plant and ecosystems nerd

Excerpt from this story from Yale Climate Connections:

Those who deny or dismiss U.S. climate change have hit a Waterloo moment of sorts. The nation just experienced its hottest month in more than 130 years of analysis, which breaks a record that had stood since the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s. For the 48 contiguous states, the July 2026 average of 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) came in 0.12°F (0.07°C) above the value from July 1936. This makes last month the hottest calendar month in national data going back to January 1895.

Remarkably, the contiguous U.S. average temperature was also the hottest on record for the past six months (February-July 2026), and for the past 12-, 18-, 24-, 36-, 48-, and 60-month periods, as depicted in the Climate at a Glance plotting tool from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. The year to date (January-July) is the second-hottest on record nationally.

The sheer breadth of the 48-state heat for July was especially shocking. Only one U.S. state, Wyoming, had its hottest July on record, but nine other states had a top-10 hottest July, and every one of the contiguous states was warmer than average. Though not included in the contiguous U.S. report, Alaska had its 20th-coldest July on record and its 30th-coldest January-to-July period.

There’s no denying the scorching conditions of the 1930s Dust Bowl. An impressive 24 of the 48 contiguous U.S. states have yet to exceed the single hottest readings observed in each of those states during the 1930s.

However, the Dust Bowl has been misused for years in climate-denial writing and speaking to argue that human activity isn’t warming the nation’s climate to any great degree. In fact, human influence played a vast part in the Dust Bowl itself. Decades of overplowing by European settlers in the Plains and Midwest – in the erroneous belief that “rain follows the plow” – left the landscape vulnerable when a sequence of multi-year droughts struck. Huge volumes of topsoil simply blew away, and the denuded land heated up far more quickly than better-managed land would have. The Dust Bowl intersected with the Great Depression to make the 1930s a period of profound misery for millions of Americans.

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.

They look very sad rn but in 2 years they will be so pretty. trust in a few years I will reblog this post to show how it changes

Remove most of the leaves, I leave 2 on now - unsure what the equivalent is for needled plants exactly, tbh there’s more here than I would leave now but I was still learning. This helps reduce moisture loss since plants breathe through their leaves. Also remove any flowers or fruits. Any part of the stem that will be buried should be leaf and needle free.

Dip plant into rooting hormone, I recommend Hormex #16. Then place the cuttings into a 50/50 mix of sand and perlite (or pumice), the lack of organic matter helps prevent rot, and then just wait and keep the “soil” moist. Some people keep cuttings under humidity domes.

For aquatic plants/very moisture loving, I just put them into water with rooting hormone. Adding willow cuttings can help as well since they make their own rooting hormones that end up in the water. Mint, basil (I have downloaded a Thai basil from phó fixings before), willows, and cottonwood are all easy to grow this way.

Not all cuttings will take especially in the beginning while you’re still learning, you will fail but that is how you learn. Some plants do not want to grow from cuttings either (Pawpaw apparently is one).

https://www.getroots.net/index.html

It has a searchable database, which will give you a entry, or multiple entries like this:

(Unless they don't have it yet)

Which can be very useful. Some plants have multiple entries, using different media or times of year, etc, which let's you compare success rates. They do have an email where you can send your own findings if you want to help build it.

Sex is the social construct we use to attach gender to bodies.

If it was actually about science, they would have updated biology classes with info about intersex variations as soon as they were discovered and documented - the way animal biology does with new species, and chemistry does with new elements.

There are over 40 different intersex variations named and described by medicine!! We know for an absolute fact that intersex traits exist, including chromosome sets besides just XX and XY - there's also XXY, XYY, XXX, X-null, and more. If this was actually about science, you would have been taught about them.

If it was actually about science, you would have been taught that what we think of as biological sex isn't any kind of binary - it's constellations of averages of similar traits, any of which may or may not occur alongside any other sex-associated traits in any specific person.

