optimistic-red-velvet-walrus:

syngoniums:

verylargefrogs:

plaid-flannel:

Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine.
Photo: Bill Roorbach

Hmm. How about erase the colonial view that the Americas were simply available, undeveloped, uncultivated lands before the arrival of white settlers. Indigenous people live(d) on that land, engineered it, and had highly complex interactions with it. Large-scale environmental destabilization, deforestation, and pollution as we know to did not begin until the period of settler colonialism. Capitalist exploitation continues to destroy the land and the indigenous peoples on that land. Maine, for example, did have set territories of indigenous communities (Miqmaq, penobscot, etc.). Modern borders of settler nation-states do not correspond to these original territorial bounds.

What I’m saying is that people need to stop thinking that human occupation is responsible for the disastrous environmental situation we have today. There are specific cultural views of land, land use, and production that cause it. These views are not universal to human societies. Indigenous communities are more than capable of occupying land without laying waste to it, and did so for thousands of years.

All of the above, plus wtf @ the bizarre implication that a huge chunk of North America was homogenous New England-style forest, and not a tremendous diversity of vegetation well suited to their respective climates! Loving nature is not a replacement for thinking critically about how colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism have shaped how you conceive of wilderness, humanity, and the relationships between them!

throwing some stuff out:

• european colonial settlers marveled out how the trees were conveniently wide apart enough for humans to travel through easily and all the fruits conveniently grew along these ‘natural’ paths.
• at the same time, they wrote journals about how when approaching the american east coast, the skies above the forests were often black with smoke, without connecting the controlled wildfires to how humanly convenient the forests were
• the amazon is as human-made as it is ‘natural’. we have evidence of its cultivation, with indigenous folk building islands of rich soil to stand over flooding waters, like the chinampas of aztec agriculture. we no longer have the knowledge to recreate terra preta, which is the uniquely rich soil created by indigenous agriculture that makes cultivation possible in the amazon
• maize and potato, two crops that basically saved europe from starvation, are the result of long artificial selection by central and south americans
• the idea that indigenous peoples did not cultivate the land or act upon it was a way of removing their agency and history and justifying the seizure of their land from them. adam smith wrote that the americans were hunters with no agriculture because the small maize plots they grew did not count (???) vs the advanced economy of britain