I live in a city, but I'll share some programs that/organizers who may provide some inspiration:
BMORE Beautiful - provides trash picking kits and helps residents organize cleanups in their neighborhood. They were incredibly friendly, so might be worth reaching out on how to build a similar program in your area
Weed Warriors - trains participants to recognize and remove common invasive plants, provides training for participants on how to organize efforts in their communities
Community gardening - this video is from an animal liberation podcast, but the guest's opening story of being completely ignorant about gardening but doing it anyway is inspiring. The remainder is about their work on food justice and grassroots organizing
Compost collective - this is the podcast of the guest in the previous video. They interview the founder of Baltimore Compost Collective who works with youth in the city
Guerrilla gardening - this is a classic TED Talk. The speaker discusses growing food in a public space and how they successfully fought their city to keep their garden. They also talk about their volunteer gardening group, planting food gardens at homeless shelters
Maryland Food & Abolition Project - may no longer be active, but an interesting idea nonetheless. Their mission was (is?) to partner community gardens with prisons to provide fresh produce
Echoing @poVoq, don't discount seniors! I used to be a case manager for the elderly and many are more interested than people give them credit for.
Did you know they're edible? I found out from this video last week, but it seems like a lot of work.
National Archives Identifier: 24376 Local Identifier: 111-EF-6 https://catalog.archives.gov/id/24376
Creator(s): Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. (9/18/1947 - 3/1/1964) (Most Recent)
From: Series: Educational Films, 1942 - 1947
Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 - 1985
This item was produced or created: 1945
Other Title(s):Educational Film, no. 6
Scope & Content: Dramatizes the destructive effects of racial and religious prejudice. Reel 1 shows a fake wrestling match and "crooked" gambling games. An agitator addresses a street crowd; he almost convinces one man in the audience until the man begins to talk to a Hungarian refugee from Germany. A Nazi speaker harangues a crowd in Germany denouncing Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons. Reel 2, a German unemployed worker joins Hitler's Storm Troops. SS men attack Jewish and Catholic headquarters in Germany, and beat up a Jewish storekeeper. A German teacher explains Nazi racial theories; the teacher is dragged away by German soldiers.
Anna Souter visits Embodied Forms: Painting Now, exploring whether art might dissolve the boundaries between the mind and body to better know the climate
>In Western thought, the apparently immaterial ‘rational mind’ has long been isolated from, and elevated above, other ways of knowing and being. Anna Souter visits Embodied Forms: Painting Now, an exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac, to explore the possibility that art might be able to help us dissolve these boundaries, opening the doors to new ways of coming to know the climate.
Awesome resource :) I've been looking into soft landings too! Nearby me, there's a corp owned commercial lot that's been vacant for years, bare-bones maintenance. The street trees out front are Callery pear, which I can't do anything about, but the ground under them isn't tended.
There's also two very sad trees in the middle of the parking lot and one empty tree well (which recently inspired me to rewatch this video lol).
This was planted in fall 2022 and bloomed for the first time this summer, so no idea. I'm in the Chesapeake Bay area and it's been pretty warm down here.
You grow them too, right? Have you ever seen/heard of them doing this before?
Thanks! They smell great, too, but it was too windy to get a whiff :(
Your point at the end is crucial. I heard a local story about a bunch of people rolling up in a neighborhood, planting trees, never to be seen or heard from again :( Kinda gross and presumptive.
>Counteract the Bleakness of the Modern Urban Environment of rampant homelessness and over-priced housing by propagating and planting trees in neglected urban spaces. Tony Santoro shows you how with help from the Department of Unauthorized Forestry.
The link in the post body has some tips on how to do so responsibly. Might be worth sharing with your neighbors!
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation: Leave the Leaves!
>Leaves are not litter > >They're food and shelter for butterflies, beetles, bees, moths, and more. Tell friends and neighbors to just #leavetheleaves
Wow, same here! I hadn't watched the show either and that clip had me blubbering.
Vincent van Gogh since seeing his Sunflowers 🌻 series in 3rd grade art class, especially after learning in my 20s that we share migraine disease. Louis Wain is a close second with "Cat's Nightmare" (my profile picture) being one of my faves.
Also, I went down a 90s kid nostalgia trip recently and watched some FernGully clips. Anyone remember that movie, specifically Batty's rap? It was about vivisection 🤯 I was tempted to post it in the music community lol.
Written information from Europeans goes back four centuries, like the account from the 1600s about cultivated food forests. The archeological finds about consumption in general are much older.
We (erroneously) may think of them as new, but the Wabanaki and other Native Americans regularly made and ate these products.
>Plenty of scholars have described nuts as a crucial food source for the Wabanaki people, and early colonial records indicate the same. In 1607, colonists from the Popham Colony described the Casco Bay islands as “overgrown with woods very thick as oaks, walnut, pine trees & many other things growing as sarsaparilla, hazle nuts & whorts in abundance.” > >Ethnobotanist Nancy Asch Sidell documents that charred beechnut remains that are more than 5,000 years old have been discovered “preserved in a hearth feature” in central Maine. At the archaelogical site on the well-documented Norridgewock village on the Kennebec River – a Wabanaki town destroyed by the British in 1724 – researchers have recovered evidence of hazelnut and beechnut consumption, Sidell reports. > >“The use and importance of nuts is as ancient as the people themselves,” Kavasch told me. “The trees they come from were so sacred and important. But many of our European ancestors couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They weren’t thinking of it as a nut forest.”
Also in Baltimore, home of Vegan SoulFest!
Food is culture 💚 and the vegan food here feels like Baltimore. It's awesome that other cities are doing the same.
