Grow Up - Enough With the Fireworks Already

Growing up in India, I enjoyed celebrating Diwali because I could play with fire and be macho. 

As time passed, I grew the fuck up. I grew the fuck up. I learned how much fireworks harm animals, ecosystems and the environment. 

So grow the fuck up and stop using fireworks in name of god knows what. Fireworks has nothing to do with you political ideology. 

Margaret Renkl reminds us that same but more politely than I do: 

For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound-shepherd-retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside.

Did he think the fireworks, with their window-rattling booms, were the work of some cosmic predator big enough to eat him whole? Did he think they were gunshots or claps of thunder spreading out from inexplicable lightning bolts tearing open the sky above our house?

There’s no way to know what he was thinking, but every single year that rangy, 75-pound, country-born yard dog spent the Fourth of July in our shower, trembling, drooling and whimpering in terror.

Clark was lucky. We have friends whose terrified dog spent one Fourth of July fruitlessly trying to outrun the explosions. The next day a good Samaritan found him lying on a hot sidewalk miles away, close to death. Other friends came home from watching the fireworks to discover that their dog had bolted in terror from their fenced backyard and been killed by a car.

And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nests or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.

Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.

And all that’s on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation. Little wonder, then, that fireworks are banned in all national wildlife refuges, national forests and national parks.

[---]

“All flourishing is mutual,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in her best-selling book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This is one of the most repeated lines in contemporary environmental literature, and for good reason. It reminds us that all creation, human and other than human, is interconnected. At a time when life on this planet is faltering in every possible way, Dr. Kimmerer gently points out that our own flourishing depends on the flourishing of planetary systems that we are barely beginning to understand.

Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.

But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”

In that context, surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be American to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other than human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.

 

Incarcerated Women & Buttery Redemption

One of the greatest failures of our generation is crime against incarcerated men and women. 

There is nothing even remotely close to rehabilitation nor reformation for these people. Loss of complete life while living, disintegration of families, economic cost and worst perpetuating cycle of violence. 

I am glad there is some hope with this change. No surprise, this is coming via our fellow sentient beings we share the planet with. This is just hope for incarcerated people but maybe a precursor to who we rewrite our economics and how we work. 

Heather wears her dark hair in braids. She’s also wearing a bright red sweater marked DOC for Department of Corrections, identifying her as an inmate of Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, a minimum security prison located near Belfair, Washington. Heather is not her real name. She says she feels lucky to be participating in this work while she serves her sentence here. She shows me around with a proud, almost parental smile. Along with eight other incarcerated women, Heather is entrusted with the care and feeding of nearly 4,000 members of an endangered species, the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly. With this trust comes the privilege of working just beyond the razor-wire fence during the day before returning to life among the general prison population each night.

[---]

Recognizing the need for urgent action, the Oregon Zoo began a captive breeding program for the species in 2003. In 2011, the zoo helped establish the breeding program at Mission Creek as part of The Evergreen State College and Washington State’s Sustainability in Prisons Project. Since then, the work undertaken by these incarcerated women has become one of the last best hopes for the species’ survival.

On this mid-March morning, the air inside the program’s two greenhouses is warm compared with the shade of the surrounding forest and the adjacent prison yard. Metal racks containing hundreds of identical plastic cups house hungry caterpillars waiting to be fed the leafy green plantain the women grow in a garden outside.

After spending six months in a hibernation-like state known as diapause, the caterpillars roused in late January and have been busy bulking up ever since. After they’re released, they will continue to eat and grow through mid-March to mid-April, after which they’ll pupate beneath dry wood and vegetation and undergo metamorphosis. Their chrysalises, with cream-and-gray bands alternating with orange and black dots, offer a pastel preview of the butterfly to come. Only a few chrysalises have been found in the wild. In April or May, they emerge as adults and take to the air on wings of vivid red or orange and white, outlined in black, calling to mind the brightly hued geometry of stained-glass windows. Their life as butterflies is fleeting—just one to 14 days—but they use that time to mate and lay clusters of approximately 100 bright yellow, quinoa-sized eggs that take on a maroon hue before hatching. A single butterfly can lay up to 1,000 eggs. From those eggs, new caterpillars will appear, fatten up, enter diapause in June or July, and then awaken in January or February to, hopefully, continue the cycle in the wild.

[---]

“When I told my family what I do,” Brooke explains, “they said, ‘we’re so proud of you, that you are doing something that has such a profound mission in the world.’” She finds the work meditative, and despite the “shocking” amount of data she must record, she says the work provides a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day.

Heather agrees, and admits the job is also on her mind at night. “I literally have dreams about being able to sleep in these greenhouses.”

Over the course of about a week, most of the caterpillars are taken away for release in the wild. For the women who raised them, it’s surprisingly hard to let go.

“I just didn’t think you could form a bond with an insect like that,” Heather declares. “I cried yesterday, saying goodbye.”

