Dumpster Diving Tip: What To Do With More Than You Need

The vegan to ecofascist pipeline

Do you have any interesting tidbits about everyone’s favorite hungry little guys, shrews?

we know these tiny mammalian terrors are hungry, but the question remains: why?

well, it's because these little guys are always running around DOING stuff, is why! shrews are constantly on the move, and their tinier-than-a-mouse size and short fur means that they lose body heat fast while they scamper around capering wildly, so to compensate they've developed one of the highest metabolisms on earth.

shrew hearts beat up to 1000 times per minute, fueling a body temperature of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but this takes a LOT of energy to keep up. shrews are essentially burning their candle at both ends and also in the middle, so is it any wonder that they need to eat up to 3 times their own body weight per day just to keep themselves going?

Despite their enormous ecological values, new research reveals we don’t understand how most arachnid species are faring right now – or do much to protect them.

Spiders need our help, and we may need to overcome our biases and fears to make that happen.“The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. […] A new paper by Isaia and 18 other experts digs into the conservation status of Europe’s 4,154 known spider species and finds that only a few have any protection at the national level. Most have never even been adequately assessed or studied in detail, so we don’t know much about their extinction risk or their ecological needs.

Italy, for example, is home to more than 1,700 spider species, but fewer than 450 have had their conservation status assessed and only two have any legal protection in that country. Greece, meanwhile, has nearly 1,300 spider species within its borders, but scientists have only assessed the conservation needs of 32 of them. None are legally protected. […] “What surprised us most while assembling the data was the extremely poor level of knowledge about the conservation status, extinction risk and factors threatening the survival of European spider species, despite Europe being one of the most studied regions of the world in terms of biodiversity,” says Filippo Milano, the study’s lead author […].

And of course, this is not unique to Europe; other countries and continents fail to protect arachnids, and for similar reasons.

“Spiders are understudied, underappreciated and under attack by both the climate crisis and humans affecting our environment,” says spider expert and science communicator Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri, who was not affiliated with the study. “These are one of the most diverse groups of animals that we don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis. There’s like 48,000-plus species, but my experience is that most people don’t really have a sense of how many are in their area. In the United States, for example, we have just 12 spiders on the endangered species list out of the thousands of species recorded here.” This lack of information or protection at the national level affects international efforts. At the time the research was conducted the IUCN Red List, which includes conservation status assessments for 134,400 species around the world, covered just 301 spider species, eight of which are from Europe. That number has since increased — to all of 318 species from the order Araneae.

As we see with so many other wide-ranging species, a transnational border is often not a spider’s friend. The paper identifies several examples of species protected in one country but not its neighbor, despite being found in both places. According to the paper only 17 spider species are protected by conservation legislation in two or more European countries.

“Animals aren’t limited by our political lines on a map,” notes Echeverri. […]

And maybe, along the way, their work can help inspire people who fear spiders to look at them in a different light — or even to help look for them, like the Map the Spider project that asks citizen scientists to upload locations of the complex webs woven by elusive purse-web spiders. […]

“Focusing on spiders has been a very important choice […],” Isaia says. “You may study their web, their venom, their bizarre behaviors, the interactions between different species, their role as predators, their amazing taxonomical and functional diversity, their key role in the maintaining ecosystem equilibrium. You may also use them as sources of inspiration in architecture and visual arts. Aren’t these good reasons to find them attractive?”

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Headline and text published by: John R. Platt. “We Need to Talk About Spider Conservation.” As republished by Salon, 23 May 2021. Originally published by Platt at The Revelator, 10 May 2021.

02/14/2025

Hey Ship, so I've just found out that my aunt, in a huge streak of protectiveness, has apparently been... hiding the climate crisis from her children??

This came up because my uncles were discussing it around my 14-year-old cousin, who actually started to cry because it was so upsetting to her—and they suggested that she go ask me to learn more. (Because less threatening from my generation?) So, now I have a very young, very smart, very empathetic teenager suddenly encountering climate change and the danger the world is facing for the first time in her life, asking me what's going on. How the HELL do I start explaining this to her without causing trauma or severe denial?

Oh, Jesus. That’s a hard one and I’m afraid I have no advice. I’m not sure there is a way to talk about it that isn’t traumatic and existentially nauseating; I can barely talk about it on my blog because I don’t trust myself not to hurt people. Focusing on ways it can be mitigated and stuff we can work towards is more palatable but a 14 year old who doesn’t even have voting rights is bound to feel especially helpless. My experiences with climate change education have mostly been specific things like teaching people about the carbon sequestration of wetlands, but I know some of my mutuals and followers are specially trained in educating about this exact subject.

