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Here comes the sun

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Lupin III Part 2 | Creator: Monkey Punch | Studio: TMS | Japan, 1977-1980  

why do black people use you in the wrong context? such is "you ugly" instead of "you're ugly" I know u guys can differentiate, it's a nuisance

you a bitch

gay_irl

Imagine traveling back hundreds of years and finding your way up a salmon-spawning river in British Columbia to a small village. You walk into the trees and find yourself in a patch of forest dramatically different from the conifer growth around it. Small fruit and nut trees form the canopy, and there are clusters of berry bushes and cleared paths. The forest floor hosts tended herbs used for food and medicine. One child carefully peels moss from the bark of a pruned crab apple tree; another clears the ground next to a salmonberry bush.

Welcome to a temperate forest garden.

A new study shows that once-managed gardens like this are still distinct from – and more biodiverse than – the surrounding forest, even 150 years after Indigenous people were displaced by colonial settlers and the gardens abandoned. More diverse ecosystems are generally thought to be more resilient to environmental change and resistant to the incursion of alien species.

Chelsey Armstrong, a paleoecologist and paleobotanist at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, studied four sites: Dałk Gyilakyaw and Kitselas Canyon, both in Ts’msyen traditional territory in northwestern British Columbia, as well as Shxwpópélem and Say-mah-mit, both of the Coast Salish people of southwestern British Columbia. Each site hosted several villages that were occupied for thousands of years, up until the late 1800s. […]

The garden plants they studied also had seeds that were about twice as large on average -- a trait typically associated with plants that bear larger fruits, which hints that people were purposely selecting for higher production.

The gardens contained 10 culturally significant species not normally found together, two of which fall completely outside their natural geographic range and were likely transplanted.

“Crab apple is a coastal species that likes its feet wet in the intertidal, and we’re finding it far inland in these sites, so people were moving them, in some cases, big distances,” says Armstrong.

“Hazelnut is doing the opposite, coming from the east and being moved toward the coast,” she adds. “We know that hazelnut doesn’t grow anywhere else in the area except for these village sites.”

Both species have enormous cultural importance to the Ts’msyen and Coast Salish people. Hazelnut packs a lot of calories into an easily picked nut that can be stored for up to five years. Crab apples, known locally as moolks, feature in origin stories of the areas, and were a high-status food stored over the winter months to supplement a fish-heavy diet.

“It’s amazing to think that the decisions that were made 150 years ago around stewardship and management persist today,” says Andrew Trant, an ecologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who was not involved with this study. The work shows that “what we do today has the potential to be persistent six generations from today.”

Armstrong says the work highlights how biodiversity and food provision can both be enriched at the same time, in contrast to colonial farming practices in which ecosystems are often stripped down to monocultures in an attempt to boost food production. “There’s a growing body of evidence from everywhere from the Amazon to the Pacific Northwest that in these sites that were continuously occupied for thousands and thousands of years, the effect is actually one of higher diversity,” Trant says.

The study details tie in with Indigenous knowledge, says Armstrong, who has been working with Indigenous partners and colleagues from the four First Nations on whose traditional territory the village sites are located: the Kitsumkalum, Kitselas, Sts’ailes, and Tsleil-Waututh. […]

Oral histories also suggest that the job of tending forest gardens fell largely to children. Elder Betty Lou Dundas of Hartley Bay remembers pruning crab apple trees and clearing the ground around their bases to raise the trees’ productivity.

Willie Charlie, former chief of Sts’ailes, a Coast Salish First Nation, says no knowledge is ever truly lost from his community – even after the assaults of colonialism and the residential school system.

“My grandfather said all of our teaching are still there on the land, so if somebody has a good mind and a good heart and the right intention, they can go out there and those messages are going to come to them,” says Charlie.

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Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Jessa Gamble. “Ancient Gardens Persist in British Columbia’s Forests.” Hakai Magazine. 9 June 2021.

Goanna burrows are incredibly weird

They’re spirals

and they nest together so you’ll get hundreds of these weird coils all together…

And the babies just punch straight up through the compacted soil on top of them… sometimes as much as 13 feet of it.

But fascinatingly weird animal architecture aside, this actually has some cool environmental implications for numerous Australian species. Because these burrows are so deep, they can protect other animals from the scorching heat and blistering dehydration of the dry season. The team pulled 418 frogs from one burrow during their excavation. The nesting sites are huge warrens where hundreds of lizards dig their burrows, and over time these burrows overlap, collapse, and erode. This creates open spaces in the soil that can shelter many other species.

The amount of change animals affect on a landscape is something a lot of people have a hard time understanding. It’s naive to think that humans are the only creatures responsible for changing our environments in massive ways. Ungulates like bison in North America or wildebeests in Africa churn up soil with their hooves, aerating it and turning it over. They might not be doing it intentionally, but this soil aeration is what allows native plants in those places to grow well. We could be seeing a similar situation here with these monitors. While they’re a desert species and might not have a huge impact on plant life, the safety of these burrows and their extreme depth (the deepest of any known vertebrate) supports biodiversity by providing refuges against arid conditions for numerous species of wildlife. The environment is a complexity of interactions between flora, fauna, and fungi, and pretty much everything impacts everything else in some way. Usually, reptiles are left out of this discussion, because other than communal burrow usage where other species shelter in tortoise burrows, we don’t think much about what they do- and in some cases, we don’t know. We don’t know much about the nesting ecology of most Australian monitors, and it could be that as a clade they represent opportunities for much of Australia’s smaller wildlife to survive the dry season. And as anthropogenic climate change leads to increased brushfire severity, these burrows might become more important than ever.

https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jzo.12543

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/monitor-lizards-australia-dig-incredible-corkscrew-nests/619294/?fbclid=IwAR1odkPWRPyHY9tU0cHiLysNBwx0MVVIOKpRe3teGcevRINVjdjTlhAlgIM

why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species

you’re hearing it more and more

Charlize Theron training for Atomic Blonde (2017)

DC Love is a Battlefield #1 - “The Beginning” (2021)

written by Tim Seeley art by Rebekah Isaacs & Kurt Michael Russell