ones. It also, I would argue, suggests that tree planting efforts don't have to be ecologically perfect to make a real difference. They certainly were not nailing native plant biodiversity and ecological best practices in the US in the 1930s!

And as we learn (and actually implement) more and more about how to do reforestation right - more biodiversity, native plants only, actual forests and not just tree plantations - the benefits of reforestation will only increase.

[the-greene-party]

“Our brains were two million years in the making. That long, slow accretion doubled our cranial capacity. And the first thing we did with it was say thank you. We drew the megafauna and the megafemales, sculpted and carved them. The oldest known figurative sculpture is the Goddess of Hohle Fels, and 40,000 years ago someone spent hundreds of hours carving Her. There is no mystery here, not to me: the animals and the women gave us life. Of course they were our first, endless art project. Awe and thanksgiving are built into us, body and brain. Once upon a time, we knew we were alive. And it was good. 

And now we leave the realm of miracles and enter hell. 

Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It comes in variations―some old, some new, some ecclesiastical, some secular. But at bottom, they are all necrophilic. Erich Fromm describes necrophilia as “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.” In this religion, the worst sin is being alive, and the carriers of that sin are female. Under patriarchy, the female body is loathsome; its life-giving fat-cells vilified; its generative organs despised. Its natural condition is always ridiculed: normal feet must be turned into four-inch stubs; rib cages must be crushed into collapse; breasts are varyingly too big or too small or excised entirely. That this inflicts pain―if not constant agony―is not peripheral to these practices. It’s central. When she suffers, she is made obedient.” 

― Lierre Keith, ‘The Girls and the Grasses’ 

[voyageroftheastralseas]

Love the post, and just want to warn that the site Women Are Human was hacked by TRAs a while back, and still redirects you to a bunch of coom sites. This essay can be found on Deep Green Resistance here

Captured in a test tube, blood may look like a static liquid, but it’s alive, as animate and intelligent as the rest of you. It also makes u

[the-greene-party]

Thank you for pointing out the issue with the link — I’ve edited it in the original post now! 💗

[skyprowler]

Ancient redwoods tap resources tens to hundreds of years old to recover from fire

Within about 5 months, ancient trees had mobilized old stores of carbohydrate to resprout. Lissy Enright/U.S. Forest Service

When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park in August 2020, flames reached the tops of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. Yet they lived. And in a paper published 30 November in Nature Plants, researchers help explain why. Despite being defoliated, the surviving trees mobilized energy reserves—the oldest ever measured in plants—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant for centuries.

After the flames had burned out and new growth appeared on the trees, researchers collected these sprouts. They checked the age of the carbohydrates in them by measuring the ratio of carbon isotopes within the molecules—a method known as radiocarbon dating. According to those analyses, several hundred kilograms of carbohydrates inside the large redwoods were forged by photosynthesis that occurred nearly sixty years ago, and the buds themselves began forming up to 1000 years ago.

“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says ecosystem ecologist Adrian Rocha, who was not involved in the work. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest that redwoods are well equipped to deal with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says, although it’s unclear how well they might handle multiple infernos on the scale of the 2020 fire.  

[hjarta-deactivated20260124]

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

[scienceoftheidiot]

They existed *before beetles*

[somethingaboutsomethingelse]

[spacedandelions]

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

[ignescent]

https://xkcd.com/1259/

Bee Orchid

[sepdet]

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:

The Trees That Miss The Mammoths - American Forests

Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world.



[modernvintage]

First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.

[civilizationkills]

maybe its bc i live in a place where forestry is one of the dominant industries but like tree planting rly isnt good. like the majority of the time its done by forestry companies to “offset” what they’ve cut down, and they almost always just plant fir & spruce monocrops and then they prevent the rest of the forest from naturally regenerating by spraying glyphosate, because they want to kill off the hardwoods that grow back since softwoods are worth more to the pulp industry… anything a company does that is supposedly “green” never is.

