fun fact: a group of starfish is called a galaxy
I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.(mary oliver, sleeping in the forest)
For your daily dose of fluff, meet the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena)! When disturbed, this critter can raise the hairs on its back, doubling in size to intimidate foes. Found in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and India, it prefers open habitats like savannas and scrublands. This hyena is typically a scavenger that feeds on carrion, but it also supplements its diet with fruits, seeds, and leaves.
Photo: Dop Rushikesh Deshmukh, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
#nature #natureworld #wildlife #wildlifephotography #amazingnature
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqOe4sVPROB/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
For your daily dose of fluff, meet the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena)! When disturbed, this critter can raise the hairs on its back, doubling in size to intimidate foes. Found in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and India, it prefers open habitats like savannas and scrublands. This hyena is typically a scavenger that feeds on carrion, but it also supplements its diet with fruits, seeds, and leaves.
Photo: Dop Rushikesh Deshmukh, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
#nature #natureworld #wildlife #wildlifephotography #amazingnature
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqOe4sVPROB/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
I highly recommend reading the original article it has lots of interesting graphics and pictures
“Four months a year, Ferreira Sandes, 47, crisscrosses São Félix’s almost 85,000 square kilometers (33,000 square miles) in a four-by-four Chevrolet with a cowboy hat on the dash and a revolver under the seat. He’s on the hunt for 5,000 head of cattle to feed a pipeline pumping beef through slaughterhouses owned by Brazilian meatpacking giant JBS SA and others, then into markets from Miami to Hong Kong. The faster he hits his mark, the sooner he goes home. But the competition is fierce, the going slow. He visits three ranches a day—four, if he hustles—picking up 23 cows here, 68 there. For buyers like Ferreira Sandes, there’s no better haunt than São Félix do Xingu. At 2.4 million head, it’s home to Brazil’s largest herd. “If what you’re after is cattle,” he says, “you needn’t go anywhere else.”
But the municipality that’s as big as Ireland lays claim to a more notorious title too. It’s the deforestation capital of the world. Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions—including JBS investors—made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. With Amazon deforestation at a 15-year high, JBS is a case study illustrating how difficult it is to keep such promises.
…
In a 2009 settlement with federal prosecutors, JBS and other slaughterhouses agreed not to buy animals from newly deforested land. While JBS did ramp up its monitoring, it also aggressively expanded in the Amazon and still doesn’t know where its cattle originate.
To determine the size of JBS’s footprint, Bloomberg analyzed the coordinates on about 1 million cattle shipments. JBS has since restricted most of the data, which cover an estimated 18 million cows sent to slaughterhouses in the states of Rondônia, Pará, Acre, Mato Grosso and Tocantins between 2009 and 2021. Bloomberg checked the data against more than 50,000 land registries and about 520,000 deforestation alerts.
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The posting was far from Azeredo’s first choice, but none of his senior colleagues in the federal public prosecutors’ office wanted it. In a nation wracked by violence and corruption, Pará state is particularly lawless. “Put it this way,” the now 40-year-old lawyer says, “When I arrived in 2007, there were some 30,000 to 40,000 individual fires burning across the Amazon each year, and regulators and police had no idea who was responsible.”
Once he got his boots dirty, he saw that this was the work of the cattle industry. More than 70% of deforested land in the Amazon turns into pasture, the first step in a supply chain that’s among the most complex in the world.
…
On one end of the Brazilian beef supply chain are 2.5 million ranchers, many in far-flung corners of the Amazon without government offices, schools or even phones. On the other are corporate buyers in 80 countries, including fast-food chains, supermarkets and makers of leather shoes and handbags.
…
It [JBS] bought up rivals, including Bertin to become the world’s biggest leather producer, and drew the scrutiny of prosecutors and environmentalists.
…
But cattle in Brazil move on average two or three times and as many as six before they are slaughtered, according to the Gibbs Land Use and Environment Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. JBS systematically monitors only the final ranch or feedlot in a cow’s life.
…
Brazil is the world’s biggest beef producer and exporter, slaughtering 22.2 million cattle a year. In Amazon states, the figure rose to 10.2 million in 2020 from 8.7 million in 2009.
…
At Nogueira’s lot, the branding is over within half an hour and Ferreira Sandes is back in his truck, crossing a vast river by ferry, driving so fast down dirt roads that the red dust makes it impossible to see too far ahead. By the time his day ends 12 hours later, he will have visited three other ranches, none of which lives up to Brazil’s rules and regulations, according to interviews and a cross check of the properties’ GPS coordinates and public records. One owner has been embargoed by Brazil’s environmental regulator; the second was flagged by the National Institute of Space Research for deforestation. Its manager talked freely about moving cattle to a plot next door to make a sale. The owner of the final ranch, a self-possessed matriarch named Divina, openly doctors vaccination records with the help of a local government official and an animal-supply store clerk before she can get her GTA issued. Side deals, workarounds, hustles—that’s how it’s always been in cattle country, Divina says. “We don’t have government, education or infrastructure here,” she says. “All we have is each other and our ranches, and so we do whatever we need to do to get by.” It’s a sentiment shared by more than a dozen ranchers interviewed during Bloomberg’s journey through the region. But it’s a trip JBS’s supply-chain auditors have never made. “No protocol requires ‘on-site visits to direct suppliers,’” JBS said about its monitoring commitments.
