#ForestFriday a creek, meandering through lush, coastal temperate #rainforest.

#forest #nature #green #moss #biodiversity #trees #ferns #mosstodon #Tsouke #Sooke #VictoriaBC #YYJ #VancouverIsland #VanIsle #PacificNorthwest #Cascadia #PNW #BeautifulWorld #botanical #ecosystem #ecological #environmental #CarbonSinks #creek #waterway #DisabledPhotographers #Hiking #photography #woodlands

Leave dead tree trunks standing in your yard to nurture new life

Learn the #ecological benefits of leaving a dead #tree trunk standing (“snag”) in your yard by reading the latest Takoma Natives blog from Friends of Native Trees in Takoma (FONTT). In addition to helping nature, a snag can bestow a unique beauty to your yard.
#NativePlants #Maryland #Gardening #Habitat #Trees

https://fontt.org/2025/12/19/snags-provide-wildlife-benefits-and-beauty/

Leaving you all with this essay about the #ExistentialDread a lot of us are experiencing, and how one person found hope through #SolarPunk! (And I am another one of those people!)

It's been a record-breaking #SolarPunkSunday, and a great way to celebrate a year of #Resiliency, #SharingInformation, #Rewilding, #Mending, #Gardening, and building the foundation for the future we all need! I'll re-post a few articles from yesterday, and then will call it a Solar Punk day! ! A special thanks to @BrambleBearGrrrauwling and @MaQuest !

A Future Dream - How solarpunk helped alleviate my existential dread.

Solarpunk pushes against the bleak Blade Runner future of cyberpunk that centers urban dystopias dominated by corporations and technology. Solarpunk imagines an #inclusive, #sustainable, possible future, where #renewable #technology meets #ecological #enlightenment.

by Sage Agee, Art by Yuumei, Spring 2023

"LIKE MANY OF MY GENERATION, I have known dread nearly my entire life. In fifth grade, I was assigned a research paper on the topic of my choice. I had begun to spend my weekends with my dad, hanging out at coffee shops in downtown Salem, Oregon, and chatting with adults about the news. We had just witnessed the 9/11 attacks, and the adults in my life seemed to be waking up to global issues, their fear palpable even to a young child.

"This was not long after the release of #AnInconvenientTruth, and I decided to interview my dad’s friends about #ClimateChange and their predictions for the future. When I turned in the finished paper, which detailed mass extinctions and natural disasters, my teacher, Mrs. Stark, wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t believe in climate change, she said, and I needed to study a different topic.

"After that, I felt myself slipping from endless curiosity about the world into a mindset where I had to prepare for the worst, and trust no one. This helped me create the shield I needed to get through adolescence. By then, I knew that my gender and sexuality didn’t align with typical gender roles, but I kept that secret close to my tape-bound chest.

"Solarpunk represents a movement from today’s reality toward a gritty, pragmatic, better future.

"Before my parents divorced, we went to an Evangelical church every Sunday, and I learned to pray each night before bed. These prayers became a place for me to put every bad thought I would have during the day, to pass them along to God. I had already developed a deep shame for my thoughts of being more boyish, and I prayed for these thoughts to end, just as I prayed for an end to natural disasters. I prayed for a better girl-mask. I prayed for a better world. My compulsive thinking followed me into my teenage years. In the ninth grade, I started an environmental justice group, hosting letter-writing parties and taking part in local protests at the Oregon Capitol, but when anti-green legislation passed into law, or when images emerged detailing islands of garbage in the ocean, I blamed myself for not doing more.

"This kind of thinking kept me from coming out as transgender. Every time I had an intrusive thought about growing facial hair and passing as a boy, my self-blame returned. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to be a girl; maybe I just needed to date boys and straighten my hair and shave my legs and wear makeup; maybe too, I needed to do more about the environment, protest more, organize more, do something more. I kept making up versions of myself. I only talked about environmental justice around my dad’s liberal friends. I only downplayed my femininity around my queer friends.
artwork depicting someone reading in a futuristic setting

"The one place where I escaped from this constant masking and shifting was in the books I consumed. At 17, I read #UrsulaLeGuin’s series of novels, the #HainishCycle, for the first time. I was instantly drawn into the worlds she created, where gender was fluid, as in #TheLeftHandOfDarkness, where some worlds grappled with climate disaster just as some had overcome it, as in #TheDispossessed. The way she experimented with the utopian, which always included queerness and dissolved gender roles, was like nothing I had read or experienced.

"When I allowed myself to fall into these fictions, my dread would turn over into an almost hopeful outlook. I understood this as fantasy, though, and never considered taking what I had read in LeGuin into my real life. Instead, I spent years dreaming of alternate realities, where I hadn’t been born into a doomed world. To cope with the real world, I would make lists of everything I would need to survive a catastrophe, and I taught myself #SurvivalSkills, like how to build a friction fire in the backyard."

Read more:
https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/solarpunk-imagines-future-renewable-tech-socio-ecological-enlightenment/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/PHXNH

#SolarPunkSunday #Earth4All #HopePunk #BuildingCommunity #Resiliency

#NewZealand / #Aotearoa - The transformative power of urban #FoodForests

1 April 2025

"#IndustrialFarms depend on #FossilFuels – making them significant contributors to climate change, says University of #Auckland professional teaching fellow Daniel Kelly.

"He is researching ways to produce food without fuelling climate change, while helping grow a food forest at #PapatūānukuKōkiriMarae in #Mangere.

