quercus

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
 

Chrissa Carlson, the former Garden and Nutrition Educator at Baltimore's Hampstead Hill Academy, shows us the steps needed to start a school garden and explains the different components of her school garden that not only makes it an effective space for growing plants, but also an engaging classroom.

If you don't have a lawn of your own to convert, this could be a great project for your neighborhood! Retirement communities or houses of worship are some other possible options.

More about the Baltimore Curriculum Project's Food For Life Program can be found here.

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago

Just witnessing tactical urbanism and guerrilla gardening projects were my gateway 😈

 

A science class for middle school students at Panorama Middle School commonly involves a trek out to the prairie behind the school, a sketch of native seeds under the microscope or a homework assignment to track the progress of a backyard bluebird from its birdhouse.

Teacher Mark Dorhout created an outdoor education program at the middle school in Panora to “connect (students) to the natural world,” foster environmental stewardship, and give students a real-world application to the science they learn in the classroom.

 

Once upon a time, the land you tend was stewarded by others – or by nature itself. Learn how to assess your site and the plants that will grow best there.

 

Governments were cracking down on street art everywhere.... until they realized they could make money off of it. Where does this leave street art and its artists today? I explore the street art scene in Toronto and some parts of Berlin to see how street art is navigating its changing culture.

 

Scholar Sunaura Taylor on March 5 [2019] presented a talk titled "Disabled Ecologies: Living with Impaired Landscapes" at UC Berkeley co-sponsored by the Haas Institute's Disability Studies Cluster, the Departments of Art Practice, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.

Learn more about this event here, and check [this link] for a transcript of the talk.

 

The iMWiL! Introductory Critical Media Literacy (Video) Mixtape features interviews with #JanineJackson, #KaliAkuno, #JoyJames, #ClaudeMarks, #SafiyaUmojaNoble, #MorganMaxwell, music from #HecDolo, #TheCornelWestTheory, #TheWelfarePoets, #BigL, #DJPremier plus #KwameTure, #bellhooks, #PaulaGiddings and more! The video outlines some of the key concepts involved in developing an understanding of our media environment including racism, critical thinking, political economy, the state, commercialism, myths of origin, dominant narrative and alternative media.*

*November 2017

 

This is the story of how potential textile waste is intercepted, transformed and given a second life at the Material Research & Development (MRD) Facility of The Or Foundation. Speakers, hangers and laptop stands are a few of the products our talented MRD team is able to create from clothing waste coming out of Kantamanto (the world’s largest secondhand market) that would have ended up in landfills and water bodies.

Too much of the secondhand clothes that are exported to Kantamanto every week ends up as unusable waste that needs to be discarded. As we work to address these problems from source (the Global North), we are also exploring ways to bring down the quantity of waste that ends up polluting our environment. The work of transforming these materials into fibreboards and subsequently into speakers and more is one of the many alternative approaches we have.

With these products we are proving that cleaning up fashion's waste crisis can be creative, colorful and fulfilling with the potential to generate hundreds of jobs making products from materials that are responsibly and thoughtfully crafted.

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 months ago

The main argument of the video is that they are human beings who should be allowed to exist in their own right, outside of the mythologies propagated by polluting corporations and western countercultural movements. It is possible to deconstruct dehumanizing stereotypes while celebrating and advocating for the adoption of traditional ecological practices, but promoting these practices while conceptualizing indigenous people as supernatural fauna is big yuck.

The latter half of the video discusses how they were forced into the market economy to survive, how murderous westward expansion destroyed their cultures, with a major conclusion being:

The United States government is the most ecologically catastrophic force on planet Earth since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

 

Though the trope of the "Ecological Indian" is indelible in popular culture, history tells a much more complicated story. Featuring cutting edge perspectives rarely seen outside academia and in-depth interviews with indigenous historians, climate scientists, and other experts, this video will dispel the paternalistic myths and reveal Native American ecology in all its ingenious, imperfect glory.

