As Andrew Belfield said yesterday: Well, between “friend” & Google’s Olympics ad, it’s been a bad couple days for humans. Andrew Belfield https://micro.andrewbelfield.com/2024/07/31/well-between-friend.html It’s true! Which is why I am glad to have read the chapter “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass yesterday. It’s a refreshingly humane contrast to the artificiality of Silicon Valley. The chapter discusses an experiment performed by Kimmerer and a graduate student at the request of some basket weavers. The ancestral wisdom of the weavers state... jabel.blog

@jabel Braiding Sweetgrass is one of my favorite books of all time… so much wisdom! And amazing what they ultimately discover about the relationship between the grass and the humans harvesting it…

@jabel Quite possibly, of course, we've already made the world that way—I can imagine sweetgrass adapting to human harvest as humans learned how much harvest was too much, just as many agricultural crops are now thoroughly domesticated and can't reproduce without human intervention. I've seen this written off as a tragedy, either for humans or for "nature" or both, but really, it's just how nature works—lots of species are codependent. Either way, we are part of it!

@jabel And I need to read that book, one of these days.

@jabel that Google Olympics ad is offensive on so many levels 🫤

@drewbelf 👍

@tracydurnell True!

@dwalbert Weirdly, it's a book I've attempted twice but for some reason it took this time.

@jabel Excellent post. Something my dad would appreciate — and be very unsurprised by. He’s a logging contractor who’s company slogan, going back to the 80s, is “Harvesting our Maine forest for today and tomorrow.” He takes elementary school clases to his sites at least once a year. “Good forest management leaves varying levels of undergrowth and a healthier forest while enjoying the benefits of one of the world’s best renewable resources.” (Here’s an actual picture of me as a kid respectfully listening to that speech for the hundredth time. 🤓)

On a similar note, as you probably know, there’s some debate about the effect forest management has on wild fires. See here vs. here, against and for, respectively.

@tinyroofnail When I hiked from the New Hampshire border to central Maine I was amazed to find out that it has essentially been clear cut three times. It's such a wild and beautiful place. I hiked through 14 states and Maine was and will always be my favorite.

@tinyroofnail I like the story about your dad. Yeah, forest management is something I’ve come around on. My instinct is to be highly suspicious of it because of the money element—but there really is clear evidence that it’s helpful and that it’s been practiced by indigenous people for centuries.

@tinyroofnail I remember that the book 1491 had a section on evidence that indigenous north americans had modified the forest for use as a food source: encouraging nut trees, making it more deer-friendly, and so on.