>We removed 1.5 million plants at 21 events in seven state parks this year.
I have been involved in Ardisia and Tallow removal efforts here in the US south. When the infestation is this bad, you're not going to solve it with mechanical methods, no matter how hard you try and how many people you have doing it. Chemicals can definitely help, but they often have unexpected detrimental side effects to other native plants and animals (though sometimes they have unexpected beneficial effects on other native plants - I've seen rare prairie natives pop up in Louisiana after Triclopyr killed off overcrowded baccaris under power lines).
I wonder, could we develop a "gene drive" for plants?
And be prepared to interact with many other animals. This includes the ones we all seem to love, like birds and bees and fireflies, but also those that are typically considered vermin, like spiders, snakes, mice, wasps, roaches.
Not that there's anything really bad about that. It just requires a change to how you approach your outdoor spaces.
Friend of mine has 2 neighbors who have gone full don't mow back to nature and all that. No, it doesn't look 'natural' or anything else nice. It looks like what is: overgrown weeds, sprawling vines (kudzu, poison ivy), several years of desiccated branches and stems (glad we aren't in a fireprone area), and scraggly, non-native trees trying to take hold.
But the best thing for my friend is how much rats like it. Not mice, rats. Lots of rats.
The article indicates that the bulk of the extinction of large mammals happened during the Quaternary Extinction[1], between 52kya and 9kya, so 100 years ago the damage was already done. It also makes the argument that the extinction events in each region coincided with the arrival of humans to that region, which would imply that these extinctions were not due to climatic changes.
I don't mean to imply that we're doing enough right now to keep our planet healthy. I agree with your sentiment and just wanted to provide a little context and clarification.
Accidents on bikes happen, which is a generally accepted risk among parents. I think they'll have more luck with the helmet manufacturer lawsuit, given that the girl died of a head injury.
We do get a lot of rain and there are a lot of low areas. It was mostly "bottomland" before the woods were cleared out. Back in 2016, it basically rained for 15 straight days and flooded huge portions of north and east Baton Rouge. The past couple of weeks (start of August) have also been relatively wet, so that's likely why you're seeing excess water right now.
>Arrest warrants can “go stale” due to the passage of time and changing circumstances, and one from 1955 almost certainly wouldn’t pass muster before a court, even if a sheriff agreed to serve it, said Ronald J. Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi.
>But combined with any new evidence, the original arrest warrant “absolutely” could be an important stepping stone toward establishing probable cause for a new prosecution, he said.
The article mentions planting natives and leaving leaf litter for the insects to nest in. Anecdotally, that works extremely well. My neighbor always leaves his leaves under the trees (gums), and I'd noticed his yard always has a prolific firefly population. Two years ago, after I started to get interested in native plants, I started doing the same thing, and this year for the first time ever I have lightning bugs as well!
I've also seen a plethora of other native bugs that I've never seen before, but that could just be due to the fact that I wasn't really very interested in them before.
Yup, small conservations efforts can make a real difference.
Leaving sections of our yard a little more wild, and bird and insect population went up, this includes lightning bugs, which we continue to get in abundance (we're in a reasonably urban area).
I've planted milkweed, it took a few years, but now we get monarchs every year too.
Jonathan Franzen wrote a great article on this that went viral (considering the topic) a few years ago https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture . He basically argues that the cataclysmic worries about climate change should not paralyze us to make changes that promote local conservation, which have real tangible benefits for biodiversity on a small scale.
The farm we purchased 6+ years ago is just starting to see fireflies and bats come back. We look at dusk visible bats to gauge our bug population. We stopped spraying and are allowing fields to go back to a mixture of natives and grasses. Also started mowing strips instead of bush hogging the whole field during the summer to give shelter to animals and insects. The biggest impact we have seen is that we have more of a "bug balance". The first two years we were here the garden plants were destroyed by pests. Now we have about a 20% reduction in garden production. We do not spray or fertilize. We have also discontinued the previous owner's habit of putting chicken litter (from commercial poultry facilities) on our hay and grazing fields. We have not been able to measure that effect yet.
Excellent to hear how you are bringing back the native grasses and insects! In what part of the world are you?
Have you tried no-till agriculture? We're finding great satisfaction and success with it, and a lot of excellent information from Charles Dowding [1] — with lots of really detailed text and videos of how he manages his organic farm, showing those key details that are so often assumed or glossed over.
Of course mentioned in the article, the Xerces Society has many excellent resources to help the pollinators and other key insects [2] — good info for everyone.
Always good to see people having a clue about sustaining nature and doing something about it — so many are just oblivious and it will literally kill us all.
We have on a limited scale...honestly grass growth has been a problem. With corn...works fine. With bush beans the grass grows too much and we are forced to weedeat/cut etc. since we can't put animals in with it. Squash we got a decent first and second crop but a third (which is pushing it anyway) had issues with a lot of rain and too much grass growth which caused mold. With pumpkins we have had better luck using a tine plow and planting between the grass furrows then moving the pumpkins onto the dirt as they mature. The biggest issue we have had is an over abundance of grass with no till since we don't spray a burn down on any of our cover crops.
Ever since I was a kid, whenever I would read things like this or stuff about animals doing human-like things, I always wind up thinking "what would it be like to be <whatever animal> for a day?", and in particular, what exactly _are_ the similarities between human cognition and other animals'. Even as a thought experiment along the lines of "assume we had a machine that could swap brains", it's always seems reasonable to assume that there are certain faculties that we possess that would not translate and would render the experience uncomprehendable (i.e., as a bird, do I even have the ability to actively probe my consciousness, to conceive and remember higher-order thoughts? I've always assumed the answer is a hard no).
I find myself wondering more and more if we are more similar than I give animals credit for.
I was confused at first because the article mentions that "a spacecraft bound for the center of the solar system would need to slow itself down" and "engineers must take Parker past Venus seven times throughout the mission, so that the spacecraft can use that planet’s gravity as a brake", but you mention that PSP is traveling very fast (and indeed I've always understood that items orbiting closer to the center travel faster). Is this just a dumbing-down in the article's verbiage, or is it common to think of shrinking the perihelion as "braking"?
Think about it as a vector. Imagine if you were a god, and you placed a particle in the same orbit as Earth. Now imagine you wanted to smash it into the sun. How would you do it?
For the particle to fall straight "down" to the sun, in a straight line, you would have to cancel all of its orbital velocity.
That's why it's difficult to get close to the sun and it requires a lot of energy. You have to subtract out a large part of Earth's orbital velocity.
But that's just one part of the explanation. It's not intuitive per se (I imagine it as a play between kinetic and potential energies), but the closer you are to a body, the faster your orbit. The farther out the "slower" your orbit.
If I get you right, the braking slows the orbiting object down. But that slow-down causes it to move to a lower orbit, losing potential energy in exchange for increased orbital velocity. And the velocity you drop in high orbit, you gain with interest as you move to low orbit.
Passing by Venus is lowering the spacecraft's periapsis, increasing the orbit's eccentricity. The lower the satellite goes, the faster it will be at periapsis. Those speeds the GP comment is refering to are, in all likelihood, velocity as periapses.
I have been involved in Ardisia and Tallow removal efforts here in the US south. When the infestation is this bad, you're not going to solve it with mechanical methods, no matter how hard you try and how many people you have doing it. Chemicals can definitely help, but they often have unexpected detrimental side effects to other native plants and animals (though sometimes they have unexpected beneficial effects on other native plants - I've seen rare prairie natives pop up in Louisiana after Triclopyr killed off overcrowded baccaris under power lines).
I wonder, could we develop a "gene drive" for plants?