Can I get a little signal boosting help, pls Mastodon? 🙏
I’m looking to fill some free time helping out organisations working for #conservation and #biodiversity.
I have a weird hodgepodge of programming/program management/marketing expertise, and am currently studying towards a MSc in biodiversity and wildlife health. Teeny tiny bit of past conservation NGO experience. Based outside Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Happy to volunteer, in field, or behind a desk, whatever you need.
Just three years after replacing their manicured front lawns with a wild flower meadow, Trinity College Dublin reports the emergence of rare orchid species in the heart of the city.
An incredible positive illustration of the benefits of allowing for biodiversity
A rant about leaf blowers. Just stop with them. Gas ones spew CO2 and particulates at an alarming rate, they’re the definition of noise pollution, and they disturb insect habitat under your hedges. But they’re also just not that good at getting leaves together. Here’s the thing that no blower guy will tell you, but every SE Asian grandma knows: the best way to get leaves off your hard surfaces is this tool right here. 1/3 #gardening#GardeningMastodon#insects#biodiversity#Autumn#FallColors
There aren't enough swear words to express how angry this makes me!!
"Industrial Farming Has Killed Billions of Birds"
🤬 🤬 🤬 🤬
Worldwide, 49% of all wild bird species are in steep decline.
BirdLife International’s authoritative report, State of the World’s Birds 2022, estimates that there are now nearly three billion fewer wild birds in Canada and the U.S. than a few decades ago, and about 600 million fewer in the European Union.
The single biggest cause of bird declines is chemical-intensive farming. Some birds are killed by pesticides or herbicides, but the most important impacts are loss of food, especially insects and other invertebrates that most bird species depend on, and the spread of fertilizer-intensive monocultures that eliminate shelter and nesting areas. Insect-eating populations declined more than any others.
In short, the collapse of farmland bird populations is closely related to the Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene. The mass slaughter of insects is killing masses of birds.
"The Amazon rain forest is not virgin forest--rather it is a vast garden, cultivated by Indigenous people."
YES!
Europeans, used to a European model of land usage, arrived in the Western Hemisphere and didn't recognize that the woodlands and grasslands of North America and the rain forests of South America were not wildernesses, but managed lands.
This is so cool! There is an annual mass #biodiversity experiment in Danish schools, which this year involved 30,000 kids collecting + examining samples of moss + lichen. Only 5% have been examined so far but they've already discovered 5 species of water bear unknown to science.
Yes! Amazing news! The EU Parliament just voted through the EU Nature Restoration Law, which aims to restore our badly degraded ecosystems. The law will set legally binding targets for nature restoration in member states.
Next stop, writing it into law at a country level.
Suck it European People's Party, suck it European Conservatives. Some of us actually want #biodiversity.
Königswinter Germany reduced annual electricity consumption for street lighting from 1300 MWh to 385 MWh from 2017-2022, including turning off many streetlights during midnight to 5 am. The result was a savings to the city of 80,000€ per year.
The police of Bonn did a crime study, and found that there was no measurable change.
We live under the flight path of wildlife traveling between native forests in #CoastalNSW. At midsummer, these creatures are all very busy feeding on, pollinating, propagating (through excreting seeds), and regenerating not only the great native forests, but many private gardens.
Why not give your local native birds and wildlife a gift for #2024 by planning now to plant edible native flowers, shrubs and trees wherever you live. Or find a Bush Regeneration group to work with on local public lands.
Before long, #Biodiversity Value will become a measurable contribution to the value of both public and privately owned land, including yours. It’s the beautiful gift you give to yourself, your children’s children, our wildlife, and the planet.
Cette photo a été prise au parc national Bükk, en Hongrie 🇭🇺.
L'arbre le plus mince a été coupé il y a des années ; le plus grand le tient et le nourrit depuis lors ; ils se « réveillent » ensemble au printemps et « s'endorment » ensemble à l'automne.
Le terme scientifique est « l'anastomose » en français 🇫🇷 ou «l'inosculation » en anglais 🇬🇧 :
C'est ce phénomène naturel dans lequel des parties de deux arbres différents, généralement mais pas exclusivement de la même espèce, poussent ensemble, s'auto-greffant et partageant les nutriments.
This outstanding article related to #NativePlants has many useful points for preparing for the next growing season and improving the #environment in general. I'll pull out some main ideas in a threaded series this week.
First up: Insects are the primary conduits for energy to get from plants to animals. And lowly caterpillars turn out to be the most important.
Our job, gardeners, is to plant more caterpillar food!
Per the article☝️, the population of American birds has declined by 30% since the 1970s. To help, you must support the bugs that the birds need to reproduce. But only 14% of #NativePlants generate 90% of the yummy caterpillars that drive food webs!
