Growing Wild

Mangrove forests used to be considered one of the world's most threatened ecosystems. However, recent analysis of satellite data shows that mangrove forests are no longer in decline and in fact the global coverage of mangrove forests has been increasing over the last 16 years due to restoration and natural habitat expansion.

Friends, followers, and Fellow Workers, the Gainesville IWW's beloved union hall, the Civic Media Center, is in need. The Civic Media Center of Gainesville, Florida, provides countless vital community resources, such as:

The Stetson Kennedy Library, a reading room and leftist library that is home to 15,000 books, journals, newspapers, and magazines.

The Travis Fristoe Zine Library, largest independent zine collection in the southeastern United States.

A meeting space for countless local activism and social justice groups such as the IWW, Food Not Bombs, and Books to Prisoners.

The Gainesville Free Store, which was founded to help local transgender people access affirming clothing and toiletries as well as other important items. The Free Store has seen so much success that they've expanded to serve the entire Gainesville community.

The Gainesville Free Grocery Store, which offers no-questions-asked food to anyone who walks in.

A cool, dry place to rest, with an open bathroom frequently used by our unhoused neighbors.

A venue for local musicians and poets to perform, including during the renowned music festival FEST.

So, so much more. Losing this community hub would be an absolutely devastating blow to our town and our union. We cannot let it die.

Via the Civic Media Center's own social media:

Dear friends, please us survive the Summer Doldrums by renewing your membership or, if you can, making an extra donation in whatever amount you can spare to help us cover rent, bills, and some extra work on our facilities this summer. Here is the direct link to the membership & donation page on our website: https://www.civicmediacenter.org/get-involved If you have Venmo or PayPal you can also just make a contribution using the handle in the graphic below. Thank you for supporting the CMC!

This logic extended outward, to neighbours, to the village, to the wider community, for most of human history. The commons wasn’t a formal institution imposed from above, it was the natural shape that cooperation takes when people live closely together and depend on the same land.

Scholars used to assume, following Adam Smith, that before money there was barter, that people traded wheat for shoes and meat for pots in a primitive version of the marketplace. The anthropologist David Graeber spent years looking for ancient evidence of this barter economy and couldn’t find any. No society has ever been documented that organised itself primarily through the exchange of goods between individuals. What actually existed, everywhere, were systems of mutual obligation, gift, and reciprocal support. The shoemaker didn’t trade shoes for wheat, the community fed the shoemaker, and the shoemaker kept everyone’s feet dry. Debts were social rather than financial. Memory and relationship did the work that money later claimed to do.

This matters because the standard story, that markets are natural and ownership is instinctive and competition is the default, is not history. It’s a story told backwards, projecting the assumptions of the present onto a past that worked very differently."

While the focus is often on transportation and energy generation, about one third to one fourth of global carbon emissions come from our food systems. This means that making these systems more efficient, such as by reducing wasting energy on food that never makes it to market, is a big deal--as well as an important economic factors for farmers.

In regions where grid electricity is unreliable or inaccessibly expensive, the lack of access to reliable refrigeration greatly increases the risk that harvested food will spoil before it can reach market. Farmers also have less agency in when and where to sell their food when they have to rush to sell it before it spoils.

Drone incursions are becoming more and more of an issue when it comes to wildfires, so last year I designed these graphics, but I never got around to sharing them anywhere.

If you send your drone up during a wildfire, even if you don't feel like you are that close, all planes and helicopters in the area may have to be grounded which can have a massive and detrimental effect on first responders' ability to manage that fire.

If you send your drone up and a plane or helicopter hits it, no matter how small your drone is, it could crash that aircraft injuring or killing those on board and potentially people on the ground as well. Even if the aircraft stays up, it will have damage that could ground it for an indeterminate and potentially extensive amount of time, meaning one less resource is available for that fire and other fires.

Just don't do it.

These graphics are free to use and distribute for any non-profit uses! You can check out my Payhip store to download (for free, or pay what you want) a package of files that include vertical versions of each design, print sizes, and social media sizes.

I'm obsessed with gardening systems that utilize rainwater without the use of barrels or cisterns. My ultimate fav is using bioswales to catch and filter stormwater on the street.

Fun addition: Dams that utilize trees to catch dirt/ stop erosion, and prevent disaster that can come from broken dams.

SUSTAINABLE URBAN DRAINAGE! SUDS!

We need more of them, in the right places!

Also, using these to reduce stormwater loads in storm events, particularly in places with combined stormwater and sewage systems, could/would be helpful at reducing river discharges of raw sewage. (If climate change is factored in at system level cos more rain in less time needs to be accouted for at rhe large scale designs...)

No! This is a lie! I will copy and paste parts of the article I wrote for the animal sanctuary website.

Raccoon domestication is not happening.

They are adapting to cities, and people are misreading that change in ways that are dangerous for both humans and raccoons.

What Does “Domesticated” Actually Mean?

Before asking whether raccoons are becoming domesticated, it helps to understand what domestication is.

Domestication is not just a species being friendly, tolerating humans, or even showing a group of specific physical characteristics. True domestication is a combination of thousands of years of human-animal interactions based on necessity and within a cultural context, and eventually many, many generations of controlled breeding by people. Over time this produces consistent genetic, behavioral, and physical changes that tie that population to human lifestyles. Dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and even reindeer fit this definition.

