Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.
In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.
Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.
The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.
When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.
It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.
That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.
I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?
That’s not true anymore. If you are not an “outdoorsy” person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.
You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.
The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.
Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil…and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.
But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.
Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.
Why river valleys? They’re fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.
And where does that silt come from?
Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.
The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.
You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.
All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she’s done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.
Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.
@headspace-hotel thank you for your many posts about conservation. It’s because of following you that I’ve started to look at gardening, land management and resource preservation differently. When someone says “buy this and we’ll plant a tree!” I say “what kind of tree? Where are you planting it? Is it being supported after planting or are you just leaving it there?”
^usually the “we plant trees when you Buy Product” is just, like, a description of how the paper industry works.
Wood pulp used for paper is grown in huge monoculture tree farms that are harvested to be turned into pulp with the trees are like, 15-20 years old.
A company that claims to plant a new tree for every tree cut down isn’t doing shit.
One of the things in the fandom that frustrates me about people trying to ignore that Kira had some legitimately illiberal beliefs (like her support of the d'jarras caste system, initially preferring the conservative fundamentalist Winn for Kai over a moderate like Bareil) is that I think the fact that Bajoran politics and religion include some genuinely yikes stuff is what makes the way early DS9 handles its postcolonial story so good. It’s really easy to make the colonized culture (Bajor) all good and the colonizer culture (Cardassia) all bad – but it does neither of those things, there are negative things about traditional Bajoran society and culture, and positive things about Cardassian society and culture. Not only does that kind of grappling with “what do we keep, what can we leave behind” make for a much more honest portrayal of a formerly-colonized nation rebuilding after independence, but it also challenges the audience to have more genuine support for anti-colonialism. Because in most real-world cases, the original culture wasn’t perfect – no culture is – but still, colonialism is bad, the things colonizers do are human rights abuses, and every people deserves the right to self-determination anyway. This is a thing that comes up in a lot of genuine postcolonial literature (especially in terms of women’s rights and patriarchy – Season of Migration to the North and high school literature class favorite Things Fall Apart come to mind as books that are anti-colonialist but still often show the colonized culture [Sudan and Nigeria respectively] in an unfavorable light in that way) and it’s cool to see an American TV show from the 1990s grappling with these ideas in a sci-fi context. I complain a lot about DS9’s politics especially re: race and pluralism but I think this aspect of it is pretty good, one of the things that most drew me into the show initially, and not remarked-upon enough. And despite being a 30-year-old show it’s a particularly salient message I think for a lot of modern fandom social justice culture, where people too often conflate being oppressed with being virtuous – when in fact, whether someone is a good person or believes in good things is irrelevant as to whether they deserve human rights of the kind that Bajorans were denied during the Cardassian occupation. And you should have to seriously consider ideologies that differ from your own in order to truly reject them, which DS9 does more than any other Trek show with its non-Federation alien characters in general.
You know who else doesn’t get enough heat for their colonialism? Portugal. Those people will be burning in hell
Started the slave trade and get to sit there while France and England get all the smoke nah. Brazil has the second largest population of Black people in the world.
Hellfire immediately. Don’t pass go don’t collect $200
Noah fence but y'all white people want to talk about colonialism like its ancient history but the current queen of England was literally already queen when my dad was a kid and Trinidad was an English colony and he was beaten in missionary school by his white teachers for speaking Hindi and refusing to convert to Christianity
Like my great grandparents, some of whom I knew and were alive in my lifetime were freaking indentured servants
Like if u dnt know what that is, it’s the system that the British created after they abolished slavery to get cheap Labor to the colonies (it didn’t just happen to Indians but that’s the narrative of my ancestors so that’s what I’ll talk about)
They promised some labourers free passage to and from India if they agreed to go to the colonies and work on the plantations in order to fund the British economy and some Indians they just plain stole like my great grandma arrived in Trinidad with no husband and a baby on her hip and spoke no English and had to live in an old hut that once housed slaves and performed the backbreaking work of cutting sugar cane in the hot sun all day with her baby with no compensation
And thousands of Indians had a similar narrative only to have it turn out that the promise of return to India was a false one that the Brits never intended to keep like the Brits exploited their labor for nothing more than empty promises
I have no idea what ethnics groups I belong to, I speak little more than kitchen Hindi that I picked up from speaking to my great grandparents who knew no English, I know little about my culture or family’s religion, and I could have family in India/Pakistan/Kashmir that I will never know anything about
I feel the phantom limb of India every day of my life
Fuck all y'all who pretend that colonialism was far in the past and that none of us feel its aftershocks today
I’ve only had two white people comment something ignorant on this post and I am pleasantly surprised
You’re an Indian giver in the way you love: Everything you give, you take away.
What is an Indian giver?
A person who gives something and than wants it back.
what did the Indians want back?
More specifically, the term “Indian giver” arose from a series of incidents in which European colonists would borrow food and supplies from the local First Nations, then turn around and go “oh, we thought it was a gift” when the locals later tried to collect on the loan.
Modern history books like to bang on about “cultural misunderstandings”, but if you look at contemporary records, it’s clear that there was no misunderstanding - the colonists totally understood that they were being extended a loan, and simply didn’t want to pay it back.
The myth that Native Americans liked to swindle people by giving them gifts and later claiming that the gift had actually been a loan - hence, “Indian giver” - thus developed in order to retroactively justify the colonists stiffing the locals when those loans came due.
(In the interest of clarity, interest-bearing loans were not commonly practiced by North America’s First Nations at the time, though they did exist among some groups; in this context, the term “loan” simply means “I give you something you need right now, and you give me back something of equal value at some specified or unspecified future date”.)
Whoa…..
This got really educational
^^ I’m glad it did too. I’ve heard this phrase all my life and now I can educate people on it
“Why don’t you guys just get the fuck over it ” - Becky voice .
“Why are you resisting ? Be peaceful .”
Don’t ever let this post die .
*Good history Twitter pg to follow *
When folks ask why I hate the British….
What?! Omg I didn’t know
Just remember that this man is praised as a hero in England and in most history textbooks. This is what we mean when we say that we are only being taught one side of history
