no such thing as a bad abyss

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

Personally, if the native species don't have enough food to feed on in the wild, to me that would be a better standard to measure the economic viability of harvesting lichen for other purposes with.

Yeah. Harvesting this stuff on industrial scale to be sold for arts and crafts is not acceptable.

One of these shops (with thousands of sales!) is selling BIRD FEATHERS

That is a FEDERAL CRIME

I'm not a snitch, but this shop I'm talking about is selling ORCHIDS. Uprooted, clearly pulled up from the wild, for people's terrariums. And slow-growing lichens. And mosses.

And they have thousands of sales.

One of their items includes bird feathers in the photos. In the USA even possessing the feathers of any wild bird, let alone selling them, is illegal.

I'm looking through etsy shops for anything that appears obviously poached/illegal.

There are so, so, so many listings of Usnea (old man's beard lichen) as a medicinal herb. And other lichens. I found someone selling PULMONARIA LOBATA of all things.

I'm thinking about how I can recognize when a plant is probably poached from Appalachia, but I can't recognize a plant that is probably poached from a faraway place.

This is going to sound crazy, but I sort of hate the houseplant business.

I don't hate houseplants as a concept. But a lot of house plants are tropical plants, desert plants, epiphytic plants, and other plants with narrow habitat requirements, and it creates a HUGE market for these plants in areas the plants don't live.

Not all of them are poached, but outside of a few very widely cultivated species, how do I know, especially if I don't know anything about the plant's native ecosystem?

Cacti, succulents, carnivorous plants, and orchids are all threatened by poaching. Even species that are cultivated in nurseries are heavily poached. And someone buying from California doesn't necessarily know that those "wild-collected" Goodyera pubescens from Kentucky are scarce enough that seeing dozens of them being sold on Etsy is a major red flag.

People think "oh, if it was illegal it would have been shut down/it wouldn't be for sale still". WRONG. There's tons of illegal plant, animal, and fungi remains for sale, often on cutesy websites like Etsy. It's especially rampant in the "gothic" aesthetic, which places great value on bones and real animal remains:

It shouldn't be up to you, the consumer, to do all the research and track down every bit of information to make sure what they're buying is actually respectfully and sustainably sourced, but often, it is, because it's really hard to regulate and track Internet-based businesses.

"It's just a few plants, it doesn't matter" - yes, it does. If it were only one person, I might understand, but the whole thing about businesses and capitalism is that they have a never-ending need, an infinite demand.

As a conservation ecology student I am begging people to think twice when you see this kind of thing. Don't take sellers at their word, and if they act cagey or give you non-answers or vague assurances, STOP and LEAVE. Better yet, report them. Take screenshots in case listings and pages get taken down, and report them to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or the appropriate equivalent in your country - just google "(your area) report poaching". The US Fish and Wildlife Service has an online form, below:

Like, teenagers are daydreaming about One Direction? Of course they are--1D was the most successful boy band of the 2010s, and providing a vessel through which young girls can examine their own developing sexuality is (if viewed as positively as possible) what boy bands are for. And teenagers are daydreaming about being sold to hot boys against their will? Sure; the bodice ripper is a very old sub-genre, the appeal of which has been explained many times, and whcih isn't likely to go away any time soon. The thing that makes this weird is the fact that so many teenagers apparently looked at the squeaky-clean, clean-shaven, J-Crew-and-Hollister-clad young men on their bedroom posters and thought "Yeah, these guys look like they could be doing human trafficking. I don't feel the need to spend any time or worldbuilding justifying this to my audience."

Even if you don’t understand Spanish do give it a look please, very interesting stuff, you’re sure to find something interesting across his 1000+ videos.

"our great grandmas fed their entire families with their knowledge. they didn't need the government telling them how to do it."

great grandma also lost babies for want of vitamin k shots and antibiotics and would have had fewer babies to start with if she'd had the option to access birth control.

great grandma did the best with what she had and knew.

why can't we do the same 😭😭

edit after

@princessxombie an excellent point!

the reason for a preference of bottled lemon juice over fresh squeezed for canning (as reported through the Iowa State University Extension and Outreach): "It is a USDA recommendation that bottled lemon juice be used.  And consistent with the recommendation, reputable canning sources will agree that the best source of lemon juice for canning is commercially bottled lemon juice, as opposed to the juice of a fresh lemon. The reason for the recommendation is that bottled lemon juice has been uniformly acidified or standardized per FDA regulations: “lemon juice prepared from concentrate must have a titratable acidity content of not less than 4.5 percent, by weight, calculated as anhydrous citrus acid.” With a guaranteed pH...there is a consistent and known acid level which is essential for the critical safety margin in canning low-acid foods and for making jams gel properly. "

as for resources:

the usda guide to canning (revised in 2015). you used to be able to find it on the usda website but for SOME reason (two guesses as to why 🙄) that website is now routing to a broken error 404 page not found. fortunately, it's available other places! here it is hosted on the internet archive! if you want it printed in color and spiral-bound, you can also purchase it for $25 from perdue university.

if you want more resources, the university of utah has a whole section of their preserve the harvest extension website dedicated to safe food storage practices including freeze drying, fermenting, drying, etc.

ball (the mason jar company) also has a section of their website dedicated to canning 101, including the basic process, recipes, a glossary of terms, and videos for their tutorials if you're a visual learner. they also offer free online recipes broken down in a way that's meant to be easy even for new canners.

yes! an excellent thing to point out!

as reported through michigan state university: "The acidity of a tomato is considered borderline between a high- and low-acid food. Tomato varieties have been changed through the years and as a result, many now have milder flavor and lower acidity than in the past. Testing has shown that some current tomato varieties have pH values at or above pH 4.6; a few have values of pH 5 or even higher."

for reference (thank you, university of georgia): "The bacteria that cause botulism poisoning can grow and produce toxin in sealed jars of moist food at room temperature if the pH (measure of acidity) is above 4.6."

