Chase-prairie - Chase - Tumblr Blog

hurricanes can huff my shorts for real. four feet of water in the house so far.

my muck boots are for botanizing in sedge meadows not stomping through hurricane debris and muck

…now despite my reblogs moments ago, I do have an important PSA involving pawpaws: be very careful eating them in baked goods or otherwise cooked. Apparently some people have a sensitivity to them that causes pretty serious GI upset when the pulp is cooked, and apparently I’m some people. 🫠 I made a delicious roast chicken dish last night that had some pawpaw pulp in the sauce based on a recipe by forager Marie Viljoen, and probably through some combination of baking and a little overindulging in the raw stuff while I was processing the fruit I have spent today laid low by gastrointestinal distress. Most unfortunate.

Of course I’m always a bit offended when I have a bad reaction to wild foods (very rare, I usually have an iron stomach), but these things happen and there’s no lasting harm in this case — but I have to strongly, strongly recommend against consuming much in the way of pawpaw breads, cakes, or other baked goods, or trying to use them in a sauce like I did. Apparently drying them will make you even more violently ill and the pawpaw grower’s association categorically recommends against making fruit leather out of these things. I’ll be sticking to eating them fresh or using them in uncooked dishes like ice cream from here on out!

ATHENS ARTISTS FOR P@LESTINE R@FFLE!! (note: this is primarily being held via instagram so the sames on here are instagram handles) 🍉 To enter the r@ffle, either: 1.) donate directly to @ palestineswg and send @ nicole_musgrave a screenshot of your donation, along with the number of the artwork you’re buying a ticket for (example: if you sent $15 and want one ticket for #5 and two tickets for #6, you would write #5 #6 #6) 2.) donate via Venmo (nicole-musgrave-1). Make sure to add your Instagram handle in the notes section, along with the number of the artwork you’re buying a ticket for (example: if you send $15 and want one ticket for #5 and two tickets for #6, you would write #5 #6 #6) 🍉 Tickets are $5 each (no cap on how many tickets you can buy) 🍉 R@ffle will close on Sunday 10/6 at midnight EST 🍉 R@ffle is open to anyone in the US—We will cover shipping anywhere in the US 🍉 Funds donated via Venmo will be redistributed to a P@lestinian refugee family with a GoFundMe, TBD at the close of the r@ffle 🍉 See comments for details about individual items and artists 🍉 Please share widely!!! ♥️🖤💚🤍

Despite being a pioneer plant associated with old fields and disturbed sites, gray goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis) is one of my personal favorites of the thirty-odd species that grow in Central Appalachia. This bold colonizer is notable for its short, droopy stature, golden-yellow flowers that only grow on one side of stem, a reddish-purple main stem, and narrow, lanceolate leaves with fine hairs. In short, it's a perfect little bumblebee magnet with a great form factor for a native wildflower garden.

Ecofascism and American Christianity have a lot in common.

FREE MAPS

Today's PSA about resources from the federal government that you might not know about: virtually all of the USGS's maps are in the public domain and free to download. More than a century's worth of them. They even have a nice map-based browser so you can search by location and filter by date, scale, etc. You can also generate your own topo map using the best available data for whatever area you define (within the US) using the topoBuilder application.

You can ALSO get printed versions for quite a low price - I just got one for my office for $9 plus shipping, which came to ~$15 total, I think.

SO if for INSTANCE you wanted a cool old map for your wall and you went to Etsy and found some schmuck selling reprints of old USGS maps for +$50 bucks - THEY'RE SCAMMING YOUUUUUUU they are depriving you of your American right to life, liberty and the pursuit of topographic data

USGS Topoview

topoView | USGS

Explore, interact, and download topographic maps from the USGS free of charge.

sometimes my job involves working with Important People and my anxiety takes it as a challenge to make me as fucked up as possible about it

the only leopold shit i actually want to talk about is how sensuously he described sculpting the hand grip of a bow he made for fellow wildlife scientist and long-time collaborator Herbert Stoddard, so that, even though geography divided them, their fingers would caress the same curves, the same grains of wood and connect them

its a weirdly horny letter

im sitting here stewing over actually making A Leopold Post and typing and deleting many words

I have Feelings about an Old Man and not in the fun, tumblr kind of way

ok yes 'aldo leopold' is my sleeper agent trigger words, i'm going back to my fictional people kissing sideblog, good bye

goddammit @starfoozle that is a beautiful and more succinct way to say what i was blathering on about.

LISTEN TO @starfoozle

I got my Masters and PhD where Leopold taught, I went to his Shack twice a year, I worked in his archives, I've read his letters and journals, I've studied under his biographer, my Masters was partially about him, my PhD is structured around one of his speeches. I feel like I have the Credentials to have Refined Feelings about Leopold

I hate this passage.

Setting aside "alone" ("Only I, the pure and noble white male university scientist can see this pain, unlike the uncultured masses")...

If you have decided that you live in "a world of wounds" then you have already decided the world is damned. If you are looking for wounds, you will always find them. Things like climate change and ecosystem destruction and extinction are "wounds" that can never be "healed." New ways of being, like peregrine falcons on skyscrapers or novel ecosystems can only be seen as "wounds." The metaphorical "body" will never be "whole." If, no matter what you do, the environment will always be damaged/flawed/corrupted, what's the point in even trying?

In Leopold's context, the only Correct ("healed") way for the natural world to exist is to restore it to its corresponding historic pre-settlement ecosystem, the state it was in prior to the "wounding." This is concretely and objectively impossible. We've had 90+ years of ecological restoration as a science (NOT INVENTED BY LEOPOLD, DON'T LISTEN TO HIS PROPAGANDISTS) to firmly establish there is no magic time machine process to "heal" these "wounds." Instead, we can change spaces, help rebuild ecosystems into something new that may have things in common with the past.

I find it a much more useful framing to think in terms of change. There was never a moment in history where an ecosystem was static, things were always changing, they always will be changing. This is especially true in the Indigenous people-driven ecosystems Leopold is talking about here. His writings all assume that these ecosystems were static prior to settlement, the "whole, healthy body" in the metaphor. That "whole, healthy body" never existed in the first place.

This is why I like to thinking of us, environmentally-minded people taking action, as members in a very old community of beings who have made environmental change. Rather than metaphorically putting bandaids on Mother Earth's body that is separate from us, we can take actions as members in the community of ecosystems to help all of us thrive, together.

The thing is that I made a very deliberate choice to NOT make my dissertation a refutation of Leopold. I had long conversations with my advisors and his biographer about it. I don't LIKE Leopold, why would I put years of energy into writing ABOUT him?

which is to say, all the things i have to say about Leopold could literally fill a book. I nearly wrote the thing. I just really don't wanna. For one thing, people don't thank you for taking a swing at their idols. Conservation orgs are the source of my employment and alienating them does nothing for me.

trying to delete things to make it as succinct as possible.

oh no some post was saying something nice about Aldo Leopold and now I'm four paragraphs in to a screed about my historical adversary

i should just delete it probably but also fuck that guy

oh no some post was saying something nice about Aldo Leopold and now I'm four paragraphs in to a screed about my historical adversary

i should just delete it probably but also fuck that guy

Autumn is here and it's time for my annual reminder: acorns are edible and I drew a whole comic to teach you how to eat them

You can read the whole zine for free and start gathering nuts from your local backyard/park/grocery store parking lot this very day!!