Try doing that in Iceland. They’re both very aware and conflicted about invasive species up there. Lupin is invasive and covering the country and also building soil from nothing, Pine trees are invasive and the quickest way to get treecover that is desperately needed.
Makes for weird discussions, I guess Iceland is such and extreme case that nobody really knows if they should be saving the ecosystem it had managed to scratch together before we turned up or if they should be trying to rush a healthier ecosystem with imports (Iceland was pretty thin and fragile even before humans and we wrecked what little there was)
In California, we have Tumbleweed, and it’s actually really useful for stabilizing/fertilizing loose, disturbed soils and making shelter for native grasses and plants to start growing near. They also love to fuck with cars by jumping out in front of them at every opportunity.
While waving a flaming Deku stick around probably isn’t safe I don’t think you can blame California’s wildfires on a pointy-eared kid with a floppy hat.
Plants may add oxalate leachate to soil, making phosphorous more available and facilitating colonization. Can increase fire hazard, especially along tree rows and fences when dead plants build up.
Increases fire hazard (though may be a hazard primarily to human landscapes).
In other words, it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the overall ecological fire hazard, you’re mostly talking highway veg fires and stuff, which happen with or without tumbleweeds.
Are there many species there that are specific to Iceland which would be harmed by lupines and pines taking over?
If it’s most an amalgamation of stuff that commonly found elsewhere I think it would be fine.
If pine seeds came to Iceland on the wind 100 years before humans got there it would have been considered native. Most the seeds of all the other stuff got there the same way I imagine, unless they’ve been isolated since the island split from a continent somewhere.
Well there’s the native birch forests, which get outcompeted. But given the vikings killed them off it’s mostly just the opportunity cost of planting pine over birch. There was a bit of both, so it’s not all or nothing of course
Would there be heavy ligament anchor points on the bones? It seems like there would be evidence of a completely different muscle build, maybe simply by the size of the spine bones themselves. I'm no bonologist, though.
And yeah, that chest is gnarly (but I'm no chestologist).
If your nihilism doesn’t make you happy, you’re doing it wrong. The absence of meaning should be a liberating factor, not a limiting one. It’s actually dope as fuck that there’s no greater purpose to your life, you can never fail as a person when there’s no standard you feel you have to meet.
basically life is minecraft: there’s no goal, we have to give ourselves reasons to live, and we can make those reasons precisely whatever the fuck we want, and that’s what makes it so fucking brilliant.
I always found this fact fascinating. It’s completely possible that fungi came here from somewhere else in the universe. It’s especially weird, the way psilocybin seems to communicate with us in a way when ingested. Psilocybin converts to psilocin in our stomachs, and psilocin is extremely close in structure to DMT. Fungus is likely to have come from another place, yet it seems to interact with us in such a natural way.
We have evidence of humans using psilocybin mushrooms dating back to before civilization existed. I wonder in what way they affected our progress and growth as a species.
Do you know Terrence McKenna? He has the idea, that primates ate psilocybin-rich shrooms which enhanced their evolution. I can totally understand his thinking. One good shroom or LSD trip and you can achieve thougts which would come up years later or never. This stuff helped me a lot with dealing with depression and generelly getting to know my subconcious better :)
honestly it’s kinda starting to seem like human history was 50% shaped by wanting to get zooted out our minds with the lads, and 50% wanting to turn the child-eating monsters in the woods into thin red paste and decorate our homes with their bones.
there’s a hypothesis that agriculture was straight up invented because we wanted more grain to make beer.
Getting high is part of all mammals. Elephants removing roofs of clay huts to steal and drink booze in India. Dolhpins biting on Starfishes to get high on their venom. Reindeers eating Amanita Muscaria mushrooms to get a GABAergic blast.
It’s all about those sweet neurotransmitters. Our whole body is made to use any kind of pleasure (external like food, drugs or internal like sport, sex or just getting your shit done) to be able to move on. Without pleasure, mammals wouldn’t repeat anything. Why would they? Nothing would be fun at all.
So yeah, I believe you, that more crops were sown just to be able to brew more beer. I would do that too, even though I don’t really enjoy ethanol. But friends and family do. When they’re happy, I’m happy too :)
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