Growing Wild

It's a program that would probably need to be organized as a group to help disabled people because of the prep involved, but Matthew 25: Ministries does take clean, label- and residue-free pill bottles to reuse by mail. It could be a decent "let's all go to someone's place or a third space that has hot running water pill bottles to soak and then scrub off/wipe while having a (masked?) socializing session and meal afterwards" monthly or quarterly event to catch up with people and process bottles for mailing without having to take it all on alone. It would also cut down on shipping costs and materials if you send one shipment, reuse a box or bag (taping up a paper bag from a grocery store is a good medium-sized option), and use something like Pirate Ship to find the cheapest postage.

Some city recycling programs do take empty pill bottles specifically, but many don't because they're #5 plastic, and are small enough to fall through sorting machines. A city nearby (sadly not where I live) does specifically say that they take them in the recycling bins on their "Accepted for Recycling" webpage; I just had to go through some webpage trees and then open up some drop-down menus to find it.

The "upcycling" solutions don't really work long-term when you have such a buildup of pill bottles that you're never going to use the dozens or hundreds that you accumulate in a year, but it's possible that local creative reuse stores might take the bottles (clean, no identifying information/residue/etc., brings us back to the "having to clean them party"), but personally I'd see if you can find sewers or knitters who need places to store pins, small thread scraps or notions, stitch markers, etc., and need small containers, or specifically upcycling artists in your area who do higher volume material reclamation.

Pictured: Luis Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat. He's photographed at his house, which has a green roof.

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"Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat without overloading electrical grids or spending money on fans and air conditioners. He came across the concept over a decade ago while researching how to make his own home bearable during a particularly scorching summer in Rio.

A method that's been around for thousands of years and that was perfected in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, green roofs weren't uncommon in more affluent neighborhoods when Cassiano first heard about them. But in Rio's more than 1,000 low-income favelas, their high cost and heavy weight meant they weren't even considered a possibility.

That is, until Cassiano decided to team up with a civil engineer who was looking at green roofs as part of his doctoral thesis to figure out a way to make them both safe and affordable for favela residents. Over the next 10 years, his nonprofit was born and green roofs started popping up around the Parque Arará community, on everything from homes and day care centers, to bus stops and food trucks.

When Gomes da Silva heard the story of Teto Verde Favela, he decided then and there that he wanted his home to be the group's next project, not just to cool his own home, but to spread the word to his neighbors about how green roofs could benefit their community and others like it.

Pictured: Jessica Tapre repairs a green roof in a bus stop in Benfica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Relief for a heat island

Like many low-income urban communities, Parque Arará is considered a heat island, an area without greenery that is more likely to suffer from extreme heat. A 2015 study from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro showed a 36-degree difference in land surface temperatures between the city's warmest neighborhoods and nearby vegetated areas. It also found that land surface temperatures in Rio's heat islands had increased by 3 degrees over the previous decade.

That kind of extreme heat can weigh heavily on human health, causing increased rates of dehydration and heat stroke; exacerbating chronic health conditions, like respiratory disorders; impacting brain function; and, ultimately, leading to death.

But with green roofs, less heat is absorbed than with other low-cost roofing materials common in favelas, such as asbestos tiles and corrugated steel sheets, which conduct extreme heat. The sustainable infrastructure also allows for evapotranspiration, a process in which plant roots absorb water and release it as vapor through their leaves, cooling the air in a similar way as sweating does for humans.

The plant-covered roofs can also dampen noise pollution, improve building energy efficiency, prevent flooding by reducing storm water runoff and ease anxiety.

"Just being able to see the greenery is good for mental health," says Marcelo Kozmhinsky, an agronomic engineer in Recife who specializes in sustainable landscaping. "Green roofs have so many positive effects on overall well-being and can be built to so many different specifications. There really are endless possibilities.""

Pictured: Summer heat has been known to melt water tanks during the summer in Rio, which runs from December to March. Pictured is the water tank at Luis Cassiano's house. He covered the tank with bidim, a lightweight material conducive for plantings that will keep things cool.

A lightweight solution

But the several layers required for traditional green roofs — each with its own purpose, like insulation or drainage — can make them quite heavy.

For favelas like Parque Arará, that can be a problem.

"When the elite build, they plan," says Cassiano. "They already consider putting green roofs on new buildings, and old buildings are built to code. But not in the favela. Everything here is low-cost and goes up any way it can."

Without the oversight of engineers or architects, and made with everything from wood scraps and daub, to bricks and cinder blocks, construction in favelas can't necessarily bear the weight of all the layers of a conventional green roof.

That's where the bidim comes in. Lightweight and conducive to plant growth — the roofs are hydroponic, so no soil is needed — it was the perfect material to make green roofs possible in Parque Arará. (Cassiano reiterates that safety comes first with any green roof he helps build. An engineer or architect is always consulted before Teto Verde Favela starts a project.)