If it was actually about science, we wouldn't actually still be arguing about this, period, because the fact that the sex binary is false undermines the entire rationale for the gender binary's existence.

Last night I reread Marie Kondo's book and it really is a standout approach, especially as it pertains to sorting and choosing what to keep and how to approach letting go. However, some of her advice for organizing is something that I just know i won't keep up with, so that's where the second book comes in.

I already think that I can find accessibility overlap from just the Konmari side:

Going through all your items and handling them individually when deciding what to keep, to prevent item-blindness

Storing things so that each one is visible, so that you know what you have and what you don't

Especially true for sentimental items, because they work best to make you happy when you can see them

No swapping out "seasonal storage" since you'll forget what's in there, and half the time you'll need something soon after you put it away

Store like items together so you know where to go to look for something

Tips from the first section of the ADHD book that already agree with Konmari:

A beautiful home isn't worth chasing, instead make it work efficiently for you

If the number of possessions is small and the storage is uncluttered, it takes fewer steps to find things or put them away.

Avoid the urge to "stock up" on consumables since you'll end up cramming storage with extras you'll forget about. Buy what you need when you need it.

Holding onto something you don't like or use isn't "saving money", because it comes with a cost of stress and space.

Room-by-room: Konmari suggests that a room-by-room approach is an organizational recipe for disaster, but the adhd book is separated into sections by room. Personally I agree with both! In the initial purge/discarding phase, Konmari's sorting by category across the whole house prevents unnecessary duplicates or forgotten items. However, for maintenance cleaning and upkeep, different rooms present different challenges that the ADHD book addresses. Konmari focuses less on the upkeep side in her book.

Japanese vs American mentality: these books show clear and heavy cultural influences from their respective authors. The American book doesn't show as much respect for the items or the home itself, rather prioritizing the human. Any object is unnecessary if it doesn't serve the human and should be mercilessly discarded, and "the home" is functionally not a concept in this book. Konmari almost speaks about the home and possessions as if they are equal members of the family, clearly from a heavily Shinto perspective. By letting the home succeed in helping you live the life you want, it gets to feel valued and live its purpose as your ally instead of your adversary.

Overall Konmari is more philosophical in her approach. Take time to identify your needs, your joys, and your ideals before you start, and apply it flexibly to any challenges you face. It's easier to summarize since it doesn't try to walk you through every potential application of the idea.

The Pinsky book is overall more concrete. Here are the things that demonstrably go wrong, and here are ways to fix them. Rinse and repeat. It also has more emphasis on managing forgetfulness and time blindness through routine. Finally it addresses reducing digital clutter - overflowing email boxes, events where you took hundreds of photos, reminders that have gone useless, digital calendars that don't work. This all makes it harder to summarize, since the book is a big collection of concrete steps.

While this isn't news to anyone who works in this space, it is useful to have this water-is-wet research to affirm that Indigenous knowledge and land management are extremely effective at storing carbon and protecting biodiversity.

I want to draw special attention to this part of the article:

I get a fair number of asks and comments on my posts expressing sentiments like "human beings are a plague on this Earth", "humans ruin everything, we deserve to be wiped out", "humanity is inherently selfish, evil, and irredeemable".

I don't think the folks saying these things have bad intentions, I know their words come from a place of very understandable pain, fear, and anger. But to act as though humanity's impact on nature is inherently damaging and extractive is to erase thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship of nature. These ecosystems are thriving because there are humans living there.

These two charts are from today's edition of Bill McKibben's Substack, the "Crucial Years." I've read Bill's essay today, but I'm not extracting any part of it yet. Why? Because I am so fucking frustrated and depressed about where we (the human race, our wildlife and plant companions and our Earth) are headed, much much faster than I thought would be happening about 12 years ago, when I started this blog. Maybe tomorrow (or day after) I'll be in a better mood, but right now, I just want to sit somewhere in a prairie, a forest, on a mountain ridge or in the desert, with a bottle of wine, and just stare and vegetate, and pout.