Krogasaurus Rex

I don’t support terfs or exclusionists.

"In Northern California, a Native American tribe is celebrating the return of ancestral lands in one of the largest such transfers in the nation’s history.

Through a Dept. of the Interior initiative aiming to bring indigenous knowledge back into land management, 76 square miles east of the central stretch of the Klamath River has been returned to the Yurok tribe.

Sandwiched between the newly-freed Klamath and forested hillsides of evergreens, redwoods, and cottonwoods, Blue Creek is considered the crown jewel of these lands, though if it were a jewel it wouldn’t be blue, it would be a giant colorless diamond, such is the clarity of the water.

Pictured: Blue Creek

It’s the most important cold-water tributary of the Klamath River, and critical habitat for coho and Chinook salmon. Fished and hunted on since time immemorial by the Yurok and their ancestors, the land was taken from them during the gold rush before eventually being bought by timber companies.

Barry McCovey Jr., director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, remembers slipping past gates and dodging security along Blue Creek just to fish up a steelhead, one of three game fish that populate the river and need it to spawn.

Profiled along with the efforts of his tribe to secure the land for themselves and their posterity, he spoke to AP about the experience of seeing plans, made a decade ago, come to fruition, and returning to the creek on which he formerly trespassed as a land and fisheries manager.

“To go from when I was a kid and 20 years ago even, from being afraid to go out there to having it be back in tribal hands … is incredible,” he said.

Part of the agreement is that the Yurok Tribe would manage the land to a state of maximum health and resilience, and for that the tribe has big plans, including restoring native prairie, using fire to control understory growth, removing invasive species, restoring native fish habitat, and undoing decades of land-use changes from the logging industry in the form of culverts and logging roads.

“And maybe all that’s not going to be done in my lifetime,” said McCovey. “But that’s fine, because I’m not doing this for myself.”

The Yurok Tribe were recently at the center of the nation’s largest dam removal, a two decades-long campaign to remove a series of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River. Once the West Coast’s third-largest salmon run, the Klamath dams substantially reduced salmon activity.

Completed last September, the before and after photographs are stunning to witness. By late November, salmon had already returned far upriver to spawn, proving that instinctual information had remained intact even after a century of disconnect.

Pictured; Klamath River flows freely, after Copco-2 dam was removed in California

“Seeing salmon spawning above the former dams fills my heart,” said Joseph L. James, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, the leaders of the dam removal campaign along with the Karuk and Klamath tribes.

“Our salmon are coming home. Klamath Basin tribes fought for decades to make this day a reality because our future generations deserve to inherit a healthier river from the headwaters to the sea.”

Last March, GNN reported that the Yurok Tribe had also become the first of America’s tribal nations to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding involving Redwoods National Park.

The nonprofit Save the Redwoods bought a piece of land adjacent to the park, which receives 1 million visitors annually and is a UNESCO Natural Heritage Site, and handed it over to the Yurok for stewardship.

The piece of land, which contained giant redwoods, recovered to such an extent that the NPS has incorporated it into the Redwoods trail network, and the two agencies will cooperate in ensuring mutual flourishing between two properties and one ecosystem.

Back at Blue Creek, AP reports that work has already begun clearing non-native conifer trees planted for lumber. The trunks will be used to create log jams in the creek for wildlife habitat.

Costing $56 million, the land was bought from the loggers by Western Rivers Conservancy, using a mixture of fundraising efforts including private capital, low interest loans, tax credits, public grants and carbon credit sales.

The sale was part of a movement called Land Back, which involves returning ownership of once-native lands of great importance to tribes for the sake of effective stewardship. [Note: This is a weirdly limited definition of Land Back. Land Back means RETURN STOLEN LAND, PERIOD.] Studies have shown around the tropics that indigenous-owned lands in protected areas have higher forest integrity and biodiversity than those owned by national governments.

Land Back has seen 4,700 square miles—equivalent to one and a half-times the size of Yellowstone National Park—returned to tribes through land buy-back agreements in 15 states." [Note: Since land buyback agreements aren't the only form of Land Back, the total is probably (hopefully) more than that.]

i did see some users in the notes who were concerned about her looking 'scrawny', or wondering if she's maybe a juvenile -- far from it! at 15, joanne is very much considered a geriatric tiger; she's a grandma. she is, however, a sumatran tiger (panthera tigris sumatrae) -- sumatrans are the smallest extant subspecies of tiger, built more for the sweltering jungles of sumatra than the blistering cold of the amur river or the dense forests and mangrove swamps of south asia.

average Daine problem: the forest 😐

average Kel problem: They Are Killing The Children

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don’t, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward “will people actually do this”?

Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70’s.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there’s a lot of social pressure to do it – but the social pressure wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn’t recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don’t recycle.

Okay doesn’t technically fit in the timeline since Ilya would be with the Centaurs but I didn’t want to make up my own Centaurs jersey LOL

Sorry for the obnoxious watermark but I saw an A*I scam bot stole my work so now I gotta do this