[daggers-drawn]

They aren’t actually replanting the forest, they’re building lumber farms in the middle of it and trying to pass them off as the same thing to people who think a forest is just trees because they live in a world mediated by images and have never been in an actual forest long enough to be able to tell healthy diverse growth from a struggling monocrop.

[bogleech]

And unfortunately even choosing all the right trees and plants would not actually help either. Some naturalists I recall coined the term “ghost forest” to refer originally to “replanted” rainforests, in the same sense as “ghost town,” because it never brings back the same rich diversity of life or the healthy microbiome that took centuries to form.

And the average person doesn’t think about that at all, they don’t care that the layers of rotten leaves and insect colonies and mycelia are as much “the forest” as the presence of trees, and in fact the whole existence of that understory *is the actual benefit of the trees,* the actual reason the trees are important to all that wildlife. Companies are glad people don’t care about this, and as long as “replanting” is seen as a valid compromise, it means environmental regulations will continue to be lax and let them kill the majority of life in those habitats.

It’s the ecological equivalent of Weekend at Bernies. They made a corpse look alive enough that they aren’t being held accountable.

[plantyhamchuk]

Saved by seaweed: nuns and Native women heal polluted New York waters using kelp

The sisters and a group of women from a local Indigenous tribe started a kelp farm in the hopes of cleaning up the pollution in their shared

Really awesome article, recommend reading the whole thing

"Drive by the multimillion-dollar homes, pools and golf courses of the renowned New York escape, Southampton, and you would scarcely know there is an Indigenous population there. But the Shinnecock have been on Long Island for the last 13,000 years, or as the Shinnecock will tell you, 400 generations.

They are one of New York’s oldest self-governing tribes, and about half of the tribal members live on the 900-acre peninsular reservation. Traditionally, the Shinnecock were a mariner tribe, and their history as expert fishermen, hunters, farmers and whalers has proven critical in the absence of other economic opportunities. Today, however, the tribe faces constant ecological threats.

The more immediate threat is to the marine life that the nation has depended on to sustain them.

“For generations, we were taught how to live off the land, or how to fish for what we need, but it’s just not possible any more because the nitrogen levels in the sea,” said Troge. “It’s killing all of the fish and the shellfish that have sustained us.”"

...

“It really amazed me that so many of the sisters joined us,” said Troge, “They were so respectful.”

When Genia contacted the monastery to discuss collaborating with the kelp farm, Sister Joan was quickly on board.

“How can we deny them that?” she says, “The bay has their name!”

The sisters offered a cottage at their retreat center to serve as a hatchery. When the question of finances came up, Sister Joan was clear: anything profits made from the kelp farm belonged to the Shinnecock. “We’re here to support you and to affirm you,” she said.

Within a couple of months, the cottage was transformed with fish tanks and warming lights. In 2021, the Shinnecock Kelp Farm was launched, and to date, 20 lines of kelp have been planted in the bay. The sisters help check the kelp lines or watching Troge’s one-year-old son when she visits. During the pandemic, they offered a “kind words program”, where sisters sang and recited poetry to the seedlings; now, they’re making it a regular practice.

Success

In the last two farming seasons, Troge has seen an increase in scallops, clams, sea horses, and other species she hasn’t seen in years, sheltering in their kelp lines. “We expanded our hatchery 10 times this season,” said Hopson Begun. In addition to their original farming site, they have since added two more at opposite ends of the bay. They hope, in time, to expand their farm sites deeper into the bay and ocean, and are currently working to secure the boats they would need to do so.

...

As a community in the throes of adversity, the outlook for future generations of tribal members may seem unpromising. But the Shinnecock are placing their trust in the same foundational values that have sustained them for 13,000 years.

“As Shinnecock we are taught to preserve our life for the next seven generations,” said Tela, “It’s what drives us to take action to protect the water now.”

