This might be super niche irl discourse, and it kinda doesn't matter. but, so, there's a lot of folks I know who will only eat meat if it's roadkill, and are otherwise vegan or vegetarian or whatever, like they won't eat hunted meat or locally farmed meat. and don't get me wrong, i'm all for eating roadkill. and i'm not like, against choosing one over the other, i mean, i think eating roadkill but not hunted food is a perfectly fine and neutral personal choice. of course, i think it is good for animals killed on the road to go to human use when possible.

but also, for reasons, i feel the need to acknowledge that this is not a morally superior practice to hunting or fishing or even localized animal farming/butchering. again, i think it is a neutral choice to eat roadkill but not locally farmed or hunted meat. but, roadkill is still killed by human actions, it's not like, absolved of the animal's death.

i know folks who will eat bowhunted animals and roadkill, but not gun hunted animals, because they see gun hunting as an unfair advantage. eat what you feel good about eating, but, i think cars are an equally unfair advantage? i just don't see the difference.

i've heard folks say that roadkill is better because, with hunting, we go into their space and kill them, but with roadkill, it's their fault for wandering into our space. i don't think there is animal space and human space, and i don't think the animals think that either. i think they tend to stay away from us because we're dangerous, but that's not the same as us somehow owning this part of the land more than they do.

i've heard people say roadkill is better because the human didn't intend to kill the animal, it was just an accident. and that ...almost makes sense to me? but, i guess i just don't believe that intent matters so much when a thing is killed. i also, and maybe this is the difference, don't believe it is morally wrong for a human to kill an animal it intends to make use of. i actually personally believe that intentionally killing an animal for the purpose of using it as a resource is better than negligently or accidentally killing it. cars don't stop being weapons just because they're normalized in a nonviolent context. like baseball bats.

i just, what's the idea here? 'it's not wrong to eat meat, it's just wrong to kill it on purpose'? it's a fallacy to think that there is any meat that isn't killed by direct human action. it has to be killed to be eaten, it's killed either way, the death is still violent-- and actually rather moreso-- when it's a result of the car industry. eating meat means the animal had to die, full stop. violence is not only violence when it's intentional. there's something i'm failing to articulate here.

maybe this belief is of the mindset that roadkill is unavoidable and hunting isn't? i guess i feel like that is both passive toward the car industry, as if in its 'inevitability' it can be folded into nature more than subsistence hunting can, and i feel like it's ignorant toward the nature, necessity, positivity and beauty of intentional hunting and localized farming.

there's no moral superiority in making the most of a death that was unintentional, a death that involved more suffering, a death out of control-- it's dead. the death is a death either way. hunting is not wrong for harvesting a resource in an intentional way that minimizes suffering. the death is a death either way. humans caused it either way.

this is not to imply that hunting is better than eating roadkill, again, a choice between the two is neutral. it's just to say that maybe roadkill is not a passive, morally absolving form of enacting death. it's not a driver's fault, of course, it's just what happens when we rely so heavily on cars. i guess my point is, roadkill is a victim of the human car industry, not some kind of natural death, and there's something i don't like about removing oneself from the mortal implications of it all, naturalizing car death while ostracizing the nature of hunting.

yes, to utilize roadkill is to make use of an unfortunate death. and that is good! using roadkill is good! but just because the death was an unfortunate byproduct of another bad industry, and not the point of it, does not make it less a result of human hands.

Thinking about "cozy" farming sims and the like. Manor Lords isn't aimed at that kind of stuff at least not explictly, you ARE a feudal lord (you can even walk in first person as one) and those people ARE your serfs. I guess there will be some people who interpret it as that, and let's be honest, the game is so pretty and intuitive, it's just so relaxing to see the forests change seasons, the houses being built, the flowers swaying on the wind. Working like a serf all day, not so much. No doubt peasants in the Middle Ages and all over the world had their moments of rest and respite and joy, but it was (and still is) a hardworking, exploited existence like we are not usually used to.

