Any Social Entrepreneurs Worth Their (fair-trade, Alder-smoked) Sea Salt Will Have An "our Story" Section

What I really object to... is that there is a rhetoric out there of trying to convince people that they’re insufficient and that everything should be the private property of a small number of people for this reason when in fact, if it was really the case that those few people were so important, and great, and powerful, they wouldn’t need to have all this rhetoric to convince other people of it. People would just see it, they would get it. If there were really a few X-Men floating around, it would be manifest to everyone. In fact, those X-Men wouldn’t even need everyone else. They would do the Atlas Shrugged thing like go off, do whatever you want, and have no connection to the outside world. If you’re really that great, just do it, and stop bitching, and trying to convince everybody else that they’re inadequate, and stupid, and useless, and that you’re the elite. Fine. That doesn’t bother anyone if you want to go do that, but don’t take as private property all the stuff that was produced in this society that we created. Go off on your own with nothing into the forest and build this great Atlantis that you’re capable of doing, and that no one else can do. Great. Honestly, if there were a bunch of X-Men, they would do that. They wouldn’t bother with everyone else. They’d just go off into outer space and do their own thing. That’s not what’s actually going on. What’s actually going on is that there’s this elite of people who’s trying to use rhetoric to dominate others, and to take the collective work that others have done, and expropriate it to themselves. I think that’s nonsense.

Glen Weyl Radical Institutional Rerforms Podcast on 80,000 Hours

Despite its green image, Ireland has surprisingly little forest. [...] [M]ore than 80% of the island of Ireland was [once] covered in trees. [...] [O]f that 11% of the Republic of Ireland that is [now] forested, the vast majority (9% of the country) is planted with [non-native] spruces like the Sitka spruce [in commercial plantations], a fast growing conifer originally from Alaska which can be harvested after just 15 years. Just 2% of Ireland is covered with native broadleaf trees.

Text by: Martha O’Hagan Luff. “Ireland has lost almost all of its native forests - here’s how to bring them back.” The Conversation. 24 February 2023. [Emphasis added.]

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[I]ndustrial [...] oil palm plantations [...] have proliferated in tropical regions in many parts of the world, often built at the expense of mangrove and humid forest lands, with the aim to transform them from 'worthless swamp' to agro-industrial complexes [...]. Another clear case [...] comes from the southernmost area in the Colombian Pacific [...]. Here, since the early 1980s, the forest has been destroyed and communities displaced to give way to oil palm plantations. Inexistent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s they had expanded to over 30,000 hectares. The monotony of the plantation - row after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts - replaced the diverse, heterogenous and entangled world of forest and communities.

Text by: Arturo Escobar. "Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South." Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana Volume 11 Issue 1. 2016. [Emphasis added.]

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But efforts to increase global tree cover to limit climate change have skewed towards erecting plantations of fast-growing trees [...] [because] planting trees can demonstrate results a lot quicker than natural forest restoration. [...] [But] ill-advised tree planting can unleash invasive species [...]. [In India] [t]o maximize how much timber these forests yielded, British foresters planted pines from Europe and North America in extensive plantations in the Himalayan region [...] and introduced acacia trees from Australia [...]. One of these species, wattle (Acacia mearnsii) [...] was planted in [...] the Western Ghats. This area is what scientists all a biodiversity hotspot – a globally rare ecosystem replete with species. Wattle has since become invasive and taken over much of the region’s mountainous grasslands. Similarly, pine has spread over much of the Himalayas and displaced native oak trees while teak has replaced sal, a native hardwood, in central India. Both oak and sal are valued for [...] fertiliser, medicine and oil. Their loss [...] impoverished many [local and Indigenous people]. [...]

India’s national forest policy [...] aims for trees on 33% of the country’s area. Schemes under this policy include plantations consisting of a single species such as eucalyptus or bamboo which grow fast and can increase tree cover quickly, demonstrating success according to this dubious measure. Sometimes these trees are planted in grasslands and other ecosystems where tree cover is naturally low. [...] The success of forest restoration efforts cannot be measured by tree cover alone. The Indian government’s definition of “forest” still encompasses plantations of a single tree species, orchards and even bamboo, which actually belongs to the grass family. This means that biennial forest surveys cannot quantify how much natural forest has been restored, or convey the consequences of displacing native trees with competitive plantation species or identify if these exotic trees have invaded natural grasslands which have then been falsely recorded as restored forests. [...] Planting trees does not necessarily mean a forest is being restored. And reviving ecosystems in which trees are scarce is important too.

Text by: Dhanapal Govindarajulu. "India was a tree planting laboratory for 200 years - here are the results." The Conversation. 10 August 2023. [Emphasis added.]

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Nations and companies are competing to appropriate the last piece of available “untapped” forest that can provide the most amount of “environmental services.” [...] When British Empire forestry was first established as a disciplinary practice in India, [...] it proscribed private interests and initiated a new system of forest management based on a logic of utilitarian [extraction] [...]. Rather than the actual survival of plants or animals, the goal of this forestry was focused on preventing the exhaustion of resource extraction. [...]