And it was cheap. Because of the bidim and the vinyl sheets used as waterproof screening (as opposed to the traditional asphalt blanket), Cassiano's green roofs cost just 5 Brazilian reais, or $1, per square foot. A conventional green roof can cost as much as 53 Brazilian reais, or $11, for the same amount of space.

"It's about making something that has such important health and social benefits possible for everyone," says Ananda Stroke, an environmental engineering student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who volunteers with Teto Verde Favela. "Everyone deserves to have access to green roofs, especially people who live in heat islands. They're the ones who need them the most." ...

It hasn't been long since Cassiano and the volunteers helped put the green roof on his house, but he can already feel the difference. It's similar, says Gomes da Silva, to the green roof-covered moto-taxi stand where he sometimes waits for a ride.

"It used to be unbearable when it was really hot out," he says. "But now it's cool enough that I can relax. Now I can breathe again."

(okay so this is gonna be a long post bc i took and then TAed a class partially about mosses so anybody who doesnt want a moss crash course should start scrolling now)

formally mosses are the only things in the taxonomic division Bryophyta. informally you’ll hear people refer to mosses as well as liverworts (Marchantiophyta) and hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) as ‘bryophytes’, because for a long time the three were all lumped into that division together, and people got used to using the term ‘bryophyte’ interchangeably with ‘nonvascular plant’. 

that term, ‘nonvascular’, is the big distinguisher for these three. basically these plants are very, very ancient lineages, as in liverworts are suspected to be the first plants to crawl out of the primordial ooze, and they don’t have proper, distinguishable vascular tissues (xylem and phloem are the main ones in all vascular ‘higher’ plants that forms the other 99% of the plant kingdom). they have primitive vascular tissues, but they’re not hefty enough to do much in terms of moving water through the plant. their ancestors weren’t able to get very far from the shore of the sea/away from a water source, because they needed to stay wet and depended on water for reproduction. while the latter is still true, modern mosses can be very well adapted to dry areas, and some are able to completely desiccate themselves and go dormant for long periods of time before being revived with the next rain. 

out of this triad of Old Lads, mosses and (leafy) liverworts look the most similar and get mixed up the most (there are ‘leafy’ liverworts and ‘thalloid’ liverworts. thalloid liverworts are wack and do not look like mosses at all). the differences between them are incredibly minute, but (leafy!!) liverworts, to be crude about it, are kind of proto-mosses with simpler physiologies. a common signifier is that leafy liverworts almost never have a costa (a single vein running down the middle of each leaf) and instead have completely smooth leaves, whereas costas are common in mosses. other differences are infuriatingly consequential (’oh, but see this liverwort has a costa but it’s still a liverwort, don’t ask questions’) and honestly i have no idea who decided which plants were leafy liverworts and which plants were mosses, but that’s just me.

i should mention also that mosses, like liverworts, are split into two major groups based on their growth forms: ‘acrocarpous’ mosses are mosses who’s stalks stand straight up, and ‘pleurocarpous’ mosses are mosses who’s stalks crawl along the ground. acrocarpous mosses won’t have branching stalks, whereas pleurocarpous mosses can. an example of an acrocarpous moss is on the left, an example of a pleurocarpous moss is on the right:

mosses do not flower. they reproduce by spores. liverworts and hornworts also reproduce by spores, not flowers. it’s easy to forget that ferns, which are like, THE original Old Lads, are actually younger than these lineages and are considered vascular plants for having more advanced xylems and phloems, and flowers didn’t come for several hundred million years after them. mosses reproduce by producing male and female reproductive organs on the parent plant, with sperm and eggs being produced in each, respectively. the sperm can swim, and fertilize the female eggs, which then sprout while still on the plant into stalks (seta) with capsules on the end. these capsules are full of spores, and when the plant is ready the tip falls off and lets the spores catch the breeze, and hopefully a few will find suitable conditions to sprout into new mosses. the entire cycle looks like this:

okay. habitats. mosses live on such a small scale that it’s best to think of how they live in terms of microhabitats instead of habitats, meaning that like, if you look at a forest from the road, that’s one habitat, but the mosses in that forest are experiencing a ton of microhabitats within that habitat. a moss that grows on the side of the tree will dry out really fast after it rains, so a species that might be more susceptible to overwatering may survive better on a tree trunk than at the base of the tree; both places, although at the same physical location, provide way different conditions and will be favored by different species. 

a moss that grows in a crack on the pavement will probably be absolutely swimming in water when it rains, so it’s probably a species that’s either fine with being submerged (and regularly trampled) or otherwise tolerant of it. a moss growing under a decaying log will have more shelter than others, and will have less airflow and higher humidity. if you’re a moss living on the bark on the side of a stump, and that bark rots enough to one day peel away and fall off, that might be absolutely devastating to you despite only losing like one inch of area, but the newly-exposed rotting hardwood creates a new microhabitat that might be favored by other species. it’s one of those things that you really start to notice once you start thinking about it.

