@d8e83438 I'm a native 'Yooper'. It IS a beautiful place. I've resettled in the Lower Peninsula, a few miles from Lk MI, and the ecotone is very similar.
Excerpt from the historical novel, The Women of the Copper Country, by Mary Doria Russell, about the #union labor movement in the ore mines of #Michigan's #UpperPeninsula. Gripping & educational
"...money changes everything, Mrs. [Ella] Bloor says firmly. "It changes how you think of yourself, & it changes how people treat you. That's why the rich hold on to every damned penny, long past the point where they know what to do with all their money. They buy bigger & bigger houses stuffed with more & more things. They hire a little army of servants to take care of it all and to say 'yes, ma'am' & 'yes sir.' Every Sunday they go to church, & when Jesus tells them to give all their money to the poor, they drop a few coins on the collection plate. On Monday they go back to their offices to make more money & complain about the cost of labor. You're allowed to ask them for charity, but if you say 'Take less', they'll call you an anarchist."
https://marydoriarussell.net/novels/the-women-of-the-copper-country/https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/111/133/891/287/322/890/original/89cd633ac6ca6eac.png
Kim Stanley Robinson - What I’ve Learned since The Ministry for the Future Came Out in 2020
"His more than 20 award-winning books over 4 decades, translated into some 26 languages, have included many highly influential, international bestselling tomes that brilliantly explore in a wide range of ways the great eco, economic and socio-political crises facing our species, yet nothing had prepared him for the global explosion of interest in his visionary 2020 novel, Ministry for the Future, which projects how a possible #climate-disrupted future might unfold and how the world might respond meaningfully. It’s also chock full of brilliant science and wildly imaginative ways humanity steps up. Stan offers us his overview of where we currently stand in relation to the climate crisis."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POs0APzpkSU&t=622s
On Coronal Mass Ejections: "The Carrington event was relatively minor. Faced with a surge of high-energy particles characteristic of a Miyake event—one powerful enough to leave its mark in the rings of trees—the induced current would flood the thousands of #satellites that encircle Earth, crippling them for months and possibly years. Power grids would topple immediately, leaving anything reliant on electricity, like lights, electric vehicles, and ventilators, inoperable. Astronauts would undoubtedly receive lethal doses of radiation, and even people on board airplanes could encounter dangerous levels." https://daily.jstor.org/the-carrington-event-of-1859-disrupted-telegraph-lines/
"Humans and pigs easily swap #influenza #viruses. Worse still, pigs can also pick up influenza strains that circulate among birds, whose viruses aren’t well adapted to infecting and spreading among people. Humans don’t have the receptors in our throats and noses that avian flus can easily attach to. Our isolation from avian flus is what makes them dangerous—since our immune systems rarely encounter them, we have little innate ability to fight them off. Enter pigs. They can catch flu strains from birds (often carrying them without symptoms), mash them up with genetic material from human-adapted flus, and create novel varieties capable of flummoxing human immunity and generating #pandemics. That’s why virologists call hogs “mixing vessels” for novel influenza strains."
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/06/tightly-packed-poultry-and-pig-farms-could-be-incubating-the-next-deadly-flu/
#CAFOs
Bamboozled?
"The team's observations also found no asexual reproduction by the plant.
"All culms died in the study site, with no sign of regeneration by seed, culm, or dwarf ramet production apparent," the team added in their paper. "These results suggest a dark future for P. nigra var. henonis in Japan: the species may be hard to regenerate after flowering." https://www.iflscience.com/bamboo-is-about-to-flower-for-the-first-time-in-120-years-it-could-be-a-disaster-70569
"You #heat the air by two to three degrees and the actual upper temperature of these leaves goes up by eight degrees," lead author Christopher Doughty of Northern Arizona University told journalists.
If tropical forest's average surface temperature warms 4C above current levels—widely considered a worst-case scenario—"we're predicting possible total leaf death." https://phys.org/news/2023-08-tropical-forests-nearing-critical-temperatures.html
#climatechange
Brain pollution by plastic.
“We expected to see the microplastics in the feces of the animal, that wasn’t altogether surprising,” Ross told Earther. “Then we found them deep inside liver cells, spleen, [and] kidneys. Not just the center of the digestive tract, but actually in the tissue of the digestive tract.”
Because the plastics were found in organs including the liver, spleen, and brain, it meant that the many bits of swallowed microplastics had entered the bloodstream. This is what allowed the microplastics to make their way into organs outside of the digestive tract."
https://gizmodo.com/microplastics-behavioral-changes-in-mice-alzheimers-stu-1850785217
@428eea05 PS, I can report that they self-sow handily and volunteer the next year. Save some seeds, too, of course, to share. These are just one of "approximately 75 to 90 species of plants in the nightshade family (Solanaceae), [both annual and perennial, I might add; I have two perennial varieties that are native to my site in Zone5a, Michigan] which are native to the Americas and Australasia. At least 46 species are endemic to Mexico.
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by Keith D Johnson | export