Text by: Daniel Fernandez and Alon Schwabe. "The Offsetted." e-flux Architecture (Positions). November 2013. [Emphasis added.]

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At first glance, the statistics tell a hopeful story: Chile’s forests are expanding. […] On the ground, however, a different scene plays out: monocultures have replaced diverse natural forests [...]. At the crux of these [...] narratives is the definition of a single word: “forest.” [...] Pinochet’s wave of [...] [laws] included Forest Ordinance 701, passed in 1974, which subsidized the expansion of tree plantations [...] and gave the National Forestry Corporation control of Mapuche lands. This law set in motion an enormous expansion in fiber-farms, which are vast expanses of monoculture plantations Pinus radiata and Eucalyptus species grown for paper manufacturing and timber. [T]hese new plantations replaced native forests […]. According to a recent study in Landscape and Urban Planning, timber plantations expanded by a factor of ten from 1975 to 2007, and now occupy 43 percent of the South-central Chilean landscape. [...] While the confusion surrounding the definition of “forest” may appear to be an issue of semantics, Dr. Francis Putz [...] warns otherwise in a recent review published in Biotropica. […] Monoculture plantations are optimized for a single product, whereas native forests offer [...] water regulation, hosting biodiversity, and building soil fertility. [...][A]ccording to Putz, the distinction between plantations and native forests needs to be made clear. “[...] [A]nd the point that plantations are NOT forests needs to be made repeatedly [...]."

Text by: Julian Moll-Rocek. “When forests aren’t really forests: the high cost of Chile’s tree plantations.” Mongabay. 18 August 2014. [Emphasis added.]

YUKI Rei（由木礼 Japanese, 1928-2003）

End of the Summer 夏の終わり　1972 Woodblock print 72 × 37cm via

The Black Camaro Death

Fine Art of the Forest

(c) riverwindphotography, August 2024

life

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Game of Life had been invented in antiquity. The concept is sufficiently simple for even a child to grasp and simplicity should have appealed to Pythagorean sensibilities…

Would they have developed standardized tokens for exploring the game, and would they have recognized it as a game?

Would there be biblical parables about the glider?

Would alternate rules have been considered heretical in the Middle Ages?

Would the R-pentomino have been thought an infinite growth pattern until some diligent mathematician, maybe an Arabic one in the 1000s, were to show the opposite by working out all 1103 generations?

Would the LWSS, the Gosper glider gun and related technology have been hailed as great inventions of the Renaissance?

Would the Gausses and the Eulers of this world have dedicated time to searching for new oscillator periods or spaceship velocities?

Would still lifes be tabulated by hand to stupendous numbers in the 1800s, and would these in modern days be memorized in a similar way digits of pi are now?

Would the entire concept have encouraged a considerably more rapid development of fields such as computability or signal processing?

Backwards/forwards time travel is overrated; I’d definitely rather explore alternate timelines…

I’ll have to disengage from online stuff on Ukraine for a while because although I have no intention of isolating myself from the life-changing events that are occurring in my literal backyard and are going to affect Europe for years to come, the rate at which I’ve been consuming the news cycle is starting to affect my head and that’s just not benefiting anything or anyone.

But before I do fuck off, a few words on what I’ve been noticing today. Namely that after the initial shock of seeing the terrorist gas station just going fucking mental and actually invading a sovereign country with no justification whatsoever, people (overwhelmingly uninformed Americans, as is tradition) have gone back to both-sidesing the war and sharing their dumbass radical centrist takes on how maybe Putin not good, but NATO is at fault. How NATO provoked the little fascist oligarchy into two days of nonstop war crimes. How if the evil West had just told Ukraine to fuck off, we don’t want you around, everything would have been peachy keen.

And there’s only one thing I can say to that—if you don’t support a people’s right to decide on its fate, on who it chooses to associate with; if you think that countries are by default beholden to whoever wields the biggest stick and have no right to rock the boat because might makes right, then I don’t give a fuck about how many thoughts and prayers you post—you don’t support Ukraine. You’re not an anti-imperialist and you sure as fuck aren’t a leftist. You’re a useful lapdog for the propaganda of a dying empire stuck in the 19th century notion of great powers that are somehow entitled to a sphere of influence, regardless of whatever said sphere of influence has to say about it or whether it even wants to be one. You’re showing a willingness to throw a free people expressing a desire to live in democracy to an expansionist dictatorship that’s a humans rights nightmare, simply “because that’s how the world works, nothing to do about it”. By regurgitating the Kremlin line on NATO provocation and “expansion” (i.e. Russia’s former colonies doing everything in their power to get the fuck out of Russia’s homicidal reach), you’re actively promoting colonialism and imperialism and you’re as useful to the victims of these horror shows as a soiled toilet paper.

Your “suck it up, buttercup” helps no one whatsoever. Quite frankly, it’s a part of the reason why we got here.

I implore you, read a fucking book on Eastern European history. Go into therapy with your U.S. centrism and “every conflict is like the Iraq War” because I swear, nobody in this part of the world is impressed with your main character syndrome. Grow out of the idiotic thinking that just because US BAD, an authoritarian regime automatically good.

You’re a part of the problem. Get solved, please.