So are you planting these?
At the link provided, you can pull up a list of what you need to plant in your ecoregion. Scroll down and click on your list.
All of these were photographed (by me) in my small suburban garden.
I wanted to post this to show that #biodiversity does still exist. With all the climate doom & gloom in the news it sometimes feels really hopeless. Like a battle we've already lost.
But the butterflies are still here. So are the bees & other vital pollinators. It's not too late to protect them.
Gardens don't have to be expensive or elaborate to provide them a home. What matters is that we create space for #pollinators in our landscaped lives. Just adding a few flowers can make all the difference & help ensure these lovely creatures continue to survive.
Not mowing grass in May but then starting again in June always seems like a lost opportunity to me and a waste of a chance to improve urban biodiversity. Instead of ‘no mow May’ how about ‘only mow September-November’? Here’s the result after six years - totally humming with bees and other insect life! #NoMowMay#nomowjune#biodiversity#lawnsareboring#Stirling#Scotland
Today is the day for the #EuropeanParliament to pass the #RestoreNature law. This is vital for the protection of #biodiversity, #climate and our ability to live and feed ourselves on this planet. This law is good for #farming and farmers. No nature, no pollinators, no farming.
Unfortunately this piece of legislation is under attack by the far-right, center-right (EPP) and liberals. You still have a couple of hours to pest your MEPs about it.
(Astro)Physics has been a core part of my personal identity since my childhood and illuminates my views of the natural and human worlds. In particular, doing research on dynamical complexity on astronomical scales has contributed to the development of my increasingly alarmed scientist perspective on a variety of very earthly issues, chief among which our climate & ecological crises.
However, paradoxically (or perhaps as a logical conclusion ? ), what I have learned in part thanks to my astrophysicist viewpoint has also increasingly led me in recent years to wonder if I should not use my scientific skills and training to help mitigate these crises instead of doing astrophysics. After much weighing of what was the best move from my comfy position in the astrophysics ivory tower, I have finally “looked up” from my speculative theoretical calculations, and have recently decided to gradually shift my research priorities to ecological sciences with a focus on biodiversity conservation, in an attempt to make the most of my research training, experience and vocation to modestly help, to the best of my scientific abilities, understand and mitigate the ecological crisis we are facing here, on Earth.
Why ? Well, first of all, with increasing professional experience, my personal views of astrophysics & astronomy have evolved to become quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is a field full of very smart people and intellectually challenging and exciting. But it is also now sufficiently mature that we essentially know all we need to know to grasp our position, both insignificant and precarious, on Earth and in the larger Universe. In some sense, mission accomplished: the field has done its job (well) to scientifically enlighten human bipedes. On the other hand, there remains a myriad of unanswered questions, of lesser importance I think, and more or less interesting to solve, that in my opinion me and most of my colleagues could spend their lives working on without making any significant difference to human progress, knowledge, and well-being in relation to our environment. Most of the research questions we work on have become in my opinion misguided intellectual raisons-d’être in an era of bloated, overhyped academic research and industrial-scale scientific publication. Working on such questions make us feel busy and smart, but in reality my own impression, informed by accumulated experience, is that we are nowhere near to have the adequate tools, theoretical, numerical, observational, or experimental, to make any significant progress on most of these. Why then waste our energy and time on these questions, most of them quite insignificant – when exceptional times invite us to focus our intellect on more pressing issues ? Fact is, astrophysics is and will remain a very speculative field, with very limited falsifiability, in the foreseeable future. I may expand on this in future posts. What matters here is that having spent most of my professional efforts myself on not even being wrong, all of this while the world burns, has become a major existential issue for me.
Then, there is the problem of the pollution footprint of astrophysics. Let’s write this plainly: we are the most polluting scientific field on the planet: mega-observatories, steel and concrete cathedrals of science built in remote desertic locations, mega-space observatories packed with electronics dumped into space by huge rockets (some of them built by corporations that are actively contributing to the destruction of our environment), billions of CPU hours spent in high-performance computing numerical models of doubtful informational value sucking lots of not-so-low-carbon electricity (3t/MCPUh in the lowest-emitting countries), lots of electronic purchases to develop high-tech astronomical instruments, and buzzing international travel all over the world to conferences and international collaborations all contribute to our huge footprint. In my current research institute, each individual, researcher or other, emits on average 28t CO2 eq/ year in his/her professional activities ! My own individual professional footprint, including HPC (but excluding my occasional use of observational data from space observatories) was of the order of 10t CO2 eq/year until recently. None of this is sustainable and justifiable for a field that is nowhere near essential to document and help solve our environmental crises. However, despite a rising awareness among the base, our community has barely started taking significant steps to change that at the science policy power levels that really matter. This would require questioning the actual need for our most polluting, core research activities, and to downscale significantly instrumentally and in term of human resources, especially on the engineering side. I am having a very hard time being part of the problem in the environmental catastrophe movie unfolding in front of our eyes. Here too, I will probably talk more in future posts about the detailed arguments underlying the case I’m making, as I do not want to give the impression that I am saying this lightly.
