#1 Native Bee Enjoyer🐝🐝🐝

My practice is very localized and I am extremely fortunate that the tales that I grew up with happened in places with similar nature to where I live and I count that as a blessing. This is the bais of this post [and of the entire screaming well honestly] and I don't claim that this is apply able to everyone but this is my method and I wanted to share it.

The plant l'll be talking about as a case study is hedge bedstraw or glad walstro in dutch.

When nature journaling l do a few steps that are always the same:

When l find the the plant / animal / fungus i log it on my phone l use a local version of inaturalist to do this most of the time but sometimes I'll write down the name if I didn't manage to take a picture.

I will draw it in a way that helps me remember it. What stands out to me what observations can I make about it myself. In order to do this i've gotten into more botanical terms for fun but you can do without honestly. The point of the drawing is to actively look at the plant and to be able to rechonize it next time I see it.

I look up the plant in botonist sites, the site I use is strictly for identification purposes and has detailed descriptions which I often find contain something I missed that I can tgen never unsee. I will then go back in and add it. Either by notes or by edditing the drawing this is where I also write down the edibility of a plant.

I will then look up the plant in an etemology data base and a story database. These databases are local to me and I will write down what I find about associations or stories they're mentioned in. I also do some general searches and read the Wikipedia for the plant. I also include family associations here.

Now for an example with the hedge bedstraw:

To me the most striking point is that the little white flowers have four points and four little stems at each corner it also has a stem in tge middle essentially the flower has 9 parts. Now tgat number is important to me so I note it down in my drawing. Then I look at the structure and where the leaves are placed. Each split in the stem has like a ring of leaves and there are no leaves in other places. These observations will help me rechonize it next time.

Now I start writing down wether it's edible or not. In this case it is and the roots are actually potentially a dye source. I don't forage for food a lot but these notes are always fun to make to me. I note that it's family of anotger plant. And then I note where it's name came from and that it was used as bedstraw the dutch name specifies this to cratle straw. I note the connection to child birth and sone sources on it being associated with protection of childeren.

Now this is where we get to the upg part. I associate child birth and protection of childeren with vrouw Holle. Therefore I note that this plant might make a good gift to her. The plant also has some snow associations and so I write that down too. Strengthening the connection a little bit.

Now with this plant my upg is mostly working on connections that had already been documented but in other cases the upg can be based on where a plant often grows, what it looks like, if it attracts certain animals and what those animals are connected too, did i find it together with a bunch of other plants? These are among the questions I ask myself that help me develop upg about the plants that live around me.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

“A gift to the Elder” – Maria Khymynets (2022)

And if you went on strike? And if you formed a union? And if you wanted to resist, like the indigenous peoples did? Some boys with a blood-red cap, the Cardenales, criminals taken from prison, would come and kill you, in broad daylight if you were striking, in the middle of the forest if you were alone. Many books tell about hacheros yelling one last long sapucai before killing themselves, because they couldn't stand it anymore.

Who were the owners of this terrible company? English. In the La Forestal HQ in the north of Santa Fe, a beautiful mansion (I understand that it is now a ruin) while the workers lived in mud huts with roofs of palm leaves, every day, the Union Jack was hoisted over Argentine soil, and of course, at five o'clock it was tea time, while all the tannin, loaded on barges and on railways worked by Argentines but owned by the British, went to Europe, and the wealth, of course, to London.

My grandfather lived through the last of this. Perón already came by that time, with worker's rights, unions, rural schools and clinics, the nationalization of railways... Nevertheless, he still had to hunt to eat and work from a young age at the machines of the company, as the company was leaving the country and couldn't even bother to pay a pittance to its workers. It eventually closed most of its operations and came into Argentine hands. But don't think it was because the English had a change of heart. They just found a better source of tannin, the acacias in their African colonies. God knows what crimes they committed there, if this is what they did in the territory of a 'sovereign' country.

The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.

The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.

Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)

It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!

It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.

In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.

And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.

For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).

As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.

The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.