[female-malice]

'Absolutely epic': Blackfeet release wild buffalo on tribal land

The tribe said, to their knowledge, the Blackfeet Nation is the first tribe in America to return free-roaming buffalo to their native habita

[kp777-deactivated20241106]

York groundsel blooms again in Britain’s first-ever de-extinction event

Yellow flower that only grows in York went extinct in 1991 brought back to life by Natural England experts

By Patrick Barkham

The Guardian

May 27, 2023

York groundsel was a cheerful yellow flower that slipped into global extinction in 1991, thanks to overzealous application of weedkiller in the city of its name.

But now the urban plant has been bought back to life in the first ever de-extinction in Britain, and is flowering again in York.

The species of groundsel was only ever found around the city and only evolved into its own species in the past century after non-native Oxford ragwort hybridised with native groundsel.

York groundsel, Senecio eboracensis, was discovered growing in the car park of York railway station in 1979 and was the first new species to have evolved in Britain for 50 years, thriving on railway sidings and derelict land.

But the new plant’s success was short-lived, as urban land was tidied up and chemicals applied to remove flowers dismissed as “weeds”.

It was last seen in the wild in 1991. Fortunately, researchers kept three small plants in pots on a windowsill in the University of York. These short-lived annual plants soon died, but they produced a precarious pinch of seed, which was lodged at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank.

Andrew Shaw of the Rare British Plants Nursery had a vision to bring the species back to life, but when tests were carried out on some privately held seeds very few germinated successfully.

So Natural England, the government’s conservation watchdog, quickly authorised a de-extinction attempt via its species recovery programme, which has funded the revival of the most threatened native species for 30 years.

“The Millennium Seed Bank said the seed was getting near the end of its lifespan and so we thought we would only have one more chance of resurrecting it,” said Alex Prendergast, a vascular plant senior specialist for Natural England.

Natural England paid for a polytunnel at the Rare British Plants Nursery in Wales, where 100 of the tiny seeds were planted. To the botanists’ surprise, 98 of the seeds germinated successfully. The polytunnel rapidly filled with a thousand York groundsel plants.

In February six grams of seed – potentially thousands of plants – were sown into special plots around York on council and Network Rail land.

This week, the first plants in the wild for 32 years began to flower, bringing colour to the streets and railway sidings of York.

This de-extinction is likely to be a one-off in this country because York groundsel is the only globally extinct British plant that still persists in seed form and so could be revived.

But Prendergast said the de-extinction showed the value of the Millennium Seed Bank – to which plenty of York groundsel seed has now been returned – and there were a number of good reasons for bringing the species back to life.

“It’s a smiley, happy-looking yellow daisy and it’s a species that we’ve got international responsibility for,” he said.

“It only lives in York, and it only ever lived in York. It’s a good tool to talk to people about the importance of urban biodiversity and I hope it will capture people’s imagination.

“It’s also got an important value as a pollinator and nectar plant in the area because it flowers almost every month of the year.”

[ftgrfk-blog]

Kakhovka reservoir.

Before and after the dam explosion.

The scale of the disaster caused by the russian occupiers at the this moment👇

20 settlements are flooded on the right bank of the Dnieper (as of 11:30 on June 7);

17 settlements can be resettled (16 thousand inhabitants);

Under the threat of destruction - 333 species of animals and plants, ecosystems of the national parks Nizhnedneprovsky, Veliky Lug, Kamenskaya Sich, Beloberezhye Svyatoslav 10 thousand hectares of agricultural land will be flooded;

31 field irrigation systems will be stopped in Dnepropetrovsk (30%), Kherson (94%) and Zaporozhye (74%) regions; the fishing industry is expected to lose 95 thousand tons of adult fish;

At least 150 tons of engine oil have already entered the Dnieper River.

[kamogryadeshi]

💔 This is what remained of the Kakhovka Reservoir after the terrorist attack by the Russians.

