quercus

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation: Leave the Leaves!

Leaves are not litter

They're food and shelter for butterflies, beetles, bees, moths, and more. Tell friends and neighbors to just #leavetheleaves

In her recent collection of essays, Vesper Flights, English naturalist Helen MacDonald observes that awareness of the specific plants and animals in the natural world around you increasingly means “opening yourself to constant grief.” She is not alone in noticing the rising tide of grief that comes with awareness of climate change and its accompanying environmental devastation. The question of what to do with this climate grief is gaining momentum, because one of the increasingly salient features of our existence right now is the pain of watching the world burn. I am interested in the spiritual consequences of this grief and the possibility (and even necessity) of mourning as a spiritual practice in a largely secular context. MacDonald herself does not identify as religious, but she remarks that, when writing about environmental grief, she “kept trying to find the right words to describe certain experiences and failing.” Her “secular lexicon didn’t capture what they were like.”^1^ Spiritual discourse has the resources for touching this aspect of our present experience, and I argue that this discourse can and should be available, irrespective of whether one personally believes that spirituality and theology refer to metaphysical realities.

Drawing on the work of a small but growing number of scholars exploring the spiritual dimensions of climate change, I suggest that climate grief is a phenomenon with spiritual significance, and that mourning as a spiritual (but potentially secular) practice is a necessary step for honoring and dealing with “solastalgia.” Glenn Albrecht, an Australian of Sri Lankan and European descent, coined this neologism to capture the inchoate negative feelings that emerge as we observe the destruction of the world around us. A combination of solace, desolation, and nostalgia, solastalgia is “an intense desire for the place where one is a resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or solace,” as well as the “pain or distress” that results from watching that solace disappear and “the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory.” Albrecht’s neologism came in part from the consideration that, for many Indigenous people, the scientific terms “ecology” and “ecosystem” “fail to capture the emotional and cultural dimensions of the human relationship to land.” He wanted to avoid the neocolonization of reading bioscientific terms into Indigenous systems.^2^

I agree with Lisa Sideris and other scholars writing about human emotional responses to the continuing destruction of life on Earth: neither blind optimism nor paralytic despair is the appropriate reaction to the state of affairs that has led to solastalgia. Rather, it is time to mourn. Paradoxically, this mourning, which may at first glance seem to be a giving-up, is an essential step toward transformation.

A Buddhist teacher shares their thoughts on shitposting, internet trolls, and nonduality.

Plenty of scholars have described nuts as a crucial food source for the Wabanaki people, and early colonial records indicate the same. In 1607, colonists from the Popham Colony described the Casco Bay islands as “overgrown with woods very thick as oaks, walnut, pine trees & many other things growing as sarsaparilla, hazle nuts & whorts in abundance.”

Ethnobotanist Nancy Asch Sidell documents that charred beechnut remains that are more than 5,000 years old have been discovered “preserved in a hearth feature” in central Maine. At the archaelogical site on the well-documented Norridgewock village on the Kennebec River – a Wabanaki town destroyed by the British in 1724 – researchers have recovered evidence of hazelnut and beechnut consumption, Sidell reports.

“The use and importance of nuts is as ancient as the people themselves,” Kavasch told me. “The trees they come from were so sacred and important. But many of our European ancestors couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They weren’t thinking of it as a nut forest.”

Wild Ones: Lifetime Honorary Director Lorrie Otto (1919-2010)

Institution: MIT

Lecturer: Julian Beinart

University Course Code: 4.241J

Subject: #architecture #urbanstudies #finearts #socialscience

Year: Spring 2013

Description: This course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.

Course materials can be found on the MIT OpenCourseWare website.

Source with pictures of example soft landing gardens, plant lists tailored to the North American Eastern Temperate Forests can be found:

https://www.pollinatorsnativeplants.com/softlandings.html

Oaks are universally the top keystone trees that support moths and butterflies. Across the United States, more than 940 types of caterpillars feed on oaks (Quercus).

Top genera: Oak, Willow, Cherry, Pines, Poplar

Lepidoptera in image: Great oak dagger moth, Luna moth, Red-banded hairstreak, Eastern buck moth

Many of the moths and butterflies that feed on oak trees must complete their life cycles in the duff and leaf litter (i.e., soft landings) near or beneath the tree, or below ground.

Lepidoptera in image: Blinded sphinx moth, Juvenal's duskywing, Hog moth

Creating soft landings under the dripline of oaks (as well as any other tree) invites all kinds of beneficial insects to complete their life cycles in your yard.

A number of beneficial insects such as fireflies, bumble bees, beetles, and lacewings need soft landings to survive.

Lepidoptera in image: Edwards hairstreak, Skiff moth, Pink-striped oakworm

Planting intentional soft landings under keystone trees builds healthy soil, provides food for songbirds and pollinators, sequesters more carbon than turf grass, and reduces time spent mowing.

Other ways to support insects that spend a phase of their life cycle beneath trees include eliminating landscape fabric and decreasing mowing to reduce soil compaction.

DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE THE LEAVES UNDER YOUR TREES!

Over the centuries, physicians have placed migraine in various positions along the mind / body spectrum. Headache experts currently consider migraine a somatic disorder rooted in the brain. But this is a break from the past. Up until thirty years ago, doctors primarily viewed migraine as having both a psychological and a somatic basis. In what follows, I trace these historical understandings of migraine from the nineteenth-century understanding of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectuals, to the influential concept of the “migraine personality” in mid-twentieth-century America, and finally to contemporary theories of comorbidity.

[...]

I pay close attention to how, at each historical turn, biomedical discourses come to enact and reinforce cultural narratives about gender, class, and pain via the encoded inclusion of moral character. After all, the credibility and the legitimacy of a disorder — and how much we, as a society, choose to invest in its treatment — is intimately tied to how we perceive the moral character of the patient.

FreeSewing is open source software to generate bespoke sewing patterns, loved by home sewers and fashion entrepreneurs alike.

Mastodon instance: FreeSewing.social

Source: sarumomorchella on deviantart