quercus

As the number of observations submitted to the citizen science platform iNaturalist continues to grow, it is increasingly important that these observations can be identified to the finest taxonomic level, maximizing their value for biodiversity research. Here, we explore the benefits of acting as an identifier on iNaturalist.

National Archives Identifier: 24376
Local Identifier: 111-EF-6
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/24376

Creator(s): Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. (9/18/1947 - 3/1/1964) (Most Recent)

From: Series: Educational Films, 1942 - 1947

Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 - 1985

This item was produced or created: 1945

Other Title(s):Educational Film, no. 6

Scope & Content: Dramatizes the destructive effects of racial and religious prejudice. Reel 1 shows a fake wrestling match and "crooked" gambling games. An agitator addresses a street crowd; he almost convinces one man in the audience until the man begins to talk to a Hungarian refugee from Germany. A Nazi speaker harangues a crowd in Germany denouncing Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons. Reel 2, a German unemployed worker joins Hitler's Storm Troops. SS men attack Jewish and Catholic headquarters in Germany, and beat up a Jewish storekeeper. A German teacher explains Nazi racial theories; the teacher is dragged away by German soldiers.

In Western thought, the apparently immaterial ‘rational mind’ has long been isolated from, and elevated above, other ways of knowing and being. Anna Souter visits Embodied Forms: Painting Now, an exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac, to explore the possibility that art might be able to help us dissolve these boundaries, opening the doors to new ways of coming to know the climate.

This black elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) bloomed for the first time back in June, now is blooming again with a flower cluster bigger than my head lol.

Close-up of the tiny flowers:

Counteract the Bleakness of the Modern Urban Environment of rampant homelessness and over-priced housing by propagating and planting trees in neglected urban spaces. Tony Santoro shows you how with help from the Department of Unauthorized Forestry.

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation: Leave the Leaves!

Leaves are not litter

They're food and shelter for butterflies, beetles, bees, moths, and more. Tell friends and neighbors to just #leavetheleaves

In her recent collection of essays, Vesper Flights, English naturalist Helen MacDonald observes that awareness of the specific plants and animals in the natural world around you increasingly means “opening yourself to constant grief.” She is not alone in noticing the rising tide of grief that comes with awareness of climate change and its accompanying environmental devastation. The question of what to do with this climate grief is gaining momentum, because one of the increasingly salient features of our existence right now is the pain of watching the world burn. I am interested in the spiritual consequences of this grief and the possibility (and even necessity) of mourning as a spiritual practice in a largely secular context. MacDonald herself does not identify as religious, but she remarks that, when writing about environmental grief, she “kept trying to find the right words to describe certain experiences and failing.” Her “secular lexicon didn’t capture what they were like.”^1^ Spiritual discourse has the resources for touching this aspect of our present experience, and I argue that this discourse can and should be available, irrespective of whether one personally believes that spirituality and theology refer to metaphysical realities.

Drawing on the work of a small but growing number of scholars exploring the spiritual dimensions of climate change, I suggest that climate grief is a phenomenon with spiritual significance, and that mourning as a spiritual (but potentially secular) practice is a necessary step for honoring and dealing with “solastalgia.” Glenn Albrecht, an Australian of Sri Lankan and European descent, coined this neologism to capture the inchoate negative feelings that emerge as we observe the destruction of the world around us. A combination of solace, desolation, and nostalgia, solastalgia is “an intense desire for the place where one is a resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or solace,” as well as the “pain or distress” that results from watching that solace disappear and “the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory.” Albrecht’s neologism came in part from the consideration that, for many Indigenous people, the scientific terms “ecology” and “ecosystem” “fail to capture the emotional and cultural dimensions of the human relationship to land.” He wanted to avoid the neocolonization of reading bioscientific terms into Indigenous systems.^2^

I agree with Lisa Sideris and other scholars writing about human emotional responses to the continuing destruction of life on Earth: neither blind optimism nor paralytic despair is the appropriate reaction to the state of affairs that has led to solastalgia. Rather, it is time to mourn. Paradoxically, this mourning, which may at first glance seem to be a giving-up, is an essential step toward transformation.

A Buddhist teacher shares their thoughts on shitposting, internet trolls, and nonduality.

Plenty of scholars have described nuts as a crucial food source for the Wabanaki people, and early colonial records indicate the same. In 1607, colonists from the Popham Colony described the Casco Bay islands as “overgrown with woods very thick as oaks, walnut, pine trees & many other things growing as sarsaparilla, hazle nuts & whorts in abundance.”

Ethnobotanist Nancy Asch Sidell documents that charred beechnut remains that are more than 5,000 years old have been discovered “preserved in a hearth feature” in central Maine. At the archaelogical site on the well-documented Norridgewock village on the Kennebec River – a Wabanaki town destroyed by the British in 1724 – researchers have recovered evidence of hazelnut and beechnut consumption, Sidell reports.

“The use and importance of nuts is as ancient as the people themselves,” Kavasch told me. “The trees they come from were so sacred and important. But many of our European ancestors couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They weren’t thinking of it as a nut forest.”