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there are multiple ways for a tree to die, each with their own impacts on the ecosystem. Many trees die standing, becoming starkly bare pillars of standing deadwood with increasingly fewer branches and more sharply whitened surfaces as the bark falls off and the branches break, the smaller branches first and then the larger ones. Standing deadwood is vital for housing lots and lots of bird species and it also has an undeniable sexiness and charisma

Trees broken by wind, snapping off at some point up the trunk, are often hollow in the middle from heart rot fungi. I don't think the fungi actually kill the tree, since the center of the tree (the heartwood) is dead anyways, but they do structurally weaken it.

One of the most dramatic tree deaths is windthrow. This happens to large trees that are solid all the way through and not easily broken by the forces of wind; instead, the roots are wrenched violently out of the ground, creating a bowl-shaped hole in the ground with a huge mound of twisted tree roots standing 5 or 6 feet tall next to it.

The death of a tree by windthrow feels very sad, because the tree seemed to be thriving up until that point, but the effect on the ecosystem is very fascinating. The hole in the ground where the root ball was torn up creates a shaded, sheltered area, sometimes filling with water to become a small pool. The root ball itself, right next to it, becomes a tall pile of soil and decomposing wood.

When walking in the forest, I often notice strange mounds rising from the layer of leaf litter, covered in lush carpets of moss, like bustling moss metropolises rising out of lowlands that only have scattered moss towns. Elevated from the forest floor, the moss-hills do not become covered with leaf litter. In some cases, these distinctive moss-hills are still visibly connected to the fallen trunk of a windthrown tree; in other cases, the tree trunk has almost completely decayed, and only the mound created by the root ball remains.

I read once in an article that the creation of humps and valleys by the windthrown tree roots is characteristic of old growth forests. That is, the forest has existed so long, with trees living majestically and dying violently in it, that the ground is no longer a smooth plane, but humpy and bumpy and pitted and pooled from centuries of trees dying by windthrow.

My observations seem to agree that these windthrown-tree-humps have unique ecology, particularly in terms of their thriving moss colonies that remain even after the tree that originally died has rotted away. They would create a million little variations on light and moisture level, gathering leaf litter in some places and keeping it away from others. Variations create multiplying amounts of biodiversity due to the increased amount of niches to fill.

In my area, one of the first tall trees to shoot up after land is disturbed is the water oak (Quercus nigra. They get 50-70ft tall and 3 feet in diameter in about 50 years. They often have very, very shallow root systems. Because of this, they fall over faster than other trees. They are also more prone to disease, and hollow out from the center faster and more often, and are likely to have dead sections on loving trees, providing even more unique habitat.

So some of our forests that are only 50 years old have old-growth-characteristics because of these trees. And then they fall, or otherwise die, leaving room for our true old growth species to rise up. But the pits and mounds of these fallen early-risers are also shaped differently than those of more deeprooted species. They are shallower pools or valleys, and sometimes form a wall that is perpendicular to the forest floor - completely vertical to the ground.

This is just one example, but understanding it, we can see that the predominance of different species in a forest can drastically change its microclimates and topography! Different species rot in different ways, hollow in different ways, and form different shapes on the landscape. If there are lots of different tree species in your area, then the different proportions they grow in, die in, fall in, and the different timings at which they do so, offer an endless aboundment of variety.

This is why no two forests are the same, and no single wild area is ever truly replaceable, or interchangeable. Because each has developed entirely differently, with so many little factors playing in.

Since I have access to a bigger library now, I've explored "deep ecology" and "green anarchism" and "Biocentrism" a bit more and what i've seen is still kinda silly. The writers have very thoughtful theory and philosophy of diverse subjects relating to morality, society, power, and liberation, but...they just don't know very much about Nature.

I mean several things by that: first, they're not clear on the boring, practical details of things like food systems and the way construction alters ecosystems, second, they don't try to clearly define what "nature" is, and third, they act like "nature" has a clear definition anyway.

