We're passionate about this stuff, but every other tumblr about ecology/animal behavior/climate change seemed so stale and staid - biology is about life and diversity and beauty and not being afraid to get dirty in the name of science!
“In 2005, I set out to photograph my home state of South Dakota, a sparsely populated frontier state on the Great Plains with more buffalo, pronghorn, coyotes, mule deer, ring-necked pheasants and prairie dogs than people. It’s a landscape dominated by space and silence and solitude, by brutal wind and extreme weather. I was trying to capture a more intimate and personal view of the West. I was trying to capture what all that space feels like to someone who grew up there. A year into the project, however, everything changed. One of my brothers died unexpectedly. For months, one of the few things that eased my unsettled heart was the landscape of South Dakota. It seemed all I could do was drive through the badlands and prairies and photograph. I began to wonder: Does loss have its own geography?”
No joke, after watching three episodes of Warehouse 13, I now want to take a trip to the Badlands in South Dakota.
“Fuelled by historic drought conditions, the wildfire season opened early this year in the rugged mountains of Arizona. By Friday morning, crews were fighting more than a dozen blazes in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, California and Utah. A few small towns were under evacuation order, and at least 170 square miles of brush and forest had been consumed by flames.
In New Mexico’s Gila national forest, fires started by lightening strikes tripled in size over the last 48 hours, with high winds forcing firefighters to the sidelines. More than a dozen summer cabins in the town of Willow Creek were destroyed as the fire burned across 110 miles of steep forested canyons.
“The fire had been around about 10 days, lurking and creeping and then kaboom, it exploded,” said Tabitha Sims, secretary of the Willow Creek landowners association, told local reporters. “They made a heroic effort at trying to build a break, but I think it was unfortunate that this wind event happened to come right at the worst time.”
Much of the state was covered in a haze, with local television stations reporting poor air quality in Albuquerque, some 170 miles away. High winds, with gusts of 60mph were expected until Sunday, blocking fire crews from cutting a containment line ahead of the fire.
In Arizona, meanwhile, more than 1,100 fighters, backed up by aircraft, were slowly containing the most dangerous fire,the Gladiator fire, which had forced the evacuation of the old mining ton of Crown King and consumed 27 square miles of pine and brush north of Phoenix.”
Gila national forest is just south of where I am. On Thursday when we were out in the field, we couldn’t even see the mountains because there was so much smoke in the air - on a clear day, which is most days, you can see for miles and miles across the flats.
EVER SINCE I STARTED TAKING HERBIVORE STUDIES COURSES AT THE LOCAL UNIVERSITY IT’S BECOME MORE AND MORE DIFFICULT TO ENJOY A WIDE RANGE OF WHAT I ALWAYS ASSUMED WERE NORMAL AND BENIGN ACTIVITIES. I’VE BEEN MADE TO REALIZE THE ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM IS DESIGNED TO OPPRESS AND MARGINALIZE ALL BUT A SELECT FEW CREATURES, AND EVEN MY ATTEMPTS TO OFFER POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS TO SOME OF THE MORE SPECULATIVE THEORIES ARE SIMPLY PERPETUATIONS OF THE DOMINANT HEIRARCHY.
I NEVER REALIZED HOW MUCH I NEED TO CHECK MY PREDATOR PRIVILEGE.
Earth, a floating installation by Peter Callesen.
This installation was constructed of a huge round lamp (2,5 m in diameter) filled with helium, hovering about 40 m. above and old square, Gl.Torv, in the old centre of Copenhagen. To make it look like the EARTH I had made a cover on which I painted the motive of the earth as it would look seen from out of space. The EARTH was only visible when it was dark. During the day I took down the EARTH and attached behind a roof invisible for people on the ground.
Ms. Frizzle and Bob Ross - both responsible for making me the nature science freak I am today.
So, first I think I need to explain what ecofeminism is not.
Ecofeminism is not the assumption that men abuse nature because women are close to nature.
This is my feeble attempt at explaining ecofeminismEcofeminism is more of a philosophy (or at least that is how I understand it)
The principles of ecofeminism are that the same ideology used to oppress women is the same thing that we use to oppress nature.
The general ideas of “We are this, nature is other” “We are men, women are other” are lined up to create the ideology that it is okay to abuse the other or treat it as less than.
Because people are seen as superior to nature and a part from it
and men are seen as superior to women and a part from themWe’d be hoping to start to see ourselves as equal with nature, because we really are.
When we start to see ourselves as the same as nature, then we’ll stop abusing it, because not many people purposely abuse themselves. This is the ECOLikewise, we’d be hoping to see women as equal to men, because they really are.
When we start to see women and men as the same thing, then we can rid ourselves of a lot of gendered abuse. This is the FEMINISMAnd there you have it: Ecofeminism
So when I first stumbled upon Lady Darwin I had zero idea what “ecofeminism” meant. I found this to be a pretty helpful explanation. Perhaps this is already on here somewhere, but oh well! :)
A brown booby perching on an Olive Ridley sea turtle near Los Cobanos beach. Photograph: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images
npr:
Ooooo.
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