now. i want to end this post with the world’s tallest self-supporting moss. my lichen and bryophyte professor has seen this moss in person and has confirmed it is really just Like That. the moss is the acrocarpus Dawsonia superba, and it’s native to Oceana. the tallest ever found was in Borneo, and was a meter tall. here’s a picture of it by gailtv on iNatrualist, observed december 17th, 2015 in New Zealand:

Chonkers™. now, the largest moss that doesn’t support itself is a pleurocarpous moss-vine, Spiridens reinwardtii, also native to Oceania, which crawls up tree trunks and can grow to a length of 3 meters. here’s one spotted by dantn, also on iNaturalist, observed august 23rd 2006 in northern Indonesia (it’s the one that looks like artificial christmas tree branches. that’s one single moss):

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

I pruned even more today and I have no regrets about it.

There's flowers all over on the cucumber plants, but only one baby cucumber that looks promising. There's hardly any flowers on the tomato plants, and no sign of tomatoes. I have decided to replace the stunted pepper with another tomato plant that I have left over, but I was too tired to switch it out, and I only remembered after I watered the bed.

I'm proud of my pruning of the tomato plants, though. What I can't weave through the netting on the trellis, I snip off, so there won't be any big limbs or tomato bunches pulling the plants down into the center. So far, cutting off leaves 1-2 feet above the ground has been working! I haven't seen much disease on the tomatoes.

I prune the cucumber plants similarly. Both of them are trying to branch out and grab onto the onions, or reach out beyond the bed. Hopefully this will teach them to keep going up the trellis, and not outwards.

There's more flower heads on the mustards. I'm thinking of doing a second sowing next month or so, in hopes of getting more seeds.

Technically, there is one carrot ready to be picked! I didn't take it because I wasn't sure if I uncovered it with the hose or not.

The second squash has finally sprouted. The bean vines are wrapping around the corn stalks nicely. The three sisters are coming along!

I didn't harvest anything today, although I could have taken some dill. I'll wait until Friday to bother the basil and oregano some more.

Instead, I finally made black currant jam from the berries I picked last week! It's actually standing in the water bath right now. The half-jar will go in the fridge once it's cool enough, and I can see if I can stomach it or not.

I also spent time today pruning the black currant bushes at the garden. It was a pain to try to pick berries from branches that were sprawling across the ground. I had to lift the branches up and pick berries off of them. Said sprawling branches were also getting in the way of pathways between garden beds, hiding troublesome weeds, and hiding a small strawberry vine. It was impossible to see into the beds where the bushes originated from.

I took off so many branches (so many ripe berries were sacrificed), but it's easier to walk around the bushes now, and it should be more comfortable to pick berries. There are still so many on the bushes. It's easier to see the base of the bushes and reach into the beds, if needed. There was actually quite a bit of dead branches and rotten berries that needed to be cleared away.

Pretty sure this little one is from the recently hatched robins that had made their nest in the front of the garden - he gets pretty close to me, and will just sort of run around the yard and garden from spot to spot collecting bugs while keeping an eye on me

Pretty sure this little one is from the recently hatched robins that had made their nest in the front of the garden - he gets pretty close to me, and will just sort of run around the yard and garden from spot to spot collecting bugs while keeping an eye on me

Pretty sure this little one is from the recently hatched robins that had made their nest in the front of the garden - he gets pretty close to me, and will just sort of run around the yard and garden from spot to spot collecting bugs while keeping an eye on me

Also the further you move toward the poles the more pronounced the difference between the length of day and night is. Worst part of a far-north (or south) heatwave is it doesn’t get dark long enough for meaningful cooling.

Infrastructure and citified heat islands also very much play a factor. And here the angle you’re at on earth also makes it worse. The sun being lower on the horizon can double the amount of solar energy affecting your house. The sun beating through your windows for 16+ hours a day when you have a house built for cold and no AC adds to the misery.

But what I’m talking about here is how hot you feel in your body when experiencing solar radiation from a lower angle. On the upside the sun’s rays have to pass through more atmosphere, weakening the UV strength, hence why populations that migrated north eons ago lost melanin (you still need SPF though). And in general the warming effect on the atmosphere is lessened. The warming effect on your body is magnified. To the tune of 10-20 degrees (yes Fahrenheit) above ambient. Winter gear prioritizes insulating your torso because that’s where all your vital organs are. It follows that the sun beating on your chest and back warms you up fast and with little relief except to get in the shade.

My eye doctor also told me living in Alaska made you more likely to get cataracts younger because the low-angle sun gets directly in your eyes in the summer (unless you’re big on sunglasses) and the snow and ice in winter reflect a lot of UV back up, doubling your exposure. Though the prevalence of cataracts in Alaska and other far-north locales is contributed to by other factors, notably poverty and the resulting lack of medical care. And is still not as likely as in people who live in equatorial climes or high altitudes and get the super-strength UV exposure all year round.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.