Now nature is pretty much undefinable anyway, a couple possible definitions are "all things that exist, have existed, or are possible in the universe" and "the thing that a forest has that a parking lot doesn't." You can say "biodiversity," but every space has biodiversity, and it's not clear how much biodiversity a space is "supposed" to have, we're just going on vibes. And the vibes are right, in a way; I visited an old-growth forest and it was DIFFERENT than any place i'd ever been in a way that is hard to describe. A flourishing, biodiverse ecosystem is different than a parking lot, a lawn, a monoculture field of corn. They say it's good for your health to be "in nature." What does that mean? At what point does a place become "nature?" How many trees does it have to have?

Something that is so painful to me is when people write "Human activities" as a cause of biodiversity loss. This is an act of cowardice. WHICH human activities? Name them.

A lot of nature and ecology writings treat humans like they have an anti-biodiversity force field that emanates from them. They write like lands on Earth are each contested between two inversely proportional forces, "Nature" and "Humans."

Without any more information, this is ethereal bullshit on par with crystals having energies. I am totally perplexed at the lack of curiosity about the specific causes and details of "human impacts." The division of habitats by so many roads and relentless speeding of cars with no way for wildlife to cross...the dumping of massive amounts of poison into soils and water...the wounding and disturbance of topsoil...these are the "human activities," but we can imagine a world without such destruction, and we can create that world.

Too many essays and papers talking about Nature non-specifically, an Idea of Nature, a Concept that everyone just intuitively knows. Nature is...you know...wildness! and trees! and...well, you know, NATURE!

And we do know! When we step out into the parking lot surrounded by low, squarish buildings and blaring signs and the stink of car exhaust, we know that something is very wrong with this place! Even we find these horrible un-places harsh and unwelcoming.

But it is very hard to imagine something different, because the other type of place, the place that is beautiful and soothes the spirit and is full of life, is by definition the place where humans only go to visit, the complete opposite and inverse of a place where humans work and live! Wherever humans live, shop, eat, fulfill their daily needs, that place is Not Nature.

The huge mistake, is that we believe that it is necessary to have places that are Not Nature. We believe that for humans to exist, areas must be set aside where the very concept of Nature is utterly obliterated.

From this imaginary and dismal point of view, we have to carefully confine our own lives to places that are utterly poisoned, sterilized, made into a hostile wasteland, and leave all the rest of the living biosphere to itself in pristine preserves.

And in this imaginary and dismal point of view, the one that divides Earth into Nature and Humans, it is okay to poison and to sterilize and to destroy, because humans must live SOMEWHERE, therefore Nature must be utterly excluded from at least SOME of Earth.

BUT...WHAT IF EVERYWHERE IS NATURE? What if the dandelions in the cracks of the pavement, the lichens growing on the park bench, the wildflowers on the side of the road, the sparrows in the parking lot—what if they are all Nature just as much as anything else? What if they too are sacred? What if it is our responsibility to see the connectedness of all life and to care for all ecosystems, however broken and hurt they may be?

What if Nature is not distant and abstract, untouched in some pristine place, but always reaching out, digging into the crumbled concrete and gravel and compacted ground, clawing to return to us and bring us back home?

It does not take away from the value of the old-growth forest or the unplowed prairie if we open our eyes and see even the scraggliest patch of overgrown weeds for the powerful manifestation of Nature it truly is.

Nature is not a place or a thing. Nature is the Movement, the Endless Happening, constantly alive throughout all life, the way of all things being family, the way of all things taking care of each other, the way of all life being constantly transformed through one another. You breathe the breath of the trees of your home, you drink the water of the streams of your home, you eat the sunlight that falls on your home, grown in the soil where all things go to be transformed through death into a new form of life, fed by the mycorrhizal network, pollinated by the bees, wasps, flies, and moths, nourished by the bone, blood and manure of beasts, and ultimately the fertile river valleys where agriculture first began, were replenished by the rich silt that washed down the river, which came from the forests in the mountains that shed their leaves to make a feast for a million decomposing critters, which is how the rich soil is made.

In this way they all take care of you, and in return you are asked to Live—to take care of them in return, to live as part of the great family of everything alive, to live, to live

What are human activities...? Deforestation? Mining? Spraying pesticides? Building housing developments? But is that all? Are we inherently a "bad" and "destructive" species, or is our ability to acquire and pass down knowledge, use tools and novel behaviors, alter our surroundings, shape ecosystems, adapt our lifestyles almost infinitely, and persist in almost any environment, simply incredibly powerful for good or for evil?

