quercus

Despite a common popular image of prehistoric Native peoples of the Southeast clad only in sewn leather, including footwear, the majority of archeologically recovered shoes were made using woven plant fiber; specifically, the leaves of a plant known as “rattlesnake master” (Eryngium yuccifolium).

n her 2016 Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein examines how Said's ideas of racial hierarchy, including Orientalism, have been the silent partners to climate change since the earliest days of the steam engine, continuing to present day decisions to let entire nations drown and others warm to lethal levels. The lecture looks at how Said’s bold universalist vision might form the basis for a response to climate change grounded in radical inclusion, belonging and restorative justice.

The Association of Space Explorers reached out to their fellow astronauts to pass on a simple message of solidarity, hope and collaboration to combat climate change and reach our political leaders during such a crucial time.

Simone Weil (1909 — 1943) was a French philosopher, labor activist, ascetic and mystic.

The author of the introduction, Gustave Thibon, shares the circumstances of his meeting Weil:

In June 1941 the Reverend Father Perrin, a Dominican friend then living at Marseilles, sent me a letter which I do not happen to have kept but which ran more or less as follows: ‘There is a young Jewish girl here, a graduate in philosophy and a militant supporter of the extreme left. She is excluded from the University by the new laws and is anxious to work for a while in the country as a farm hand. I feel that such an experiment needs supervision and I should be relieved if you could put her up in your house.’

Thibon later shares how he gained possession of Weil's writings which would become Gravity and Grace:

I saw her for the last time at the beginning of 1942. At the station she gave me a portfolio crammed with papers, asking me to read them and to take care of them during her exile. As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: ‘Goodbye till we meet again in this world or the next!’ She suddenly became serious and replied: ‘In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life. I watched her for a moment as she was disappearing down the street. We were not to meet again: contacts with the eternal in the time order are fearfully ephemeral.

The Philosophize This! podcast has a four part introductory series on Simone Weil (with transcripts). There are short videos from this series on their clips channel on YouTube.

The Talk Gnosis podcast hosted a discussion about Weil's work featuring two poets.

17 years ago, I was amazed by the incredibly loud pulsing chorus of cicadas in my backyard. I improvised this tune that I had to name "The Cicada Reel". I recorded the tune a year later on "Journey to the Heartland" (Maggie’s Music, 2005). And the cicadas are back in full force. Shortly after I recorded this video, they hit 93 dB’s. So here it is again: The Cicada Reel, played on a Dusty Strings D670 with dampers.

Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.

CW: Around the 20 minute mark, footage of an execution is briefly shown.

Related essays can be found on ways-of-seeing.com

Interesting tidbit: the creator of this video was arrested in the 1990s during the Satanic panic.

Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Full text can be found on:

libcom.org | theanarchistlibrary.org | gitbooks.io

The depth psychology of C. G. Jung provides a set of concepts for exploring the spiritual aspect of nature. According to this view, spiritual experiences occur when basic patterns or archetypes within the psyche are projected onto natural environments. Implications of this viewpoint for natural resource management and research are discussed.

Treesearch archive / Archive of article (PDF)

Join Iowa attorney and business professor Rosanne Plante as she explains what to do if the “Weed Police” knock on your door!

Most towns, cities, and other municipalities have weed ordinances (local law) concerning what is a weed, what is not defined as a weed in their jurisdiction, and what is allowed to be grown on the property of local citizens. How do you know if you are really in violation, or if your “flowers” just remind others of weeds?

Rosanne presents a handy checklist to use if you are ever accused of breaking a weed ordinance. Many times, citizens are not in violation at all, but can use the citation or threat of a citation as a teaching moment for local government officials.

As a past city attorney herself, Rosanne has extensive experience not only drafting city ordinances of all kinds but also prosecuting offenders. She truly knows what is needed to “prove up” a weed violation.

Download a Sample Native Planting Ordinance: https://wildones.org/resources/

In this episode we film more habitat destruction in South Texas, this time for the purposes of grazing cattle in a desert.

Echinocereus enneacanthus, Coryphantha macromeris runyonii, Ancistrocactus scheeri and others are prevented from being destroyed in this act of senseless bulldozing. Ecotourism possibilities abound here due to the presence of numerous rare birds and cactus species and an abundance of winter texans that would happily pay to see and protect this land, but ranching and cattle are the convention here, and human beings rarely break with convention unless forced to by unforeseen circumstances which are sure to arrrive to the region, eventually.

Monarch on rose milkweed, Asclepias incarnata.

I dug this out myself, roughly 6 feet in diameter and 4 inches deep. Given how fast everything is growing and self-seeding, I'll be able to expand closer to the street next year.

Southeastern USA Plains. This is the last stop for rainwater before the storm drain leading to the Chesapeake Bay.

This is in the Southeastern USA Plains.

The mature plants (seen on the left side) went to seed in the fall. I broke apart the seed heads over the right side in February.