View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/4-421JS13 Instructor: Julian Beinart This collection includes twenty-six lectures, including presentation of sli...
Institution: MIT
Lecturer: Julian Beinart
University Course Code: 4.241J
Subject: #architecture #urbanstudies #finearts #socialscience
Year: Spring 2013
Description: This course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.
Course materials can be found on the MIT OpenCourseWare website.
On the post image, Knowing Animals Podcast: Episode 58: Animal Rights in Palestine and Israel with Esther Alloun
This episode of Knowing Animals features Esther Alloun from the University of Wollongong. We discuss her article ‘’That’s the beauty of it, it’s very simple!’ Animal rights and settler colonialism in Palestine–Israel’ which appeared in the journal Settler Colonial Studies in December 2017.
Source with pictures of example soft landing gardens, plant lists tailored to the North American Eastern Temperate Forests can be found:
https://www.pollinatorsnativeplants.com/softlandings.html
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Oaks are universally the top keystone trees that support moths and butterflies. Across the United States, more than 940 types of caterpillars feed on oaks (Quercus).
Top genera: Oak, Willow, Cherry, Pines, Poplar
Lepidoptera in image: Great oak dagger moth, Luna moth, Red-banded hairstreak, Eastern buck moth
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Many of the moths and butterflies that feed on oak trees must complete their life cycles in the duff and leaf litter (i.e., soft landings) near or beneath the tree, or below ground.
Lepidoptera in image: Blinded sphinx moth, Juvenal's duskywing, Hog moth
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Creating soft landings under the dripline of oaks (as well as any other tree) invites all kinds of beneficial insects to complete their life cycles in your yard.
A number of beneficial insects such as fireflies, bumble bees, beetles, and lacewings need soft landings to survive.
Lepidoptera in image: Edwards hairstreak, Skiff moth, Pink-striped oakworm
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Planting intentional soft landings under keystone trees builds healthy soil, provides food for songbirds and pollinators, sequesters more carbon than turf grass, and reduces time spent mowing.
Other ways to support insects that spend a phase of their life cycle beneath trees include eliminating landscape fabric and decreasing mowing to reduce soil compaction.
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DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE THE LEAVES UNDER YOUR TREES!
>Over the centuries, physicians have placed migraine in various positions along the mind / body spectrum. Headache experts currently consider migraine a somatic disorder rooted in the brain. But this is a break from the past. Up until thirty years ago, doctors primarily viewed migraine as having both a psychological and a somatic basis. In what follows, I trace these historical understandings of migraine from the nineteenth-century understanding of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectuals, to the influential concept of the “migraine personality” in mid-twentieth-century America, and finally to contemporary theories of comorbidity.
[...]
>I pay close attention to how, at each historical turn, biomedical discourses come to enact and reinforce cultural narratives about gender, class, and pain via the encoded inclusion of moral character. After all, the credibility and the legitimacy of a disorder — and how much we, as a society, choose to invest in its treatment — is intimately tied to how we perceive the moral character of the patient.
Mr. Trash Wheel is pretty cool:
>FreeSewing is open source software to generate bespoke sewing patterns, loved by home sewers and fashion entrepreneurs alike.
Mastodon instance: FreeSewing.social
I've read that in the southeastern states, Spanish moss was used like wool, also for thread and upholstery. But it doesn't get nearly as cold down there 😆
I've seen folks online use Virginia creeper and pokeberry to dye fabrics, a soft green and vibrant purple respectively. I'd love to take a crack at them on cotton, maybe even a natural tie dye!
The US Forest Service has a chart with plants and their corresponding colors. I wonder if there's a dye community on lemmy 🤔
Dang, the goblin in me wanted some for my collection 😅 I bet they look awesome during a breeze.
Beautiful 🧙♀️ I love the naturalized look, so much texture!
What's the tall purple flower in the second pic?
From May 2023 in Reuters: Some 25 types of mammals died in latest bird flu outbreak
With the increased interest in upcycling, visible mending has become a popular way to avoid sending worn or torn items to a landfill. There are many ways to incorporate visible mending into your own life, and just as many crafting techniques can be used to fix snags, holes, and even cover up stains ...
Huffin' the flowers has been a huge stress relief here in the Southeastern USA Plains.
The shrub on the right is buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis). Flowers are: orange coneflower (Rudbeckia 'goldsturm'), sweet Joe-Pye (Eutrochium purpureum), anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), pokeberry (Phytolacca americana), and catmint (Nepeta × faassenii).
Closer to the ground there's: wood sorrel (Oxalis sp.), three seeded mercury (Acalypha rhomboidea) and blue violets (Viola sororia). The empty space has wild stawberry (Fragaria virginiana) slowly creeping and a young little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium).
The image below shows the opening of the rain garden where the runoff enters. Plants are 4 - 5 inches max. Here there's: Virginia pepper (Lepidium virginicum), blue violet (Viola sororia), wood sorrel (Oxalis sp.), nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi), prostrate spurge? (Euphorbia sp.).
Also seen: white clover, creeping cinquefoil, and Bermuda grass.
Dan Fischer Let Nature Play A Possible Pathway of Total Liberation and Earth Restoration April 2022
>In short, this is a proposal for an abolition of compulsory work for all beings. It involves rewilding at least 75% of the Earth with guidance from local and Indigenous communities, and ensuring that the remainder of the planet “abolish[es] the wage system, and live[s] in harmony with the Earth” as proposed by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (2021).
"Tarot & Acid Communism" Live at Tenderbooks in London >The launch party for 'The Philosopher's Tarot' at Tenderbooks in London on November 23, 2022. > >Acid Horizon's first live event extends Mark Fisher's concept of 'acid communism' through prominent figures featured in the work of the podcast.
