Life is Indeed Stranger Than Fiction

Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!” 

One thing that I think a lot of Environmentalists in America really overlook is that humans are supposed to be part of an ecosystem.  Humans are part of the food web; we fill an environmental niche, just as much as beavers and wolves do.   

We are SUPPOSED to interact with the environment- the problem arises when we begin interacting with the environment in UNSUSTAINABLE ways. This idea that we should try to “return” the environment to the way it was “before” humans so so so often ignores the way that Indigenous people all over the world were (and are) an important part of their environments- and trying to “preserve” those places without people filling their ecological niche can cause harm in super weird ways. 

You know how its shitty for deer populations if you take out all of the wolves? It’s just as bad if you stop all human hunting too. Humans hunting deer has been an important part of the food web for thousands and thousands of years! Deer populations NEED hunters- human, wolf, cougar- to stay healthy. 

Yes- massive clear cutting of forests and strip mining is bad. HOWEVER, not allowing Indigenous people to practice traditional controlled burns of grass lands? Not only makes wildfires worse, but ALSO fucks up the bio-diversity of those grasslands. Totally unmanaged “pristine” grasslands without humans are actually less healthy than grasslands that are sustainably managed by people.

Mono-crop super farms are not good- but humans have been farming for thousands of years- tending for plants and increasing their yield, monitoring the soil, in ways that benefit those plants and the other animals that eat them, and the other plants that use that soil, and the insects that make their home there. Sustainable, diversified farming isn’t bad. 

Laying out acres and acres of asphalt and oil pipelines? Bad. But digging natural cisterns in the dessert that catches rainwater for grazing animals to use? Benefits the entire ecosystem and all the animals in it. 

We are part of the environment. We belong here. And the ecosystems that human beings evolved in and lived in need us just as much as we need them. We aren’t parasites on the planet, we are a part of it. It’s just that global capitalism has thrown us terribly out of balance.  Colonialism and profit-seeking are the problem- not human beings existing.  

they/them i made a chestplate yesterday, sourced from an old metal bucket i found in the woods :)

Bill Grogan’s Goat. Does the goat die or get shipped off to slowly be tortured at a Girl Scout camp? God knows until we get there.

Will the littlest worm escape his fate by means of tiny scuba gear, or is he permadead?

When your song leader yells EARLY IN THE MOOOOOORNIN’ are you about to embark on the journey of a bird with a really long name, or are you going to yell about how Felix doesn’t like pits in his juice?

What are we thankful for in the Lollipop Grace? Chocolate? Raisins? Tacos?

What is Herman the worm even eating?

Princess Pat. Did she live in a tree or was she involved with a wide infantry? A first infantry? 

What the ever loving chestnut do you sing when you’re introducing Running Bear?

How many things rhyme with “thunderation?”