[the-greene-party]

Pregnant woman and others killed as the Russians shoot at volunteers and those fleeing the Kakhovka Dam flooding

Tetiana Hryshko and her unborn daughter, a 74-year-old and others are among the civilians Russia killed as they tried to help relatives flee

Tetiana Hryshko was almost 33 and pregnant when the Russians killed her in Kherson oblast as she tried to rescue her grandparents from the flooding unleashed by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on 6 June.  As of late on 11 June, she is one of several Ukrainians reported killed as they tried to flee for their lives or help others to evacuate. 

Tetiana Hryshko was from Hola Prystan which is presently under Russian occupation and one of the occupied cities facing the most devastating flooding.  Her death was reported, citing three of Tetiana’s friends, by ‘Russia killed them’, a social media page which records the victims of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.  She was shot by Russian shelling on 8 June as she tried to get her grandparents out of the city. A hairdresser by profession, Tetiana was just a month off her 33rd birthday, when she was  killed, together with her unborn daughter.

Russia first shelled an evacuation point in the centre of Kherson on 8 June.  The savage shelling of a city which so joyfully greeted the Ukrainian liberators on 11 November 2022 has been relentless, despite the devastation caused by Russia’s destruction of the Khakhovka Dam. 

On 10 June, Oleksandr Prokudin, the Head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, reported that two volunteers, aged 52 and 25, had been injured as they tried to provide assistance to those evacuated in Kherson.  It is worth stressing that the very many volunteers who have come forward to help save people, as well as animals, are already risking their lives because of the extent of the flooding.  That has not stopped the Russian invaders. 

The situation is even more dire on the left bank of the Dnipro.  Despite claiming that occupied areas, like Hola Prystan and Oleshki are ‘new Russian territory’, the Russian occupiers took days before even beginning any rescue efforts.  It has, from the outset, obstructed those volunteers unwilling to stand helplessly by as people were swept from the roofs of their homes, having waited in vain for the occupation authorities to rescue them.

On 11 June, Prokudin reported that the Russians had shelled an evacuation boat trying to take people from the left bank.  Three civilians were killed, including a 74-year-old man who was shot in the back as he tried to protect his wife from the shelling.  Since then, the Kherson Regional Prosecutor has said that at least 23 people were injured.  The police stated that 21 people had been rescued, with almost all of them elderly and with limited mobility. “This was a huge risk, however we couldn’t abandon people.  As a result, treacherous shooting in the back.”, the police write.

The independent Russian publication Agentstvo reported on 10 June, citing unnamed volunteers, that the fate was unknown of 374 people from Russian-occupied territory on the left bank of the Dnipro.

Although the water is gradually receding, devastation remains.  There is a grave shortage of drinking water, and serious fears of disease, especially cholera, as well as catastrophic environmental impact.

Ukraine stated from the outset that Russia had bombed the Kakhovka Dam, pointing out that the level of damage could not possibly have been caused, as Moscow claimed, by Ukrainian shelling.  More and more evidence has since emerged providing confirmation of this, including US satellite recording of the explosions that destroyed a part of the dam, as well as seismic records also pointing to explosions at that time.

As reported earlier, Russia has also been destroying dams in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia oblast.  That such actions are aimed at obstructing Ukraine’s counter-offensive received new confirmation on 11 June with reports that the Russians have also blown up a dam on the Mokra Yala River in Donetsk oblast.  Here too the destruction resulted in flooding on both sides of the river, with this almost certainly the aim, one that the Russians planned in advance by waiving any criminal investigations.

See: Not Kakhovka Dam alone: Russia destroys dams in occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast

Russia gave advance permission to not investigate its attack on Ukraine’s Kakhovska Dam

[the-greene-party]

Affecting farmland, drinking water and animals, Ukraine dam destruction an environmental catastrophe | CBC News

The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam was a fast-moving disaster that is swiftly evolving into a long-term environmental catastrophe affecting

[false-binaries]

I've been thinking a lot about ephemeral ecosystems lately.