Mix all these considerations together, and shake with a pinch of mid-career scientist professional existential crisis and boredom, having the feeling of having done everything I could and not being able to give more to the field, and you have the recipe for a major introspection and reconsideration of future career directions. I have honestly grown tired of astrophysical sciences, its research practices, and of my own perceived personal inadequacy to do anything significant there. I feel both useless and wasted. So I have concluded it is high time to use my energy and experience to serve more important research causes before I get too old and intellectually rotten, modestly and with whatever limited intellectual capacities I have left at my advanced age of 44. What better cause to serve than ecology and biodiversity conservation research for someone with a deep sensitivity for nature, mountains, and complex patterns of the natural world ?
This place will be here to describe my experience, thoughts and struggles as a scientist in the process of such a (scientifically difficult, and certainly not obvious) transition. I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience as it unfolds, both for egoistic reasons, to encourage myself and to conserve momentum when things get difficult (as they inevitably will do), but also to make other younger or older people with similar questionings, and maybe eager to take similar steps, relate and share. And also maybe as a bit of an activivist too, to contribute to instill through some logical arguments some sense of emergency and questioning among some of my colleagues less sensitive to these issues.
How, when, where all of this is going to happen, what is going to be posted in this place, that will be a story for upcoming posts. I hope you enjoy the ride. Please feel free to weigh in in the comments now and then to tell me/us about your own experience and thoughts on the matters I will post about, especially if you are a scientist yourself. I would also like this place to be a forum for debate or experience-sharing. What is important for me though is that this is always done constructively, in a civil and informed way, and in good faith. My view of these exchanges is that they should in the end lift us up all to help us better understand our place and role as humans and sometimes scientists, both as part of, and powerful actors (for the best or the worst) of our earthly natural world. This kind of conversation, in my view, is more than ever needed (actually, well-beyond scientific circles) in times of massive media dis- or mis-information and through-the-roof political irresponsibility on the biggest issues of our times, preserving the physical wonder that is nature and life on the pale blue dot.
Contrary to popular dogma, industrial agriculture cannot "feed the world." Below are seven key takeaways from a report comparing the industrial food chain to the smallholder peasant food web.
Peasants are the main or sole food providers to more than 70% of the world’s people, and peasants produce this food with often much less than 25% of the resources — including land, water, fossil fuels — used to get all of the world’s food to the table.
The industrial food chain uses at least 75% of the world’s agricultural resources and is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but provides food to less than 30% of the world’s people.
For every $1 consumers pay to industrial food chain retailers, society pays another $2 for the industrial food chain’s health and environmental damages. The total bill for the industrial food chain's direct and indirect cost is 5 times governments’ annual military expenditure.
The industrial food chain lacks the agility to respond to climate change. Its research and development is not only distorted but also declining as it concentrates the global food market.
The peasant food web nurtures 9-100 times the biodiversity used by the industrial food chain, across plants, livestock, fish, and forests. Peasants have the knowledge, innovative energy and networks needed to respond to climate change; they have the operational scope and scale; and they are closest to the hungry and malnourished.
There is still much about our food systems that we don’t know we don’t know. Sometimes, the industrial food chain knows but isn’t telling. Other times, policymakers aren’t looking. Most often, we fail to consider the diverse knowledge systems in the peasant food web.
The bottom line: at least 3.9 billion people are either hungry or malnourished because the industrial food chain is too distorted, vastly too expensive, and — after 70 years of trying — just can’t scale up to feed the world.
Uk folk: As we move into spring/summer, and you notice some pretty verges blooming with wildflowers, please remember to contact your council and say how much you like them & how good they are.
If they only hear from people complaining it looks untidy, they will cut it back.
If there are no verges left long, write & suggest they should be
Plantlife (UK charity) has more info https://www.plantlife.org.uk/our-work/road-verges/
If not in the uk you can do this too, I just don’t know who you would contact #Biodiversity#UK
Ich habe einen etwas zu langen Text geschrieben, aber ich bin wütend und traurig, deshalb musste das sein. Es geht um den Klimawandel, um Biodiversitätsverlust und um Ecological Grief. Um Frustration, Wissenschaft und Schmerz. ❤️🩹
"Instead of betting on endless technological progress, we should aim for a transformation of societal priorities that can put humanity on a sustainable and fair path where resources are managed for the future and shared equitably among all."