Dear Monday

Two screenshots of Tia Mason (Instagram linked here, Facebook linked here). Tia is wearing a knitted beanie, with sunglasses, dreadlocks and nose piercings, and is speaking outdoors against a background of forest greenery, smiling while saying:

Trying again is an act of rebellion. Never trying is an act of submission.

End ID.]

We barely know anything about Madagascar pre-500CE. We don’t even know whether the island had a permanent population before then, despite finding a bunch of much older signs of temporary human presence.

Malagasy mythology makes mention of the vazimba, a “precursor” ethnic group that might or might not be distinct from Madagascar’s current population.

The point is, we do not know.

So you were in Madagascar when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, i.e. during one of the most obscure, most undocumented parts of Madagascar’s human history?

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.

It was shocking to me to grow up and realize how few old-growth forests are left. It was very easy for me to feel like there are no truly natural places anymore outside these few protected parks, and that was depressing to my forest-loving self.

The main issue with the wood for rebuilding Notre Dame is that it needs to be green oak and the beams need to grow straight. This significantly narrows down the choice of trees that can be cut. When the cathedral was first built, it took a whole century (97 years, from 1163-1260). Building methods were much slower than today, so the current reconstructors are processing wood for it much faster than when it was originally built, which means less time for other trees to grow in their place and a more significant impact on the environment.

The carpenters helping with this process have been participating in the experimental archaeology project of Gueleon Castle, and are approaching Notre Dame repairs the same way as the original builders, with 13th century techniques. Why is this significant? Here, from the article linked:

“After the fire, there were a lot of people saying it would take thousands of trees, and we didn’t have enough of the right ones, and the wood would have to be dried for years, and nobody even knew anything about how to produce beams like they did in the Middle Ages. They said it was impossible. “But we knew it could be done because Guédelon has been doing it for years.” . . . Florian Renucci, the Guédelon site manager and a philosopher turned master mason, has already been asked to oversee training of artisans expected to work on Notre Dame.

“All we heard over and again after Notre Dame burned was that it was not possible to reconstruct the roof as before. There was no wood, no savoir faire – it was an argument used by those who wanted to modernise. We showed that it can be done and we know how to do it,” he says.

Épaud is on the scientific committee at Guédelon and the committee overseeing the reconstruction of Notre Dame, as well as a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France’s national research body. He says that going back to build the future is not just nostalgia.

“I have studied the 13th-century technique for many years and, if we respect the internal form of the tree, the beams will last for 800 years. Guédelon is the only place in France, and I believe in Europe, where they build this kind of roof structure in wood. All those who didn’t think it was possible didn’t know about Guédelon.”

The issue with Notre Dame was not that there was no wood, but that there was no wood in France that met modern repair designs. The original builders used wood that was locally available, which there is still plenty of. So this isn't necessarily a conservation issue, but an issue of modern architects not considering how to use what's local and sustainable instead of demanding that nature provide for their invented needs.

This doesn't mean that there is no environmental issue, because like I said, the current reconstruction is going through trees at a faster rate than the original due to the speed of their work. But they're using the same kinds of trees as they did in the 12th and 13th centuries.

This means it's more likely that the main problem at the root of the tweet in OP's post is that what they learned in archaeology class seems to be outdated and from before the experts at Guedelon got involved in the process. It's unclear if "Trey the Explainer" is a current archaeology student or if they're referring to something they learned several years ago that is no longer accurate or fully informed. Their bio states they're "A W-Grade Internet Celebrity whose main goal is sharing information about paleontology, biology, anthropology, history, and science. I make Youtube videos" which, frankly, doesn't mean any of their posts researched or verified. I'm also enthusiastic about history and post about it online sometimes, but as you can see I link articles and references because 1. I'm not an expert 2. if I was, then I'd be linking even more sources.

The photo that the tweet was retweeting, meanwhile, is of a felled giant Sequoia tree from c. 1910 cited as being in the collection of the Library of Congress on Wikimedia Commons. Sequoias grow in California, which is where that photo was taken. This image has nothing to do with the trees originally used to build the Notre Dame cathedral in France in the 12th and 13th centuries, it's just meant to illustrate the OP tweet's point (inaccurately) and evoke a reaction.

But Wentworth is only able to fully enjoy it for like A DAY before he starts realizing how terrible it is. He watches Anne suffer in silence and he hates it. He watches her being treated like an inconvenience and a joke and a piece of furniture and he hates it. He hears sneering comments at her expense and he hates it. He spends evening after evening in her company, where he is celebrated as a handsome, dashing hero while she is shoved to the side and ignored and he hates it.

He probably spent a lot of heartbroken hours out on the sea wishing revenge on her (like ten years’ worth), but then he gets to see it happening and revenge turns out not to be that sweet after all. He probably thought “I hope she never gets married to anyone else and she has to spend the rest of her miserable life with her miserable family, listening to them talk about nothing and regretting ever letting me go.” But then he has to watch her live through it, and it is just excruciating. Watching her bite her tongue. Watching her keep her eyes down on her clasped hands. Watching her silently accept everything as if she deserves it.

He’s like, “YES, it’s all HAPPENING! She’s all ALONE and PALE and OLD and…sad. And her family treats her terribly, and she’s— no one is talking to her. No one even knows that she’s funny and smart, they just— they just make her sit in the corner. She’s hardly eating anything. And she really isn’t that old, but they are acting like she’s dead? Her family is even worse than they used to be, how is that even possible? Why isn’t anyone helping her? Why is she the only person taking care of anyone? Why isn’t anyone taking care of her?”