Solemates

thelastfarm.substack.com

What Could A Climate Corps Do? Part 2

Living Machines: Turning Wastewater Into Life

Living machines are essentially intensive, indoor artificial wetlands. Technical names for living machines include "advanced ecologically engineered systems" and "fixed-film ecology wastewater treatment systems." What they entail is mimicking natural processes of biological decomposition in a constructed aquatic environment. Simply put: dirty water goes in, passes through a series of self-contained aquatic ecosystems, and clean water comes out. The water is, in fact, so clean that it can be safely discharged into sensitive aquatic environments, like natural wetlands. And it does all of this without any of the usual chemical treatments or high-energy inputs of conventional wastewater treatment. Living machines produce such safe effluent because they achieve what is known as "tertiary treatment," meaning they successfully abate pollutants. How does a biological system do this? Simple: it uses them as inputs. Let me explain. The most common such pollutants are nitrogen and phosphorous. These happen to be the two nutrients whose out-of-whack flows have pushed us past a key planetary boundary. The biggest reason for this is industrial agriculture: it relies on synthetic nitrogen and mined phosphorous to exceed the carrying capacity of the ecosystems in which it operates. One of the big problems with industrial agriculture is that a great deal of the nitrogen and phosphorous applied isn't actually utilized by the food being produced: most of it runs off into waterways. This leads to far-reaching, ecologically catastrophic events ("eutrophication"). By constructing a complete food chain within the living machine, each step creates the food for the next step. Excess nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorous, feed microorganisms which are then consumed by larger creatures and so on up the food chain, until we are left with harmless components and a great deal of life. The living machine converts pollution into biodiversity and clean water, instead of run-off and eutrophication. It's a prime example of true "regeneration."

out of all my misconceptions and false assumptions about who the sonic characters are, omega's definitely the funniest.

How people in the USA loved nature and knew the ways of the plants in the past vs. nowadays

I have been in the stacks at the library, reading a lot of magazine and journal articles, selecting those that are from over fifty years ago.

I do this because I want to see how people thought and the tools they had to come up with their ideas, and see if I can get perspective on the thoughts and ideas of nowadays

I've been looking at the journals and magazines about nature, gardening, plants, and wildlife, focusing on those from 1950-1970 or thereabouts. These are some unstructured observations.

The discourse about spraying poisons on everything in your garden/lawn has been virtually unchanged for the past 70 years; the main thing that's changed is the specific chemicals used, which in the past were chemicals now known to be horribly dangerous and toxic. In many cases, just as today, the people who opposed the poisons were considered as whackos overreacting to something mostly safe with a few risks that could be easily minimized. In short, history is not on the pesticides' side.

Compared with 50-70 years ago, today the "wilderness" areas of the USA are doing much better nowadays, but it actually appears that the areas with lots of human habitation are doing much worse nowadays.

I am especially stricken by references to wildflowers. There has definitely been a MASSIVE disappearance of flowers in the Eastern United States. I can tell this because of what flowers the old magazines reference as common or familiar wildflowers. Many of them are flowers that seem rare to me, which I have only seen in designated preserves.

There are a lot more lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) presumed to be familiar to the reader. And birds.

Yes, land ownership in the USA originated with colonization, but it appears that the preoccupation with who owns every little piece of land on a very nitpicking level has emerged more recently? In the magazines there is a sense of natural places as an unacknowledged commons. It is assumed that a person has access to "The creek," "The woods," "The field," "The pond" for simple rambling or enjoyment without personally owning property or directly asking permission to go onto another person's property.

There is very little talk of hiking and backpacking. I don't think I saw anything in the magazines about hiking or going on hikes, which is strange because nowadays hiking is the main outdoor activity people think of. Nature lovers 50-70 years ago described many more activities that were not very physically active, simply watching the birds or tending to one's garden or going on a nice walk. I feel this HAS to do with the immediately above point.

Gardening seems like it was more common, like in general. The discussion is about gardening without poisons or unsustainable practices, instead of trying to convince people to garden at all.

Overall, the range of animals and plants culturally considered to be common or familiar "backyard" creatures has narrowed significantly, even as the overall conservation status of animals and plants has improved.

This, to me, suggests two things that each may be possible: first, that the soils and environments of our suburbs and houses have sustained such a high level of cumulative damage that the life forms they once supported are no longer able to live, or second, that our way of managing our yards and inhabited areas has become steadily more destructive. Perhaps it may be the case that the minimum "acceptable" standard of lawn management has become more fastidious.

In conclusion, I feel that our relationship with nature has become more distant, even as the number of people who abstractly support the preservation of "wilderness" has increased. In the past, these wilderness preservation initiatives were a harder sell, but somehow, more people were in more direct contact with the more mundane parts of nature like flowers and birds, and had a personal relationship with those things.

And somehow, even with all the DDT and arsenic, the everyday outdoor spaces surrounding people's homes were not as broadly hostile to life even though the people might have FELT more hostile towards life. In 1960, a person hates woodpeckers, snakes and moths and his yard is constantly plagued by them: in 2024, a person enjoys the concept of woodpeckers, snakes and moths but rarely sees them, and is more likely to think of parks and preserves as the place they live and need to be protected. Large animals are mostly doing better in 2024, but the littlest ones, the wildflowers and bugs and birds, have declined steeply. It's not because "wilderness" is less; it seems more because non-wilderness has declined in quality.

graves grow no green that you can use.

gwendolyn brooks

"Father! Your flesh and blood, I give it all back! I will burden you no longer!"

Fans of Nezha 2025, please watch Nezha 1979 (哪吒闹海) 🥺

Lofter tutorial

Here’s a short tutorial on how to sign up and navigate Lofter, which is like the Chinese version of Tumblr! It’s not as popular as Weibo, but you can find a variety of Chinese artists there. Anyway you can choose to use either the app or the site ->

APP TUTORIAL

Firstly just download the app from your app store

If you are using the app to register, you will come to this page:

Click 注册 and it will lead to this:

You can register an account using your WeChat/ QQ/ Weibo account (or register using a Chinese phone number, which I assume all of us don’t have). I registered using WeChat, just click on the icon and your account will be set up! After that just key in your username and you are done. 

On the app page the icons at the bottom of the page are home, discover, news and your account. To search for the users/ tags you want to follow go to the discover page and click on search

Anyway things get kind of tricky here because most of the usernames and tags are written in Chinese… I’ll just link Djun’s and a few other artists’ blog below so you can check them out without typing in Chinese 😂😂

SITE TUTORIAL

Similarly if you use the Lofter site to register an account you will see a similar page (you can use your email to register an account if you are using the site!): 

If you used WeChat to set up your account like me click on the WeChat button and there will be a QR code available for you to scan:

Just scan it with your WeChat app and you will be able to log in, you will be directed to your Lofter dashboard:

Anyway here’s Djun Lofter and a couple of other BL/interesting artists for you to check out if you are interested!

Djun

恶魔吃烤鸭

夜晚吃肉的衝動

王各各

宣哲

眠狼/ RDJlock

缄默症

Hope this helps!

If you're using the Old Tumblr Dashboard style and that new premium shit is covering your menu on top, add this rule to uBlock Origin filters:

www.tumblr.com##.HxaHT.VVqTC.EvhBA

you're welcome!