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I love these update videos! Most of the stuff I planted two years ago finally started to look like something this summer 😆 but seeing all the monarchs, sootywings, fritillaries, skippers, and so many different bees made the growing pains worth it.

 

As the number of observations submitted to the citizen science platform iNaturalist continues to grow, it is increasingly important that these observations can be identified to the finest taxonomic level, maximizing their value for biodiversity research. Here, we explore the benefits of acting as an identifier on iNaturalist.

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 9 points 4 months ago

I live in a city, but I'll share some programs that/organizers who may provide some inspiration:

BMORE Beautiful - provides trash picking kits and helps residents organize cleanups in their neighborhood. They were incredibly friendly, so might be worth reaching out on how to build a similar program in your area

Weed Warriors - trains participants to recognize and remove common invasive plants, provides training for participants on how to organize efforts in their communities

Community gardening - this video is from an animal liberation podcast, but the guest's opening story of being completely ignorant about gardening but doing it anyway is inspiring. The remainder is about their work on food justice and grassroots organizing

Compost collective - this is the podcast of the guest in the previous video. They interview the founder of Baltimore Compost Collective who works with youth in the city

Guerrilla gardening - this is a classic TED Talk. The speaker discusses growing food in a public space and how they successfully fought their city to keep their garden. They also talk about their volunteer gardening group, planting food gardens at homeless shelters

Maryland Food & Abolition Project - may no longer be active, but an interesting idea nonetheless. Their mission was (is?) to partner community gardens with prisons to provide fresh produce

Echoing @poVoq, don't discount seniors! I used to be a case manager for the elderly and many are more interested than people give them credit for.

 

In Western thought, the apparently immaterial ‘rational mind’ has long been isolated from, and elevated above, other ways of knowing and being. Anna Souter visits Embodied Forms: Painting Now, an exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac, to explore the possibility that art might be able to help us dissolve these boundaries, opening the doors to new ways of coming to know the climate.

 

Counteract the Bleakness of the Modern Urban Environment of rampant homelessness and over-priced housing by propagating and planting trees in neglected urban spaces. Tony Santoro shows you how with help from the Department of Unauthorized Forestry.

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 months ago

The link in the post body has some tips on how to do so responsibly. Might be worth sharing with your neighbors!

 

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation: Leave the Leaves!

Leaves are not litter

They're food and shelter for butterflies, beetles, bees, moths, and more. Tell friends and neighbors to just #leavetheleaves

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 months ago

Cool beans 😉

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I can help out with /c/food

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

The local cottontail raised her litter in my yard and the family didn't care for them, other than using them as a hangout spot. They did eat all the Virginia spiderwort and there's a bunch of violet stems around with no leaves, but mostly they stick to the plantains (Plantago sp.) in the lawn.

I had no idea deer lived in the city until I started doing this. Sometimes I'll catch one sleeping in my backyard which is a surreal sight. They munched the sunchokes, hazelnut, and chokeberry to the ground, but all are bouncing back.

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 2 points 8 months ago

Most of the flowers are divisions of plants, some volunteers and others I got as plugs in summer 2022. I decided to start small and expand over time. The coneflower was four plants last spring which I divided into 12, then into about 30 this spring. Rose milkweed and late boneset are just as prolific.

I have spread some seeds around and others have blown in. The groundcover in the second photo is all volunteer.

The mulch was leftover from a chipdrop. I used it to make the beds look "intentional" when everything was sparse and muddy back in February :) The plan is for everything to grow so dense that I won't need to mulch it again.

[–] quercus@slrpnk.net 6 points 8 months ago

They don’t want most of the crap people plant trying to be Eco friendly anyways or so the landscape architect told me.

Keystone Plants by Ecoregion

The research of entomologist, Dr. Doug Tallamy, and his team at the University of Delaware have identified 14% of native plants (the keystones) support 90% of butterfly and moth lepidoptera species. The research of horticulturist Jarrod Fowler has shown that 15% to 60% of North American native bee species are pollen specialists who only eat pollen from 40% of native plants.

view more: next ›