Anyway.

It has been very pleasant out. We had the windows cracked and left them cracked when we went to work. This has never been an issue before.

My darling spouse was working on a job in a small town about a mile from our place. He was getting some stuff from the work van when he sees a large white dog prancing along.

"Huh." He thinks. "That looks an awful lot like.....TYR WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE."

Tyr, delighted that she has Found Father, bounds up happily and gets in the work van to give face kisses.

"GIRL NO WHAT." Kev says, scrambling to go let the client know that he has to take the fucking criminal back home real quick.

Turns out she discovered that a window can be shoved open with a determined snoot, and a window screen is not as strong as 80 pounds of muscular dog. And went for an adventure.

I got a call at this point while I was doing payroll.

"BABE WE NEED TO BABY GATE ALL THE FUCKING WINDOWS." My spouse says.

"....okay??" I say, and then get the story. I swore a bunch.

I think this exchange gets overlooked a lot because it happens right before the big climax, but I think it shows the basic principle of the book boiled down to its most essential core. The importants of humanity and view people as people.

"Think logically, will you?" he said. "You're a philosopher, aren't you? Look at the crowd!" Urn looked at the crowd. "Well?" "They don't like it,." Simony turned. "Look, Brutha's going to die anyway. But this way it'll mean something. People don't understand, really understand, about the shape of the universe and all that stuff, but they'll remember what Vorbis did to a man. Right? We can make Brutha's death a symbol for people, don't you see?" Urn stared at the distant figure of Brutha. It was naked, except for a loin-cloth. "A symbol?" he said. His throat was dry. "It has to be." He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they'd left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you'd go mad. "You know," he said, turning to Simony. "Now I know Vorbis is evil. He burned my city. Well, the Tsorteans do it sometimes, and we burn theirs. It's just war. It's all part of history. And he lies and cheats and claws power for himself, and lots of people do that, too. But do you know what's special? Do you know what it is?" "Of course," said Simony. "It's what he's doing to-” "It's what he's done to you." "What?" "He turns other people into copies of himself." Simony's grip was like a vice. "You're saying I'm like him?" "Once you said you'd cut him down," said Urn. "Now you're thinking like him . . . "So we rush them, then?" said Simony. "I'm sure of-maybe four hundred on our side. So I give the signal and a few hundred of us attack thousands of them? And he dies anyway and we die too? What difference does that make?" Urn's face was gray with horror now. "You mean you don't know?" he said. Some of the crowd looked round curiously at him. "You don't know?" he said.

This is such a profoundly important part of the message of small gods, it's what makes Vorbis that monster that he is and what makes Brutha the man that he is.

The thing that Simony cannot understand, and that Vorbis never did is summed up best by granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum

'There's no greys, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, iswhen you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.' 'It's a lot more complicated than that-' 'No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.'

Simony just sees Brutha as a martyr, a tool to strenghten his rebellion and rally around, he's not seeing the person bound on the burning turtle, just how he can use its ashes.

Vorbis always thought like this, in fact he never saw people at all, his mind was never open to a single other person, he was the very embodiment of sin as viewed by granny, he never saw a single person as a person, only ever as a thing.

"So," said Vorbis. "The desert. And at the end of the desert?" JUDGEMENT. "Yes, yes, of course." Vorbis tried to concentrate. He couldn't. He could feel certainty draining away. And he'd always been certain. He hesitated, like a man opening a door to a familiar room and finding nothing there but a bottomless pit. The memories were still there. He could feel them. They had the right shape. It was just that he couldn't remember what they were. There had been a voice . . . . Surely, there had been a voice? But all he could remember was the sound of his own thoughts, bouncing off the inside of his own head. Now he had to cross the desert. What could there be to fear? The desert was what you believed. Vorbis looked inside himself. And went on looking. He sagged to his knees. I CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE BUSY, said Death. "Don't leave me! It's so empty!" Death looked around at the endless desert. He snapped his fingers and a large white horse trotted up. I SEE A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, he said, swinging himself into the saddle. "Where? Where?" HERE. WITH YOU. "I can't see them!" Death gathered up the reins. NEVERTHELESS, he said. His horse trotted forward a few steps. "I don't understand!" screamed Vorbis. Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE? "Yes. Yes, of course." Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

The fact that the desert is empty for him because, even when he was alive he never saw the people infront of him so how could he now? He never listend, never learned, never took in the perspective of anyone else, just had his own thoughts echoing inside him.

"You are my soulmate. We are forged together by battle and tears and love. Also my brother's coming along."

"Isn't it weird that your brother in law is always hanging around?"

texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.

the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.

the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).

well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).

every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.

now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.

Because the surest way to avoid platforming, reblogging, or encouraging AI art posting is to know where every image you share originated and that's 1) boring, tedious research and 2) extremely limiting in what you feel you can reblog. But if unattributed images never gets traction, people will start attributing their images.

I've been guilty of this in the past, but for a while now it's been my policy that if I can't verify the origin, I don't share the image. That goes for stuff like screen grabs of headlines too -- more than once I've avoided spreading misinformation by saving a post to research before I reblog, then seeing the post refuted before I've been able to verify it.

And I usually try to attribute photos I take -- case in point, the "woman with shrimp" post gets a lot of attention but not one comment about it being AI, despite it being pretty similar to something you'd get from an AI. That's because I clearly state it's in a museum and link to its catalogue page.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.