A wild animal raised by people, even for several generations, is not automatically a new domesticated species. It is simply a captive population of a wild animal.

Raccoons living in cities are not being purposefully bred by humans. They are not existing as a part of a culture. They are not filling defined roles like guarding, herding, or pulling loads. They are doing what raccoons do best: adapting. (In this case, by exploiting whatever food sources we leave lying around.)

Raccoon Domestication vs Raccoon Habituation

Domestication (as explained above) and habituation are often confused, but they describe two very different processes.

Habituation happens within an individual animal’s lifetime. It occurs when repeated exposure to humans causes a wild animal to lose its natural caution and approach people or human spaces more boldly in search of food. A habituated raccoon may seem friendly because it tolerates human presence, but it is still a wild animal with wild instincts, unpredictable behavior, and no genetic or behavioral changes that make it suited for life as a companion species. Confusing habituation for domestication is dangerous because it encourages people to treat wild animals like pets, often leading to aggression, injury, and long-term harm to the animals themselves.

Begging is not a sign of raccoon domestication, it is a sign of raccoon habituation.

Where did the "Raccoon Domestication" idea come from?

The recent wave of attention surrounding raccoon domestication comes from a study titled Tracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories led by Dr. Raffaela Lesch, an assistant professor of Biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock along with 16 student co-authors, 11 undergraduate students and 5 grad students.

This study measured skulls from urban and rural raccoons and reported that urban raccoons had slightly shorter snouts. The authors linked this to a popular idea called “domestication syndrome,” which claims that domesticated animals tend to share traits such as shorter snouts, floppy ears, lighter coats, and calmer behavior.

That “syndrome” idea largely traces back to a famous fox experiment led by Dmitry Belyaev. For decades, that project has been described as taking wild foxes and, through selection for tameness alone, turning them into foxes with short snouts, floppy ears, curly tails, and very social personalities.

Newer work has shown a different story. The foxes in Belyaev’s experiment were not wild. They came from fur farms on Prince Edward Island in Canada, where they had already been bred for generations in captivity. They were heavily inbred and already showed a lot of the coat colors and ear shapes that later got credited to the “tameness” experiment. In other words, most of the genetic and physical changes happened before the study ever started.

Despite this, the fox experiment is still treated as the main proof that selecting for friendliness causes a predictable package of physical traits. When the raccoon skull study saw shorter snouts in city raccoons, it plugged that single trait into the domestication-syndrome story and jumped to “early domestication.”

Why the Raccoon Domestication Study Is Misleading

The study used 28 rural raccoon skulls and 144 urban skulls. That is a huge imbalance. Many of the “rural” locations were not actually rural at all. For example, downtown Pigeon Forge, Tennessee (a busy tourism area full of hotels, restaurants, and tourist traps) was classified as rural in the dataset, even though anyone who works with raccoons there knows those are city raccoons.

When the exact same measurements from the paper are reassigned using raccoon subspecies ranges and historic skull descriptions, the differences match subspecies far better than “urban vs rural.”

The California raccoon, for instance, shows a skull-to-snout ratio about 5% smaller than other subspecies. The Pacific Northwest and Upper Mississippi Valley raccoons show larger ratios, and that pattern lines up with known dietary differences and skull shapes in those regions. Only about twelve and a half percent of the “urban” raccoons came from the shorter-snout subspecies, but because the dataset is so uneven and there are no California raccoons in the rural group, that subspecies drives the result.

The study also drew heavily from iNaturalist. That platform is fantastic for public participation, but it has a bias: people take pictures of raccoons that are easy to see, usually near homes, campgrounds, parking lots, and city parks. Very few users hike deep into forests at night just to photograph raccoons. So the “urban” sample is large and the “rural” sample is tiny and patchy.

Once all of this is considered, the short snouts look much more like normal subspecies and geographic variation than proof of domestication. City living and diet may influence skull shape a bit, just as they do in urban red foxes, but that is about adaptation to an environment, not the creation of a new domesticated animal.

Are Raccoons Evolving to Look Cuter?

No, raccoon are not evolving to “look cuter.” Some raccoon subspecies just have shorter snouts. Below, you can see historical documentation of skulls belonging to the California raccoon subspecies and the Upper Mississippi Valley raccoon subspecies. The California (Procyon lotor psora) have always had shorter snouts, but not to “look cuter” or because of any supposed raccoon domestication.

Above is the skull of the California subspecies of a common raccoon (Procyon lotor psora), the subspecies with the shortest skull-snout ratio

Above is the skull of the Upper Mississippi Valley subspecies of a common raccoon (Procyon lotor hirtus), the subspecies with one of the longest skull-snout ratio.

Do Shorter Snouts Really Mean Raccoons are Becoming Domesticated?

No. A slightly shorter snout does not mean a raccoon is on a path to becoming a pet.

Urban animals often change in response to new diets. City foxes that eat more garbage and fewer hard-to-chew wild prey have shorter, wider muzzles than foxes in rural areas. Raccoons who rely on restaurant dumpsters and porch handouts are under similar pressure. Their teeth and jaws do not have to work as hard on tough, wild foods, and easier calories can favor different skull shapes.