" 'Growing food has given me faith that humans can be a positive force for #ecological #restoration.

" 'There’s this narrative that being human means being an ecosystem destroyer, but that’s only a story about one type of human.

" 'Perhaps the biggest challenge facing us as a society is learning how to become another type of human, who cares for and enriches their place,' says Kelly, who teaches psychology and sustainability and is involved with the University’s Centre for #Climate, #Biodiversity and Society – #NgāAraWhetū.

"Kelly stumbled across gardening while flatting in his early twenties and became focussed on climate change while completing an environmental law degree.

"Now 36, he’s trying to refine the art of growing food while sequestering carbon – and tackling social inequities in the process.

"Five years ago, Kelly learned about #syntropic #agroforestry at a workshop at PermaDynamics in Northland. It’s a new technique for growing trees and food that is inspired by pre-modern farming in Europe and contemporary #Indigenous practices in #Brazil.

"#SyntropicAgroforestry is aligned with #agroecology, a political movement that aims to hand control of land and food production back into the hands of ordinary people.

Agroecology aims to address hunger, #FoodInsecurity and ultimately #Social Inequality.

"In #Aotearoa, food inequality disproportionately affects urban #Māori and Pacific people, who more often live in areas with poorer access to healthy food and are less likely to be able to afford fresh fruit and vegetables, says Kelly.

" 'That can be traced back to #colonisation and the large-scale dispossession of Māori land to support the establishment of European farms from the 1860s onwards.'

"In 2020, Kelly started experimenting with growing a syntropic food forest at Papatūānuku Kōkiri marae in Mangere.

"That food forest has become part of his PhD thesis on #FoodSystemChange - and from bare clay five years ago, it has grown 12-metre tall trees, berries, bananas, peaches, figs, #pawpaw, peppers, and many other crops.

"The bounty is distributed by Papatūānuku marae as part of its efforts to support people facing hunger in the community."

Read more:
https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2025/04/01/the-transformative-power-of-urban-forests.html

#SolarPunkSunday #FoodSovereignty #Decolonization #FoodSecurity

Went for a nature walk after volunteer work. Trails & lots of marshes at #SwanLake are #flooded. #Ducks have taken over 🦆

#Wsanec #Saanich #VictoriaBC #YYJ #VancouverIsland #VanIsle #PacificNorthwest #PNW #Autumn #RainyDay #flood #Nature #wildlife #mallards #waterfowl #NatureSanctuary #NaturePark #NaturePreserve #BirdSanctuary #estuary #wetlands #ecosystem #ecological #UrbanParks #PhotoCollage #NatureConservation

#Solarpunk: Visions of a #Just, #NaturePositive world

What does a sustainable civilisation look like and how do we get there? A burgeoning movement of #artists and #activists is seeking answers.

by Joe Coroneo-Seaman, January 21, 2022

Excerpt: "The concept of solarpunk originally emerged in the late 2000s, when a handful of artists on the social media platform Tumblr began sharing drawings of futuristic green cities. Over time, the aesthetic and ethos evolved into a more robust vision for the world, and in the process has been embraced by other art forms. There are now published collections of solarpunk literature, subgenres of music, movements within architecture and even tabletop role-playing games [#RPGs].

"At the core of this vision is the idea that humans can coexist in harmony with the rest of nature. A solarpunk world is one where vast swathes of land have been returned to #wilderness, rooftop gardens dot the skylines of high-tech cities and vertical farms provide food to their residents.

"Responsible use of #technology is also a prominent theme. #Solar, #wind and #wave power have entirely replaced #FossilFuels as sources of energy, while widespread #3DPrinting has made it much easier to produce things #locally, creating #resilient, #SelfSufficient #communities.

"Increasingly, artists and writers in the solarpunk movement also describe a world that is just and safe for #MarginalisedGroups – especially those facing the brunt of the #climate and #ecological crisis today. '#BIPOC [#Black, #Indigenous and #PeopleOfColour] and #QueerPeople are safe in solarpunk futures,' says Brianna Castagnozzi, co-editor-in-chief of Solarpunk Magazine.

"Although it may seem utopian and idealistic, solarpunk attempts to answer real questions being asked more and more often in light of the unfolding climate and ecological crisis. What can be saved? What does a truly #sustainable civilisation look like? How do we get there?

"It may be a big ask, but it’s now clear that the scale of the environmental crises facing humanity demands #TransformationalChanges to the way we live, as well as the way we think. Art has the power to shape our attitudes, so perhaps it’s time – as Nigerian poet #BenOkri said recently – for artists of all kinds to 'dedicate our lives to nothing short of re-dreaming society'."

Read more:
https://dialogue.earth/en/nature/solarpunk-visions-of-a-just-nature-positive-world/

#SolarPunkSunday #ReDreamingSociety #BuildingCommunity #LtG #ABetterWorld #StabilizedWorld #ClimateAdaptation #ClimateChange #Resiliency

The #dodo #Raphus #cucullatus (#Columbidae), lived on #Mauritius and was discovered during a Dutch expedition in 1598. This #flightless, ground-nesting #bird #diedout by 1690 due to introduced #predators, as it lacked #defensivebehavior. A research project aims to #recreate it based on its and the #genome of its closest living relative. D. Angst et al. (2017) found #ecological aspects from #bonehistology studies.
©#StefanFWirth 2025

Ref
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-08536-3

#Pictures
©S.F.Wirth,AI assisted