So many flower buds!

This is full sun between a brick wall and concrete pathway. Sandy clay, soil is wet in the winter and turns into pottery during the summer. What was four pads four years ago now covers 6 sq feet! Doesn't get much higher than a foot tall and edible.

Here's some flowers from last June:

Eastern Prickly Pear, Opuntia humifusa, is native to Eastern North America. Best for people who enjoy playing the game operation!

Bonnetta Adeeb, founder & President of STEAM ONWARD, Inc, a Non-profit 501(c3) organization in Southern Maryland, as well as the projects: Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance (UCFA) and Ujamaa Seeds. UCFA is a collective of emergent and seasoned growers who cultivate heirloom seeds and grow culturally relevant plants for food, healing, and textiles. Ujamaa recognizes the need for increased diversity in farming and the seed industry, and the need to provide more opportunities and support for growers from historically oppressed and marginalized communities. To this end the UCFA is working to bridge the gap between prospective growers and seed companies. In addition, she works with the Cooperative Gardens Commission to distribute free heirloom seeds to communities in need serving 300 seed hubs nationally. January 12 [2023], saw the launch of a new Black Indigenous led project. Ujamaa Seeds is and online store cultivating and distributing culturally important seeds to increase diversity in the seed industry. Learn more about Bonnetta and her work at https://ujamaafarms.com and https://ujamaaseeds.com.

Original on New Politics, Winter 2022

Although the UN released a special report two years ago stressing that one of the most effective ways to mitigate warming is a plant-based diet,^[4]^ not one day of COP26 was devoted to the issue, in stark contrast to the time dedicated to energy, transport, and finance. Even as protests outside the conference called attention to this issue, the delegates inside ignored it.

One reason cited for the omission was that addressing animal agriculture would unfairly target historically oppressed communities, continuing the Global North’s legacy of dominating and controlling those they’ve colonized.^[5]^ While this may seem motivated by the noble impulse to be “sensitive” to colonial dynamics, the knowledge that these same imperialist nations’ delegates also removed from the conference’s concluding agreement the so-called Loss and Damages Finance Facility,^[6]^ which mandated compensation be paid to poorer countries for climate damages, should put any uncertainty about their true motives to rest. This is just one manifestation of how the call for sensitivity toward oppressed groups is exploited by those most responsible for current crises in order to avoid making transformative changes within their own societies.^[7]^

Unfortunately, the Western left bears some responsibility for this manipulative usage of political correctness, due both to its collective failure to reject the neoliberal exploitation of identity politics, and to its constant smearing of veganism and animal liberation as “middle class and white.”^[8]^ While it’s certainly true that vegan and animal advocacy are often conducted in colonial, Eurocentric ways, that does not mean there are no liberatory ways of advancing these goals, or that no marginalized individuals do this type of work themselves. Around the world, Indigenous, colonized, and working-class people engage in praxis that recognizes how the fates of other species enmesh with our own, and that our collective survival depends upon the liberation of humans and other species alike.

In this patch, I'm working towards a mix of violets (Viola sororia), nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi), white avens (Geum canadense), and yellow woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta). There's also clover, chickweed, mock strawberry and others I'm weeding out. The shrub is an elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) which should get 10 feet wide. The top right corner is a mix of Philadelphia fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus) and orange coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida).

This is an urban area in the North American Eastern Temperate Forests. My yard is the lowest point of the street next to the storm drain, a "rain garden" for the block. Here, the violets thrive from deep shade to full sun. They are the host plant for fritillary butterflies.

Another good reason for killing your lawn is that once you've done so, you can turn your yard into a literal classroom in order to study things like plant identification and the ecology of the native habitat that once stood where your house is.

In some ways, planting native plant gardens (which can sometimes include non-native, non-invasive species of plants) are small acts habitat restoration in miniature, sure.

Equally (if not more) rewarding however is the ability to learn about the plants that together compose your native ecosystem by growing them right in front of you. Grow them throughout their entire life cycle - observe what pollinates them, what disperses the fruits and seeds, what eats them. The rewards from this kind of sh*t can't be overstated.

We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.

Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.

Gardeners often don’t realize gardens make for great firefly habitat, helping to replace lost natural habitat. The common firefly — the Big Dipper firefly (Photinus pyralis) — readily takes to an organic habitat. The trick is to make your garden as inviting as possible for fireflies to take up residence.

Fireflies spend up to 95% of their lives in larval stages. They live in soil/mud/leaf litter and spend from 1-2 years growing until finally pupating to become adults. This entire time they eat anything they can find. As adults, they only live 2-4 weeks. Females that have mated successfully need a place to lay eggs. They will lay eggs in many spots, but gardens offer an oasis with a source of soil moisture good for larval development.

This is a Texas based organization, but many of the plants (or their close cousins) are found across the continent.

Institution: UCLA

Lecturer: Professor Courtenay Raia

University Course Code: HIST 2D

Subject: #history #science #religion #magic #antiquity #modernity

Year: 2009

Description: Professor Courtenay Raia lectures on science and religion as historical phenomena that have evolved over time. Examines the earlier mind-set before 1700 when into science fitted elements that came eventually to be seen as magical. The course also question how Western cosmologies became "disenchanted." Magical tradition transformed into modern mysticisms is also examined as well as the political implications of these movements. Includes discussion concerning science in totalitarian settings as well as "big science" during the Cold War.

In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.

Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.

“Burden-Stelly is not content with simply contributing to existing scholarship. She shakes things up. And Black Scare / Red Scare hits with volcanic force, sweeping away the prevailing tendency to underestimate the Black Marxist threat to racial capitalism and the embedded anti-Blackness driving state repression. Burden-Stelly details precisely how the ‘political economy of capitalist racism’ played a decisive role in the super-exploitation and subjugation of the Black working class, resulting in a protracted war on Black radical movements. A powerful, pathbreaking work that not only reorients the long history of anticommunism on Black liberation but moves the theory of racial capitalism to an entirely new level.” Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history. Her research pursues two complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression. Her second area of focus examines twentieth-century Black anticapitalist intellectual thought, theory, and praxis. She is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and her single-authored book titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States is forthcoming in November 2023. She is also the co-editor, with Dr. Jodi Dean, of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022).

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.