Dec. 1 12:50 pm

Darren Wilson will not receive any further pay or benefits after resigning (x) (x)

“That bullshit jury was fixed” — Ferguson seethes in response to Darren Wilson verdict 

14 teens killed by cops since Mike Brown

Long history of racial tension set the stage for Ferguson protests

STL Rams players show support for Ferguson protesters before game. Jeff Roorda and STL Police Officers Association (SLPOA) wants Rams players disciplined for “hands up” gesture.

Protest shuts down Interstate 395

Obama to meet civil rights leaders, police amid Ferguson protests

Few people realise that England has fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. […] One of their defining characteristics is the presence of epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, often in such damp and rainy places. […]

You may have heard of England’s most famous fragment of temperate rainforest: Wistman’s Wood, in the middle of Dartmoor. With its gnarled and stunted oaks, its remote location marooned within a sheep-nibbled moorscape, and attendant tales of spectral hounds that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, it has an outsize reputation for somewhere so tiny in size: eight acres – about four football pitches.

Temperate rainforests, however, once covered a much larger swathe of England, and even larger parts of Wales and Scotland. A map produced by the academic Christopher Ellis in 2016 identified the “bioclimatic zone” suitable for temperate rainforest in Britain – that is, the areas where it’s warm and damp enough for such a habitat to thrive. This zone covers about 1.5m acres of England – around 5% of the country.

For comparison, the entire woodland cover of England today is just 10%, and much of that is conifer plantations.

We have, in other words, lost a lot of our rainforests. […]

Many of England’s rainforests were lost long ago, to the axes of Bronze Age farmers and medieval tin miners. Others were lost more recently to […] profoundly misguided forestry policies, which led to the felling of ancient, shrunken oaks in favour of fast-growing Sitka spruce. And in many places where rainforests would naturally flourish, overgrazing by sheep – whose sharp teeth hungrily eat up every sapling – has prevented their return. […]

It wasn’t just Wistman’s Wood: rainforests cling on, too, along the whole valley of the Dart river ([…] dart is Brythonic Celtic for “oak”), the Bovey and Teign rivers, and far beyond.

Some of this is simply due to the lie of the land. At Holne Chase, a rocky outcrop on the Dart […], the scree-strewn cliffs and piles of boulders are too steep even for sheep. Oak, birch and holly flourish instead, sprouting from nooks and crevices between the rocks, carpeted in verdant mosses and that staple of temperate rainforest, the string-of-sausages lichen. […]

At Lustleigh Cleave, a steep-sided common on the river Bovey that was barren pasture on Ordnance Survey maps a century ago, several hundred acres of rainforest has miraculously regenerated. A painting of the summit of Lustleigh Cleave dated 1820 shows it to be bare rocks, a shepherd grazing his flock at its base.

Mapping what survives is only the first part of this project. The next phase is to attempt to restore our lost rainforests to something approaching their former glory. That process is already under way in Scotland and Wales, where charities and alliances have formed to protect and rejuvenate their diminished rainforest habitats. (England, as ever, seems to be lagging behind.) […] [T]he next time you go for a walk in the woods and spot ferns growing from branches, lichen sprouting like coral and tree trunks bubbling with moss, you may well be walking through one of this country’s forgotten rainforests.

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Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Guy Shrubsole. “Life finds a way: in search of England’s lost, forgotten rainforests.” The Guardian. 29 April 2021.

yo, ho all hands hoist the colours high heave ho,thieves and beggars never shall we die

Māori are trying to save their language from Big Tech

Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

“In March 2018, Peter-Lucas Jones and the ten other staff at Te Hiku Media, a small non-profit radio station nestled just below New Zealand’s most northern tip, were in disbelief. In ten days, thanks to a competition it had started, Māori speakers across New Zealand had recorded over 300 hours of annotated audio in their mother tongue. It was enough data to build language tech for te reo Māori, the Māori language – including automatic speech recognition and speech-to-text.

The small staff of Māori language broadcasters and one engineer were about to become pioneers in Indigenous speech recognition technology. But building the tools was only half the battle. Te Hiku soon found itself fending off corporate entities trying to develop their own indigenous data sets and resisting detrimental western approaches to data sharing. Guarding their data became the priority because the only people truly interested in revitalising the Māori language were the Māori people, themselves.”

“The common pattern throughout human history, including communities where significant elements of exchange existed, was for production, exchange and consumption to be embedded in a context of social relationships, religion, love and family life. If anything, the common denominator throughout human history — even in our society, despite the capitalist state’s attempt either to destroy it or harness it as an auxiliary of the cash nexus — has been what Graeber calls “the communism of everyday life.” Every society in human history has been a foundation built out of this everyday communism of family, household, self-provisioning, gifting and sharing among friends and neighbors, etc., with a scaffolding of market exchange and hierarchies erected on top of it.”

— Kevin Carson, The Communism of Everyday Life