Death's Monocle's Blog.

Ally as HJ Wingstreet during the talk "I don't need to be exactly where you're at to be supporting you."

Grace: *freaks out*

Hatchling: *starts roasting marshmallows*

having OCs is bourgeois

people who write erotica should be considered sex workers

only americans believe in aliens

it's misogynist to draw touhou characters with big boobs

the "godzilla" franchise is harmful because it teaches children that they should be afraid of lizards and other animals

Their immediate reaction to the lawyers thinking they aren't a liability:

See, every time you harvest something, you take the nutrients in that item away from the soil, and they go somewhere else. When I put a banana peel in my compost bin, I think (a little gleefully) about how I've just added an exotic, different profile of nutrients to my own property--but I also think about that distant banana plantation that lost tons of nutrients per year to US grocery stores, and I wonder what they replaced those nutrients with.

The farmer across my field grows corn, which gets harvested for feed. Corn is a nitrogen-hungry crop. Every year, that corn sucks up nutrients, which get harvested and shipped away. The farmer, being a conventional farmer, mostly replaces those with a conventional fertilizer. Nitrogen is often applied to fields in the form of ammonia fertilizer, which is made via a process that binds nitrogen in the air with hydrogen from natural gas. This feels like a vast resource, but of course we know it's not inexhaustible and not without cost.

Ideally, said farmer does soil tests and applies a carefully considered amount of ammonia. It is taken up by the growing plants and relatively little is lost. Possibly (often), though, some of the ammonia is leached out via rain and ends up in waterways, where it causes plant overgrowth and algal blooms, which harm the waterways in several ways, and turn those nutrients from a resource into a contaminant.

Meanwhile, the corn is also uptaking a variety of other nutrients from the soil which the commercial fertilizer is NOT replacing. Year by year, those nutrients get shipped off to distant feedlots and depleted in the soil. Eventually, those nutrients are gone from my neighbor's field and, quite possibly, languishing in a manure lagoon somewhere in, say, Indiana, where one can only hope it's properly treated and made into compost. But, you know. Not necessarily.

When I buy compost at the store, it's usually based in either cow manure or "forest products". Hopefully, depending on brand, those forest products MIGHT be collected municipal yard waste. Which is pretty good. Those suburbanites don't want their leaves, I do, win/win.

Except that because those suburbanites raked their yard waste, they now need at some point to fertilize their trees, shrubs, and turf grass. Meanwhile, they've eliminated habitat for the many insects that use leaf litter to either overwinter or reproduce. They may not be counting the costs, but the costs don't stop existing.

The ebb and flow of nutrients is something that, in the current system, goes utterly unregarded by most of the people taking part in the process. Even gardeners bring nutrients onto their soils mostly without thinking about the places those nutrients came from. I think in a sustainable world, that needs to change.

Also, notably, nutrient flows don't need to be zero sum. With conventional ag, you farm in a way that's extractive, taking tons of nutrients out of the soil and then you add tons of inputs (fertilizer, trace minerals, other amendments) to try and balance put that extraction. And those come from petrochemicals/ other fucked up extractive supply chains.

But also, plants have rly wild abilities to add nutrients to the soil (generally through mutually beneficial relationships with soil microbes + mycelial networks + the fact that plants can grab nutrients from the air). Ppl talk about this lots with nitrogen fixing but it happens in different ways with tons and tons of different nutrients.

the jacob wysocki tulpa manifesting inside my brain: