Category: Ecology

Save UNCA’s Urban Forest

Breaks my heart and mind to see out-of-state developers pushing to cut even more forests out of Asheville’s downtown canopy (especially after Helene and the human and more-than-human losses). I hope this initiative linked here takes hold and works. Go spread the word if you’re interested in the great work of our ecological futures (rather than more corporate homogenized playing fields):

Save UNCA’s Urban Forest:

Approx. 40% of trees in Buncombe county were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Helene, per AVL Watchdog. It’s more important than ever to save the trees we have left

Fire Resilience 🔥

Fascinating and needed work… imagining something similar here in the Carolinas as we begin to grapple with seasonal fires in a land that once saw large populations of megafauna such as buffalo and mammoths (not forgetting that fires are a part of the solution, not the actual problem)…

Rewilding project aims to restore resilience to fire-prone Spain via wildlife:

Some 30,000 years ago, Stone Age people decorated a cave, today known as Cueva de los Casares, in central Spain with pictures of mating humans (most famously), geometric shapes, and animals. The most popular carved animal is the wild horse.

Cueva de los Casares sports at least two dozen images of wild horses. Eventually, these Pleistocene-epoch horses vanished — likely slaughtered for food or domesticated. But some 10,000 years later, wild horses have again returned to central Spain — this time to help with out-of-control fires and bring economic opportunity to a struggling region.

Amazon Warehouses and Leopard Frogs

Incredible statistic here… we are certainly harming our amphibian friends, as evidenced by countless statistics and news stories (salamanders, especially, in the Carolinas), but this reminder of the devastation humans have created and caused in terms of wetland biomes is especially shocking.

We’re still recovering from Hurricane Helene here in the Upstate of South Carolina a year later (the two homes across our street still sit vacant as a daily reminder), but I can’t imagine the human-scale destruction that another Superstorm Sandy-type event would cause the NYC / NJ region, given the lack of wetlands now…

The Endangered Leopard Frog That Lives Next to an NYC Amazon Warehouse – The New York Times (gift article):

Less than 1 percent of the quarter-million acres of freshwater wetlands that once blanketed New York City still exist. City officials have conserved some marshes, but others are on private property, including the 675-acre site where Atlantic Coast leopard frogs often breed. That land had a vast network of creeks before 1929, when the Gulf Oil Corporation started building aboveground petroleum storage tanks to receive oil from ships in the Arthur Kill strait between Staten Island and New Jersey.

Let’s Flood the Planet with Solar Panels

I have very similar thoughts about our growing energy needs and utilizing the very free and abundant (and powerful) resource that is energy being produced by our own star that floods our Earth with more than enough energy potential to get us out of the capitalistic and colonialist matrix that is the fossil fuel industry… a mesh of Whitehead Schedulers powered by solar energy would do wonders to transform the daily lives of humans and more-than-humans here on Earth…

Good read and idea (and stats, espeically out of Pakistan):

A Modest Proposal – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

So let’s start at $2.5 trillion, the number for the panels alone, because, hey, Tik Tok videos. Is that an absurd number to imagine helping to pay? The International Monetary Fund reported recently that the world spends $7 trillion a year subsidizing fossil fuel. And all it gets us is the chance to buy more fossil fuel—the last line of Jacobson’s email makes it clear that even at the full price this would be a huge bargain. You save huge amounts of money because you don’t have to pay for fuel any more. Once the panels are up, sunshine is free. It changes everything.

Apple Watch Greenwashing

“Greenwashing” is one of those terms that has bubbled up to the mainstream over the last few years and will only intensify as the broader global culture(s) become more attuned to the ecological realities we face in the decade ahead. Whether you’re one of the richest corporations to ever exist in human history or a church or mom-and-pop store or school, it would be wise to realize the measure the risks of claiming the high ground in environmental ethics (while also realizing the upsides and benefits of actually being moral and ethical in approaching those topics)…

Apple Watch not a ‘CO2-neutral product,’ German court finds | Reuters:

Apple based its claim of carbon neutrality on a project it operates in Paraguay to offset emissions by planting eucalyptus trees on leased land.

The eucalyptus plantations have been criticised by ecologists, who claim that such monocultures harm biodiversity and require high water usage, earning them the nickname ‘green deserts.’

“Nature is imagination itself”

James Bridle’s book Ways of Being is a fascinating and enlightening read. If you’re interested in ecology, AI, intelligence, and consciousness (or any combination of those), I highly recommend it.

There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, oil and us. Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.

Environmental Laws are also Laws

☀️ Bit of sunshine…

EVERGLADES WIN: We stopped “Alligator Alcatraz” — for now – Friends of the Everglades:

“This decision sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government — and there are consequences for ignoring them,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.

This isn’t a good strategy (if one could call it that), City of Columbia…

Mays Park reopens in Columbia after tree removal debate | The State:

“I was never against them renovating the park,” Marshall said. “My concern is how many trees have been cut down. … [Citywide] we have lost a lot of trees.”

Indeed, Columbia’s overall tree cover has shrunk. Between 2005 and 2019, the city lost 22% of its tree cover, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of South Carolina. The loss of tree cover plays a role in the city’s overall heat problems, which plague Columbia every summer.

Defining the Limits of Religious-Services Clauses on Public Lands

Fascinating decision (the Lipan-Apache Native American Church here lost the case in the 5th Circuit this week):

Beyond the Sanctuary: Defining the Limits of Texas’s Religious-Services Clause on Public Lands: 5th Cir. | CaseMine:

Gary Perez and Matilde Torres—leaders in the Lipan-Apache Native American Church—challenged the City’s $7.75 million renovation of Brackenridge Park, alleging the work would destroy the “spiritual ecology” of their sacred riverbend by removing heritage cypress trees and deterring the migratory cormorants central to their creation story…

…Guideposts for Native and minority faith claims: The decision elevates the evidentiary threshold for showing a substantial burden where the state acts on its own land. Litigants must document direct, site-specific prohibitions rather than ecological or aesthetic degradation alone…

…Texas’s pandemic-era Religious-Services Clause, while “absolute and categorical,” is geographically—and now judicially—confined; policy makers retain authority to manage parks, rivers, and historic landmarks even when such management displeases worshippers…

I wonder how the decision would have fallen had this been in a “Christian” (under Texas-understanding) context…

More on the case here from the Baptist Standard.