I think Manor Lords really GETS what a subsistence farming economy was like, at least at the very beginning. and this is really important in my opinion because it was the lifestyle of no less than 90% of the world's population until very recently. And it wasn't like in Stardew Valley where one farmer had a variety of crops all growing in the same tiny farm. In Manor Lords you usually build a small hamlet or village, every home with its own little backyard plot with vegetables, chickens, but it is actual fields what truly feeds and clothes people. The distribution and managing of these fields, and how big they are, is something that changes from society to society, but it's not like there is a single household that is able to feed itself and is able to do everything that a human needs to eat, to get clothed, to be warm in winter and more. They need to have big open fields (or pastures) to do that, where the community puts most of its time and effort maintaining.

So when you think about subsistence farming, you shouldn't think about it as peasants (wherever in the world where they are, as they still exist, why do you think we Latin Americans talk so much about the campesino struggle) owning one small plot of land and feeding their household with it. You should think of them as communities where the main and sometimes only activity is farming, and they do not farm to sell it to a market (though campesino communities can and do produce excess they can sell) but to sustain themselves and their family. They do not especialize in a single crop or industry, nor they have the time or ability to. They plant whatever helps them feed and clothe their family, that is, subsist.

In Manor Lords, you can also "cheat" a bit and get goods by trade, or survive by gathering berries (EXCESSIVELY OP) or hunting. The first was impossible in very remote areas, and the second was impossible in high-density areas. Which means that you can't sustain a community by just gathering berries or having home gardens. Vegetables and fruit CAN and do supplement the diet of people and they make life infinitely more enjoyable (some places like tropical and subtropical America are very blessed in that respect and their crops are very diverse), and indeed most people have those, but it isn't enough to feed you every day. You have to farm to it. And it's a way of life tied to the land and the seasons. You gotta have enough food and firewood before winter (Manor Lords is tied to the European temperate seasons of course, but every region in the world has its own), you gotta prepare the fields, mill the grain and bake the bread, it's all work, work, work, neverending work. There is a reason why some have said agriculture is kind of a "trap" to humanity, it allows you to feed yourself and your family at the cost of being tied to your land forever, and this didn't change until very recently. And again, while of course it's also a life that has its moments of rest (harvest festivals! and all those church days in Europe, but again, every region has its own traditions), it's still work, work, and work more.

I think this is an interesting contrast with other "cozy farming sims" of which are there are a ton, with a single character being able to produce the whole spectrum of human food and a bit more. Manor Lords to me is very interesting because by having its resource and city building in such a small scale as individual families, it captures in a rather realistic (if not completely so) way how subsistence agriculture is, which is the way virtually most of our ancestors (no matter where you are from) lived. To me that's way more interesting than the combat system.

can even spice it up by having the locations be a lot further from the equator than you'd expect due to global warming or something.

What politicos on both sides of the aisle have refused to acknowledge is that complexity, creativity, and determination are the hallmark of the Appalachian people. Acknowledging that Appalachia, or what remains of it, is not altogether backward and unenlightened might mean embracing the task of finding real solutions to real problems — problems due in no small part to the systematic failure of political institutions. It would mean that Washington would have to look inward for root causes, and the federal city abhors self-reflection.

Excerpt from this EcoWatch story:

Three-year moving average of annual forest loss area for the major disturbance categories in all countriesImage from Tyukavina et al., Sci. Adv. 2018;4: eaat2993

Africa's Congo Basin is home to the second largest rainforest on the planet. But according to a new study, this may soon not be the case. It finds that at current rates of deforestation, all primary forest will be gone by the end of the century.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) in the U.S. who analyzed satellite data collected between 2000 and 2014. Their results were published Wednesday in Science Advances. It reveals that the Congo Basin lost around 165,000 square kilometers (approximately 64,000 square miles) of forest during their study period.

In other words, one of the world's largest rainforests lost an area of forest bigger than Bangladesh in the span of 15 years.

But why? Is it due to industrial pressure like in South America and Southeast Asia where the majority of deforestation has been done for soy, palm oil and other commodity crops? Or commercial logging, which is razing forests on the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea?

Not so much, according to this newest study. It reveals that the dominant force behind rising Congo deforestation, driving more than 80 percent of the region's total forest loss, is actually small-scale clearing for subsistence agriculture. The researchers write that most of it is done by hand with simple axes.