Mi Sona Ala

Ok someone has to take this away from me before I drive myself insane attmepting to idk art better 🙈

“As a biologist, I have been asked by many, many people; “why do we need mosquitos?” and “Why can’t we just kill all the ticks?”. People may argue that they serve no purpose in the ecosystem, and nothing would really be affected if we got rid of them. After all, these animals are just nuisances, right? Everything would be better off if there were no parasites to bother them.

This is, of course, an untrue claim. Parasites play many roles in the ecosystem and their presence is absolutely necessary. For instance, let’s look at mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes are remarkable animals. There are many thousands of species, and only a few drink blood. Mosquitoes of all species subsist primarily on nectar, just like bees. This makes them critical pollinators. Of the few species that drink blood, only the females are interested in doing so, and they only do so to secure vital proteins for incubating their eggs. The males will continue to only feed on nectar for their whole lives.

But, besides being pollinators, what makes mosquitoes really incredible is their larvae. These larvae are aquatic and capable of surviving in extremely hostile conditions and in very small volumes of water. A mosquito will happily lay her eggs in an otherwise barren muddy puddle, and thousands of babies will thrive there, filter-feeding on microscopic organisms. This, in turn, provides food for other animals. Other aquatic insects as well as larval amphibians subsist largely on mosquitoes. Some insects will seek to lay their eggs in areas that mosquito eggs or larvae already exist, because it is a guaranteed food source.

This sudden abundance of life will attract predators of those animals, and so on and so forth. Suddenly, an entire thriving ecosystem has sprung up around this muddy puddle that otherwise would have supported little to no life, all thanks to these hardy larvae. In this way, mosquitoes are the foundation of many food-webs and allow life to colonize new, formerly inhospitable places.

However, defending the ecological importance of any animal is ultimately an exhausting task for biologists. The idea that animals must serve a purpose, must benefit humans in some way, is a fundamentally flawed way to view the natural world.

Every living organism that exists is a result of billions of years of evolution, all interwoven in a delicate balance with each other. If any of these pieces are removed, things will begin to collapse around it. We cannot sort animals into the categories of “useful” or “not useful”, because animals do not exist to be useful to us. They all have a place in the world, and we don’t get to pick and choose which species deserve to live without sending catastrophic ripple effects throughout the surrounding web of the ecosystem.

Whether we like it or not, parasites are part of the world and we have to coexist with them. Our focus should be on prevention of diseases associated with these parasites, by deterring them from biting, vaccinations against the bacteria they may carry, and affordable treatment if infections do occur, rather than figuring out a way to remove them from the planet entirely. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Everything is deeply interwoven, and every species is necessary. The moment we allow ourselves to debate which species could be driven to extinction without consequence is the moment we will begin unravel the world around us, and, ultimately, humans will feel those ripples too.”

"Ikea pt. 1-8"

Everyone deserves a magical, plush, emotional support shark/patron saint <3

For more Tiff & Eve: My Site | Webtoon | Bluesky

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.

If all the places we think of as "no longer wild" actually were, if the biodiversity we thought was gone actually was gone, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. The unintended and random plants, the wild weeds of lost and empty places, they hold us tightly, sustaining the few and meager scraps of symbiotic relationships that keep the Earth alive

The ditch beside the road is no longer a serene wetland. The wetland was bulldozed and destroyed and now it is a ditch, dirty and strewn with garbage. But because nobody looks closely, almost nobody sees...A few rushes and sedges have decided to grow here, there's a clump of stubborn and stunted cattails, and there in the weeds, a thickety willow cradling a blackbird's nest.

Easy to love the pristine wilderness in distant preserves, but will someone love this abused and ugly place? Will someone be moved to protect the wild of the roadside ditch and vacant lot as passionately as they protect the primeval forest?

Easy to see the importance of the Amazon rainforest for the very air in our lungs, but who will see the moss that grows between the bricks in the wall of their run-down apartment and realize, It is your oxygen that I breathe?

I read a paper one time suggesting that, even though the idea of monoculture is harmful through its influence on agricultural practice, monoculture does not actually exist, because in practice the weeds prevent it from becoming a reality.

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.

It's like in between buildings there is Space and that space is No Place and most people can't even see it or notice it.

Like, when you start to actually pay attention to what is covering the surface area of the ground in shopping centers, parks, industrial areas, roadsides, there are countless square miles of space planted with invasive turfgrass and maintained with a lawn mower and they are completely unnoticed and unacknowledged.

to keep me inside all day.