Before they leave, she has a message for them: the fate of the species is riding on your shoulders. “You got this,” she says. 

 

The Hidden Language Between Flowers and Bees

In short, the team discovered that bumblebees can sense a flower’s electrical field, distinguish between fields formed by different floral shapes, and tell whether another bee recently visited a flower.

See, both flowers and bees have electrical fields. As they fly, bees bump into charged particles, such as dust and other small molecules. The friction of these tiny collisions knocks electrons off the bee’s surface, leaving them with a positive charge.

Meanwhile, flowers usually have a negative charge, particularly during mild weather. A plant’s roots in the ground give it a slight negative electric charge. The higher the plant grows, the higher the electric charge it has because the air around the plant also has an electric charge that increases every meter above the ground. This creates a faint electric field around the plant.

Now for the fun part.

One interesting observation is that pollen will hop from the flower to the bee when a positively charged bee approaches the negatively charged flower. Robert told National Geographic:

“We found some videos showing that pollen literally jumps from the flower to the bee, as the bee approaches… even before it has landed.”

Further, the positively charged bees slightly increase the charge of any flower they land on beginning just before landing and lasts for just shy of two minutes — much longer than a bee usually spends visiting a flower. The team demonstrated that when a bee lands on the stem of a petunia, its electrical potential increases by approximately 25 millivolts.

Bees sense this slight change in a flower’s electrical field, which communicates that the flower has recently been visited and is likely low on nectar. It’s sort of like the flower is telling the bee, “I’m out of stock. Check back later.” Meanwhile, when a bee makes contact with a flower, it cancels out the single — which tells other bees, “I’m occupied.”

No one knows for sure how bees actually sense electrical fields. But Robert and others believe the electric fields affect part of a bee, like its antennas or the tiny hairs on its body. 

[---]

One of the best things about this knowledge is that you don’t have to travel or book a vacation to see it. From now on, you’ll know the miraculous interaction happens anytime you see a bee and flower interacting. You can watch the interaction and know there is an exchange between these two vastly different species, one we humans can only observe and not experience.

Not only does this knowledge make previous mundane observations more magical, but it’s also a humbling reminder that as brilliant as the human species can be, other animals experience the world wholly differently than we do and are capable of doing things we may never fully understand.

- More Here

We Owe Debt Of Gratitude To Flies

Flies generally get a bad rap. People associate them with dirt, disease and death. “No one except entomologists really likes flies,” Finch says. Yet there’s good reason why we should cherish, encourage, even nurture them: Our future food supply could depend on it. The past few years have seen growing recognition that flies make up a large proportion of wild pollinators — but also that we know little about that side of their lives. Which sorts of fly pollinate what? How effective are they at delivering pollen where it’s needed? Which flies might we harness to boost future harvests — and how to go about it? With insect populations plummeting and honeybees under pressure from multiple threats, including varroa mites and colony collapse disorder, entomologists and pollination specialists are urgently trying to get some answers.

Animals are responsible for pollinating around 76 percent of crop plants, including a large number of globally important ones. Birds, bats and other small mammals do their bit, but insects do much more — pollinating flowers of many fruits, vegetables and nuts, from almonds to avocados, mangoes and melons, cocoa and coconuts, as well as crops grown to provide seed for future vegetable harvests. In a recent analysis for the Annual Review of Entomology, Australia-based biologist Romina Rader and colleagues from Australia, New Zealand and the US calculated that the world’s 105 most widely planted food crops that benefit from insect pollination are worth some $800 billion a year.

Bees, especially honeybees, get most of the credit, but overlooked and underappreciated is a vast army of beetles, butterflies, moths, ants, flies and more. In Rader’s analysis, only a handful of crops were visited exclusively by bees; most were visited by both bees and other insects. She and her colleagues assessed the contribution of each type of insect and found that flies were the most important pollinators after bees, visiting 72 percent of the 105 crops.

[---]

Making fields and orchards more fly-friendly won’t always be enough. With that in mind, researchers round the world are trying to identify flies that can be reared commercially and released where and when their services are needed. But where to start? The vast majority of pollination studies have focused on bees, and although many species of flies have been reported visiting crops, in most cases little is known about how good they are at transporting pollen, let alone whether their visits translate into more fruit and vegetables.

That’s beginning to change. Scattered studies have logged how often flies visit flowers, counted the pollen grains stuck to their bodies and recorded crop yields, and found that some flies give bees a run for their money — and in some cases, outdo them. Researchers studying avocados in Mexico, for instance, found that the large green blowfly Chrysomya megacephala (aka the oriental latrine fly) visited more flowers in a given time than bees and carried pollen grains on parts of the body that would contact the stigma of the next avocado flower it visited. Studies in Israel, Malaysia and India all suggest that blowflies are effective at pollinating mangoes, while trials in the US and New Zealand showed that the European blue blowfly (Calliphora vicina) produced as good a yield of leek and carrot seed as bees.

- The essential fly