First of all, what better way to demonstrate a contrast to anthropocentrism...than to compare the impact of humans alone to the impact of an ENTIRE KINGDOM OF LIFE, the fungi????? Of course all of Fungi are more important than one single species??? Wtf?!?!?

But also, we should not convince ourselves of our own insignificance and worthlessness to the biosphere, because in the same way that individual self-loathing can be a way to avoid the hard work of loving oneself and advocating for the love one deserves, collective self-loathing as a species is a way of avoiding the responsibility we have to other life forms.

Like, in my area, out of our plants that grow here, there is a certain group of plants that Exists in Forests, and another group that Exists in Lawns, and another group that Exists in Pastures, and depending on certain factors like how far upland it is and the soil pH, you can get a pretty good sense of what you're going to see and you can find environments like that over and over again, with similar combinations of plants.

And then there are plants that are absolute wildcards, that don't consistently exist anywhere because their habitats are only ever created accidentally. Powerline cuts, abandoned stretches of land, roadsides that are intermittently maintained, patches of land with complicated histories of being used for this and that and the other, disturbed and neglected in various ways.

randomly stumbled upon this post by a theater in omaha, nebraska about their production of frozen & may have wept a little. they actuallyyy stood up for her! they did not let racist comments go ignored. they did not try to ""be nice"" by offering excuses to court the racists. they even called out potential complaints of inaccuracy as the racist tool they are. like! the bar is in hell so it just felt nice to see this & i wanted to share. the actress is named monica weber!

I KNOW THAT'S RIGHT!!! you would be astonished at how hard doing something like this- at standing up for what's right and not cowering in the face of racism and pressure- is for regular degular people, let alone businesses! I appreciate this!

And it's wild because she's like, light af. So it's not even like it's a "oh her skin color doesn't match" no they just deadass didn't want a Black woman playing that character. Doesn't matter that Anna's actress is in a whole wig, nope, that's proper! Goofies. Thank you for sharing this with me.

Like, so let's consider the facts. Star Trek was created 60 years ago by a guy who died 35 years ago. Most of the canon was created more than 20 years ago, by people who have since died or moved on with their careers. These people, the ones who actually had a hand in making it, have, other than a tiny trickle in royalties, made all of the money that they will ever make off of their work; their work which has inspired millions of people across generations and become a fixture of popular culture.

And yet, somehow, through some strange alchemy of law and capitalism, all of this is owned by a bunch of usurious sons of bitches with an ideology diametrically opposed to that which the series was created to represent. Men who had no part in creating it, men who, in fact, have never created anything at all, get the revenue from it. They alone get to say what happens next in this fictional universe that they had no part in creating, and that means nothing to them. They alone get to turn the spigot of new Star Trek on or off depending on their taste.

You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.

You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.

You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

Feel awkward about people maybe thinking you’re queer but still want to clearly signal “queers are okay with me”? SURE. LOVE IT. HERE’S YOUR WEIRD FLAG.

Don’t fucking at me about allies right now, they are ALSO actually getting fucking killed over us. Take your puri-gay shitty tent somewhere else mine is great with people’s cishet friends and relatives showing up to have our backs.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

there's having parents who can pay for your application to any college, and then there's having parents who can bribe your way into any college. there's owning your own home, and then there's owning 50 houses and getting rich off hoarding a vital resource. there's not fearing for your life whenever cops are around, and then there's being the cop and being allowed to murder anyone at any time.

one’s character has no impact on whether they were/are a victim or not, victim status is not something that is only afforded to the palatable.

and like, I know people who are transphobic in that if you pitched to them a question about trans people they would likely say something bigoted. But they just don't think about trans people at all and live perfectly fulfilling social lives.

There's something so unique about the terf in that the ideological obsession and trying to dance around the idea of their own grievance that they've constructed a worldview on top of being visciated by someone's mere existence drives them absolutely mad. They're lonely and unhappy regardless of anyone's presence before they decided to become transphobic.