A book I read talked about whales, and whalefalls a lot. Whales are megafauna like this world doesn't see much of any more: A single whale corpse is packed with so much life and energy that it can create a whole ecosystem on its own that lasts for decades. The creatures on the bottom of the sea, you see, usually live off of tiny flakes of waste matter dropped from the life in shallower waters- a tiny snowfall of food. A whalefall is an extended feeding frenzy, a time of Plentitude, where these frugal, simple creatures have more than they need for what may be the first time in generations.

But it ends! Eventually, the last of the fat is eaten by the last lucky bacteria, and only the bones are left to seed new coral reefs or hide predators or prey. Abruptly, feast becomes famine, and the bottom of the sea lies barren again. The detritovores die, or are eaten, or drift away in the current to maybe find another source of food. The tiny worms and shelled things scuttle or swim away, the promise of food no longer enticing them where predators might also lurk. Fish, eels, mammals... they leave.

Then there are hydrothermic vents. These pop open, stay open for some length of time, and eventually close themselves up again. They're completely unique environments- deep past the twilight zone, where sunlight can't reach. We used to think that straight-up wasn't possible, that the sun was the source of energy for ALL life. But hydrothermic vents put out sulfur, and bacteria can turn sulfur into energy- and so life exists. The vent is the dark sun, and chemoautotrophs its plants.

These bacteria form beautiful relationships with the strange animals that live there. Yeti crabs, colloquially named so for their hairy limbs, are one of my favorite sea critters. Living within the hairs on their limbs are countless little sulfur-eating bacteria. The yeti crabs stand in the wash of the vent and dance through it, waving their arms, feeding the bacteria. The bacteria then feed them in turn, and so they live, where there should be nothing to live off of. They live by dancing!

But it gets weirder, right? Because these vents are so rare, and so ephemeral, and so frigging extreme, the creatures who live there tend to be pretty damn specialized. You've gotta be able to live through high temperatures, high pressures, sulfurous water...

We can't figure out how the populations migrate when a vent closes. Many of the creatures are sessile, or not mobile enough, to fight the currents to get from one vent to the next. When a vent closes, the population it fed should just... die.

But they don't! When we send subs down to hunt around for new vents, we find populations that manage to survive, again and again. The sun vanishes, and the plants just... find a new one, somehow. We've got no clue how they do it, but they clearly do, and I think that's incredible!

And then I think about transition ecosystems- the fresh growth right after a forest fire, the weedy, crazed ground after human clear-cutting, the way vines and roots work to uproot abandoned human dwellings and take the ground back for growth.

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to get at here, honestly. I feel like I'm making an argument for something, but maybe I'm just saying I care a lot about this- about surviving against the odds, about surviving in environments that aren't made to thrive in, about the gritted-teeth sense of hanging on. Maybe I'm just saying I feel that, lately.

[ftgrfk-blog]

Kakhovka reservoir.

Before and after the dam explosion.

The scale of the disaster caused by the russians at the moment👇

20 settlements are flooded on the right bank of the Dnieper (as of 11:30 on June 7);

17 settlements can be resettled (16 thousand inhabitants);

Under the threat of destruction - 333 species of animals and plants, ecosystems of the national parks Nizhnedneprovsky, Veliky Lug, Kamenskaya Sich, Beloberezhye Svyatoslav 10 thousand hectares of agricultural land will be flooded;

31 field irrigation systems will be stopped in Dnepropetrovsk (30%), Kherson (94%) and Zaporozhye (74%) regions; the fishing industry is expected to lose 95 thousand tons of adult fish;

At least 150 tons of engine oil have already entered the Dnieper River.

[redshift-13]

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1666186127500275714

This isn’t the first act of Russian ecocide since they launched their fascist invasion:

https://news.mongabay.com/2022/12/black-sea-dolphin-deaths-prompt-ecocide-allegations-against-russia/