60 minutes interviewed the photojournalist Philip Holsinger. He says as much when discussing the pictures of them bound, shaved and wearing all white.

Interactive map

Same, had one inserted over a decade ago. No one said anything about pain medication. Drove myself home and felt every imperfection in the road. About a week of severe cramping.

Went for the follow up and the gyno adjusted its position without warning. When I cried out, she told me the pain would subside in a few days. It didn't, so I got it removed a month later.

Glad to see the tides are changing 🙌

Especially us over at ![email protected] 🌻

If nobody got me, I know Chesapeake Bay Watershed got me 🙏 Can I get an amen?

Greening Your Homeowners Association: Wildlife gardeners are getting HOAs to relax rigid landscaping rules

Direct link to the Maryland bill passed: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2021RS/bills/hb/hb0322f.pdf

Maryland passed a bill doing just that:

https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2021RS/bills/hb/hb0322f.pdf

The above map doesn't include fishing, it's showing land use. This shows fishing:

Here is another one about land animals:

Happy to spread the gospel 🙏 I'm surprised it wasn't already posted here!

The problem is with lawns that aren't used except to serve abstract purposes, such as signaling status, adhering to socially conditioned ideas of beauty, or holdovers from the colonial impulse to terraform.

For example, I've lived in my home for nearly two decades and have not once seen any neighbor use their front lawn other than to mow it. Many are the same way with their backyards. Blocks and blocks of this type of land use, all over my city. This is what the nolawns movement is about.

You can find your ecoregion here: https://bplant.org/regions.php

For example, I'm in the Eastern Temperate Forests. If you are too, this list can get you started: https://choosenatives.org/articles/plant-native-ground-covers-make-america-green/

Baltimore City has an adopt-a-lot program, allowing residents to use vacant lots for urban agriculture or community projects. However, as stated in point 3, it can be difficult to keep them going long term:

One farmer, Rich Kolm, said urban farms in Baltimore are playing several critical roles: They are community centers, educational hubs and fresh food producers in food-insecure neighborhoods.

Kolm has overseen three separate farms on adopted land in the city, and now he works as a contractor to those attempting to do the same. Though he commended the city’s low-cost water access service that accompanies lot adoption, he said people may not want to start a farm under the program if the land could be taken away.

“The whole idea of agriculture is that you’re building something,” said Kolm. “The only way to do it well is to make it permanent. But the city’s attitude is that urban agriculture might be a means of raising property values so much so that the agriculture gets kicked off the site.”

Farm worker Jovani Martinez Tells his Experience Working in the Dairy Industry (English/Español)

Carol J Adams - The Absent Referent

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:

“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”

“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”

Become a 🌻 Social Justice Druid 🌿

Passing Wildlife-Friendly Property Maintenance Ordinances

I live in a city, but I'll share some programs that/organizers who may provide some inspiration:

BMORE Beautiful - provides trash picking kits and helps residents organize cleanups in their neighborhood. They were incredibly friendly, so might be worth reaching out on how to build a similar program in your area

Weed Warriors - trains participants to recognize and remove common invasive plants, provides training for participants on how to organize efforts in their communities

Community gardening - this video is from an animal liberation podcast, but the guest's opening story of being completely ignorant about gardening but doing it anyway is inspiring. The remainder is about their work on food justice and grassroots organizing

Compost collective - this is the podcast of the guest in the previous video. They interview the founder of Baltimore Compost Collective who works with youth in the city

Guerrilla gardening - this is a classic TED Talk. The speaker discusses growing food in a public space and how they successfully fought their city to keep their garden. They also talk about their volunteer gardening group, planting food gardens at homeless shelters

Maryland Food & Abolition Project - may no longer be active, but an interesting idea nonetheless. Their mission was (is?) to partner community gardens with prisons to provide fresh produce

Echoing @poVoq, don't discount seniors! I used to be a case manager for the elderly and many are more interested than people give them credit for.

Somewhat Verbally Abusive "Kill Your Lawn" Instructional Video Nice

They don’t want most of the crap people plant trying to be Eco friendly anyways or so the landscape architect told me.

Keystone Plants by Ecoregion

The research of entomologist, Dr. Doug Tallamy, and his team at the University of Delaware have identified 14% of native plants (the keystones) support 90% of butterfly and moth lepidoptera species. The research of horticulturist Jarrod Fowler has shown that 15% to 60% of North American native bee species are pollen specialists who only eat pollen from 40% of native plants.

Unlike the misconception that Indigenous fire knowledge is rooted solely in tradition, it is rarely static and evolves with changing conditions including climate change. Communities combine generations of lived experience with scientific research to understand shifting wildfire patterns, adapt cultural burning practices, and restore healthier, more resilient forests.

The article is chock-full of information about the hows and whys, if you're interested in learning more.