Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.
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me @ caribert archon quest
me again @ fontaine archon quest
two sisters and their "in his own world" older brother
a final shitpost dump before fontaine...
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.
Putting on my Ecologist Hat, I once had a friend ask me "how long does it take for an old-growth forest to form? how old is 'old-growth'?" I gave the question a good bit of thought, and I will stand by my answer: for pretty much any temperate forest I'm aware of, after about 100 years after a major disruption (fire, the saw, pest/disease outbreak, volcanic eruption) it will begin to noticeably take on old-growth characteristics*. And after 250 years it will be meaningfully indistinguishable from an undisturbed forest. This is, of course, not including pests and diseases that eliminate an entire species or genus from the ecosystem, or the introduction of new species. But even in those cases, this is about the right timeframe for a new autopoeic old-growth ecosystem to be established.
This is sort of bad news, in that old-growth forests do take a long time to reestablish. But I think it will come as good news to many, who imagine that old-growth forests are necessarily millennia old.
*What are old-growth characteristics? Well, these: trees of a wide variety of ages and size classes forming a complex, multilayered canopy; an abundance of late-successional, shade-tolerant species; a forest floor community featuring herbaceous species adapted to dense forest conditions and a deep organic layer of decomposing leaf litter; animal communities similarly adapted to these conditions; large amounts of dead wood, both standing and on the ground; and the complex forest floor topography associated with repeated uprootings of large trees.
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Putting on my Lumberman Hat, once upon a time some coworkers and I found a particularly impressive surviving old-growth redwood on a protected area of a timber company's lands. Now, this tree was impressive by 'surviving a century and a half of intensive logging' standards, but compared to what's out there in the never-logged stands, it was pretty average. We did some quick, back-of-the-envelope geometry to estimate how much recoverable timber would be in that tree, and when we got home we checked out the stumpage prices for old-growth redwood lumber. Conservatively, a sawmill would pay $40,000 for that tree. No, I didn't add a zero there: the wood in that single tree was worth a year's wages for a workingman.
I suddenly became much more sympathetic to the greed of the lumber barons. Yes, they were short-sighted, foolish, and possibly blasphemous in the speed and extent of the destruction they caused. But there have been, and continue to be, people who would sell out things even dearer to them for far, far less money than that.
capitalism ruins everything
did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said “foxes are dogs cause they are fluffye” and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like “you will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right now”
This is especially funny because they aren’t even right. Foxes *ARE* dogs.
No they aren’t.
yes they are. because they are fluffye.
OK yes they are.
Dog
Dog
Different family, but same order as @pictures-of-dogs
No, they are the same family. They are the same kingdom, phylum, order and family. They separate at the genus.
They’re a dog.
yeah they’re fluffye
theyre literally not dogs theyre not even fluffy. can we get science tumblr over hear or what!?
checkmate athiests
fluffye
okay but they literally are dogs, for those who are confused
If foxes are dogs, then so are wolves, coyotes, dingoes, jackals, and several other extant and extinct species.
Behold! A dog.
of course it’s a dog you buffoon. it’s fluffye.
Why on earth would someone think “BUT IF THEY’RE DOGS SO AR -”
Like yes of course wolves are dogs, where have you been. Jackals are excellent doggies! So are coyotes. Why is this confusing.
I love that this is literally two completely different arguments running simultaneously.
That guy up there who said they’re not even fluffy was thinking of sharks
sharks are also dogs. ravenous water dogs, but still dogs
Sharks can NOT be dogs they are SMOOTH
Tags via @jenroses
A typical day at Devildom. (It's not my job)
I see a pattern
Imitate
Bonus Tighnari's POV :
Been meaning to post this here for weeks now...
Thinking like her master
pair. itoshi sae x gn!reader
content: fluff, idiots in love, not proofread
wc. 0.7k
a/n: based loosely off of the "we accidentally kissed goodbye before they left for work" trope because it's funny and cute
itoshi sae is not an easy man to fluster.
in fact, you’re not sure you’ve ever seen him get any further than slightly pink in the face. and even then he didn’t gratify you with any change in his expression, instead stubbornly staring at you with a deadpan. always so serious, that guy.
it’s not like he didn’t have people over. he actually had a lot of people over, but never the same one twice.
“being a celebrity sounds exhausting,” you told him one time. he just grunted at you in lieu of a proper response and slammed his bedroom door behind him. even famous people who live in the lap of luxury need to blow off steam once in a while, and it’s fine, you guess.
you only wish that they were quieter. maybe that was just sae’s type.
you’re not sure how you fell into the role of his roommate in the first place; you definitely did not keep up with the rent as dutifully as you should but for some reason he never minded covering the rest of the insane cost. you were just a friend from his youth— not his childhood by any means, in which the sentiment would hold up much better.
no, you met sae when you were seventeen years old. and since then he’s always spoiled you more than words could describe. in return, he comes home from gruelling practices to see your smiling face and the soft way you ask him “how was your day?”
