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(Originally posted elsewhere on 7 November 2022.) Great question. This post will outline context stuff. My follow-up post will answer more directly. Preview: There were white rhinos in North Africa relatively close, though they will now likely be extinct this century. But to situate this: We can guess that
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(Originally posted elsewhere on 29 May 2020.) Hi. No bother at all :) Here is the text of my original post (from 22 May 2020): So about the communities of moss balls which live atop glaciers and appear to be “moving” in a “coordinated” fashion. A bit of a sensational application
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When I was a teenager—fixated on the (to me) extraordinary presence of “coastal-type” rainforest so far inland and how its relative fertility contrasted with the “dryland” sagebrush steppe of much of the adjacent Columbia Plateau—the region received less attention as a cohesive unit, particularly in the US.
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(Originally posted elsewhere 3 July 2019, with updates August 2019 and January 2020.) So, in 2019, the southern mountain caribou was formally declared (by US federal authorities) extinct within the Columbia Mountains/inland temperate rainforest region. But this wasn’t the only contest—possibly not even the most notable—over
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Originally posted elsewhere 30 January 2019: A relict species of megafauna has barely held on to existence in the inland temperate rainforest region within borders of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. The “mountain caribou” or “southern mountain caribou” was the last native "reindeer” to live in the Lower 48 of
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Work acquaintance, ostensibly as a joke about me and my interests, asked if I had any educational reading recommendations about “Santa’s sleigh” So, to pass the time, thought we’d have a dialogue about the history of urban vehicularization, pedestrian encounters with vehicles, and control of space and mobility,
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(Public domain image of an illustration from 1875 by cartoonist Henry Worrall, provided by the Kansas Historical Society to Wikimedia Commons.) Just wanted to summarize takeaways from Alexandra Wagner’s work on implications of class; changing paradigms of poverty/disaster relief; nationalism in the marketing of frontier settlement; the curious
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The confinement of 'women of ill repute,' US anxieties of race and empire, and the advent of weaponized medical sciences in California, border stations, and the US-occupied Caribbean, 1908-1918
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In December 1928, Benito Mussolini broke ground—quite literally—on a massive development project targeting the “death inducing swamps” of the Pontine Marshes, the substantial wetland region on Rome’s southern edges, which were to be remade into “New Town” settlements whose residents would model ideal standards of productivity. Having
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So, an acquaintance recently asked for music recommendations—something “dreamy” to help her “feel like a jellyfish” or something. The “deep listening”—attending to other-than-human ethics—may seem to be pretty abstract, but it actually came in handy in a conversation among friends that had to do with
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[E]very [interspecies] meeting in fact reminds us that the being we meet is and always shall be strange to us […]. When beings meet there is a distance between, such that in encountering the slug we also encounter something beyond the slug – a multitude of life we cannot sense. [...] So
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co-worker: “we’re getting fucked by this weekend rush. go grab some extra dish-rags from the basement.” me: “don’t you think it’s interesting how leopards, lions, tigers, caracals, and cheetahs actually all lived alongside each other - in Persia, the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, Kurdish land, Mesopotamia, and