Whether or not any of the cows Ferreira Sandes buys will end up at JBS slaughterhouses is impossible to know. The Lageado farm, like thousands of other direct suppliers in the company’s ecosystem, is a mixing pot. A 2020 study published in Science magazine found that such intermingling means more than half of all beef exports from the region to the European Union may be tainted by deforestation.
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But the scope of the actual deforestation in the area since 2009 is staggering. The space institute issued 20,000 alerts in the period highlighting where the rainforest has been clear-cut. As long as no alert overlaps a direct supplier’s ranch at the time of purchase, JBS is free to buy from them.
The Abstract: Are honey bees declining in the United States? What about wild bees?
David Tarpy: The wild natural pollinators are disappearing. There are about 4,000 native bee species in North America alone, and 20,000 worldwide. For wild bees, we do know that some species are more susceptible than others, but we don’t have as much information because there are so many species, and some of them live solitary lives.
All pollinators are in trouble, but it’s a mischaracterization to say the honey bee population in the United States is declining. Honey bees are managed by people. It’s more accurate to say honey bees are dying off in unsustainable rates. The number of managed beehives in the United States is fairly stable, but we see a higher than sustainable turnover rate. Honey bee colonies are dying, but the beekeepers are growing them back. The question is: what happens if they’re no longer able to?
I like to use the analogy that native bees are like songbirds. They’re diverse, and wonderful, and come in all different shapes and sizes. Honey bees are like chickens, since they’re managed by people. All are birds though, so they share a lot of the same common stressors.
TA: What are some of the stressors for pollinators?
Tarpy: One of the stressors they have in common is nutritional deprivation. There are not enough flowers to provide nectar and pollen, their two food sources. That’s true for honey bees, just as it is for native bees. In addition to the lack of food, we also see overuse of pesticides, especially insecticides, as stressors, as well as threats from parasites and pathogens.
Nebraska Democratic state Sen. Megan Hunt vowed to filibuster every bill for the rest of the legislative session after the Nebraska Legislature advanced a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for people under 19.
The legislation, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, would ban minors from seeking gender confirmation surgery and hormone treatments — issues that could impact Hunt’s transgender son. She discussed her son and his testimony in committee on Wednesday and to the wider body the next day.
“My son is trans,” Hunt said of her 12-year-old child, who she says has been unable to attain gender-affirming care. “And this bill, colleagues, is such an affront to me personally and would violate my rights to parent my child in Nebraska.”
The bill is one of many anti-trans policies rolled out this year, according to Trans Legislation Tracker.
“We have made it clear that this is the line in the sand,” Hunt said to lawmakers on Thursday.
“People have said, ‘What if we go after your bills? What if we put a bunch of bills introduced by progressives up on the agenda? Are you going to filibuster those, too?’ Yes, because we’re not like you,” Hunt explained. “We have a principle and a value that actually matters that much to us that we’re willing to stand up for.”
Hunt was scolded over her stance by Republicans, who said her pushback set a bad precedent.
“You really don’t get it,” Hunt said to Republican state Sen. R. Brad von Gillern. “You’ve crossed a line and you’ve gone too far.”
“Don’t say hi to me in the hall, don’t ask me how my weekend was, don’t walk by my desk and ask me anything. Don’t send me Christmas cards ― take me off the list,” Hunt warned. “No one in the world holds a grudge like me, and no one in the world cares less about being petty than me. I don’t care. I don’t like you.”
“This hateful bill is not about policy. It is a basic human rights issue. The vote today will show us exactly which senators value the dignity, autonomy, and personhood of Nebraskans,” Hunt added on Twitter. “Do not cross this line. Do not violate our rights”
Hunt joins Democratic state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh in her promise to filibuster the remainder of the legislature’s 90-day session, which ends on June 9.
“I will burn the session to the ground over this bill,” Cavanaugh warned.
On this day, 25 March 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York took place, which killed 147 workers. The victims were mostly women and young girls aged 13 to 23 working in sweatshop conditions. Some were burned, others were trampled to death, desperately trying to escape via stairway exits illegally locked to prevent “the interruption of work.” 50 died leaping from the high-rise building to escape the flames. The company owners were charged with seven counts of manslaughter, but found not guilty.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9761/Triangle-Shirtwaist-Factory-fire https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2237529486432189/?type=3
