“Be yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be.”
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
irving berlin’s “let’s face the music and dance” is a familiar and classic older love song, full of swing influence and 1930s jazz syncopation. the titular lyric in question is used to suggest that while there may be trouble ahead, right now, the lovers are here together–so they’ll face the music and dance. HOWEVER, without context, the lyric could be taken with a slightly darker tone, the phrase about facing the music turns into the common saying at the end of a story where the criminal finally gets his due. but then to dance. to dance to the music and police waiting for you, to face the consequences of previous actions, to go out with a song. in this essay i will–
Okay, here's MY take on "Let's Face the Music and Dance". YMMV.
Trigger warnings for discussion of infidelity and suicide.
So on the surface this looks like a good thing. After all, we need mature and old-growth forests as they're havens for species dependent on that habitat type, and they are also exceptionally good carbon sinks compared to younger, less complex forests. (A big, old tree will still absorb and hold more carbon than a new, quick-growing one, and in fact for the first twenty or so years of its life a tree is actually carbon positive, releasing more than it absorbs.)
However, timber industries are trying to paint mature forests as fire hazards that need to be thinned out due to an abundance of plant life. They also tend to oppose leaving snags and nurse logs in the forest as "fuel", because they'd rather salvage what lumber they can from a freshly dead tree. So of course they're trying to push for cutting down trees as the solution to climate change's threat to mature forests.
Large, old trees are generally better adapted to surviving a fire simply by sheer size. Some have other adaptations, such as deeply grooved bark that can create relatively cooler pockets of air around the tree to help it survive, and the branches of older, taller trees of some species are higher up the trunk, away from lower-burning fires. And those old trees that survive are often important for helping to restore the forest ecosystem afterward, from providing seeds for new trees to offering wildlife safe haven and food.
When timber companies come in and log a forest, even if they don't take all the trees, they leave behind all the branches and twigs and just take the trunks. This creates a buildup of fine fuels that burn very quickly (think the twigs and paper you use to start a campfire), while removing coarse fuels that take longer to catch fire. In fact, an area that is subjected to salvage logging after a fire is much more likely to burn again within a few years due to all the fine fuels left behind by salvage logging.
Another factor is that not all forests are the same, even at similar ages. Here in the Pacific Northwest, as one example, the forests east of the Cascades live in drier conditions with slower plant growth, and low-level wildfires that can clean out ladder fuels before they pile up too high are more common. In those locations prescribed burns make sense.
However, the fire ecology of forests on the west side is less understood; because lightning storms are less common and the climate is wetter, fires just don't happen as often. And west-side forests are simply more productive, with denser vegetation that grows back quickly after even large fires like 2017's Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia River Gorge. Historically speaking, west-side forests get fewer, but larger, fires. So the prescribed burns and other strategies employed for east-side forests aren't necessarily a good fit.
Finally, mature forests are much more biodiverse, and support many more species than a monocultural tree plantation. As climate change continues to affect the planet, mature forests and other complex ecosystems are going to become increasingly crucial to protecting numerous species, to include those dependent only on those ecosystem types. Thinning may seem like a great idea at first, but even if it isn't as destructive as clearcutting it will still damage a forest in ways that will take years to restore.
We really need to be wary of the narrative that thinning is the only way to curb climate change's effects on mature forests. It's a more complex situation than that, and we need to prioritize preserving these increasingly rare places as much as possible.
#I spend every Saturday out in the woods and I can confirm#old growth forests are just so much healthier#I don't even call replanted “forests” as actual forests#they are tree farms to be cut again in 50 years#they have NO biodiversity and are pretty much dead#forestry#climate change#climate chaos#surely there must be a better way to make toilet paper
Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope & Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932) (Corbis)
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
—
Johann Hari,
(via bigfatsun)
💙HAPPY BIRTHDAY ZACHARY QUINTO (June 2, 1977)💙
If your goal is to normalize gender-nonconformity you’re gonna have to accept that some people will fuck with gender as hard as they can while still being unequivocally, 100% cis and that is okay. There’s no egg to crack or callout to write. This is a good thing actually.
Reblog and put in the tags a food you didn't like as a kid but like now & a food you did like as a kid but now don't.
mmmh I grew up very poor and im always very stressed about money and I can never figure out what goal im supposed to set for myself that would allow me to be like "okay this good this is decent I can relax a little" so here's a question for all of you :
please money anxiety is so big for me I always wonder how it manifests in other but not a lot of people accept to talk about it
(for reference rn 1000€=1071$)
#I'm a broke bitch#I live paycheck to paycheck#I'm unemployed now too#If I had $5k I would stop worrying#I'll be working until I die#every time I start to get ahead something happens#my special needs kid is finally an adult#and I can HAVE resources#you're not allowed to have resources if you're getting gov't assistance in any way#and then my preschool went out of business#right when things were looking good