Michael Parks
@jurassicparks.bsky.social
Writer working on book about grasslands and people (https://shorturl.at/WPahu) for Bloomsbury. Also a dad / husband / dog walker in N. New Mexico.
Enjoyed this. They frame the curse as being only about "bad conscience," but who knows... aeon.co/videos/thiev...
Thieves of ‘cursed’ rocks pen letters of remorse to a national park | Aeon Videos
The sorrows and redemptions of visitors who mailed their ‘souvenirs’ back to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park
aeon.co
Awesome video. The world's grasslands and rangelands are so vast...no end to the amazing landscapes, cultures, histories. The Basotho story relates to a historical dynamic around horses and colonization. As Europeans were colonizing new lands, horses were a major aspect of their power...
CA4SH_Global @ca4sh.bsky.social · 2w agoIn the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, pastoralist culture and tradition matter as much as caring for the landscapes that support them. 🔗 Full story and film | bit.ly/45ehRdH @iyrp2026.bsky.social @fao.org @landalliance.bsky.social #IYRP2026
These Silicon Valley transhumance-ists sure do a lot of talking and not a lot of moving goat herds between seasonal grazing lands
have just seen a monkey photo so haunting that I cannot be alone with it and therefore must share with you all news.mongabay.com/2024/06/came...
It's go time, folks. Time to start prepping those public comments.
Los Angeles Times@latimes.com · 3d agoTrump administration advances plan to rescind 'Roadless Rule' protecting national forests
This reminds me of Simon Armitage's brilliant entry in the book Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame.
Just cancelled Mongolian publication deal for something of mine because the translation would have been done by AI.
This is really fascinating on both the history and future of bison genetics. I often wonder if the general public understands that while the animals have bounced back something like 95% are managed as livestock, with attendant selective pressure.
Erle Ellis@erleellis.bsky.social · 2w agoI ❤️🦬! Great article on American bison @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...
The ag lobby really, really, really, really, really, really, really wants you to think AI is the reason reservoirs are going empty. It's not. It's agriculture.
Kent Lind@camasonian.bsky.social · 4d agoWe have data on this. The blue is all the non-ag human use:
Also FYI, the majority of Colorado River water used for farms is actually for cattle feed (alfalfa and hay). The minority of the agricultural water use is for food people eat directly, like wheat or produce. science.nasa.gov/missions/lan...
mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 4d agoe.g. Las Vegas is a huge and fast-growing metro area in one of the driest parts of the southwest and is now a net CONTRIBUTOR to Colorado River flows because they took water conservation extremely seriously. People don't actually use that much water! It's the farms!
The number of comments on this with "well then don't live in the desert, dummies" really makes me despair www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/c...
Lake Powell Hits Lowest Level On Record As Water Crisis Continues
Levels in Lakes Mead and Powell have not been so low since 1957, underscoring a water crisis that plagues seven states that rely on the Colorado River.
nytimes.com
I get a lot of people asking for sources about the Lipan Apache in Texas and our history; the Texas State Historical Society just published a thorough, peer-reviewed article on the subject! www.tshaonline.org/handbook/ent...
History and Legacy of the Lipan Apache Tribe in Texas and Mexico
Explore the rich history, cultural heritage, and continuous presence of the Lipan Apache tribe across Texas, northern Mexico, and the Southern Great Plains. Learn about their origins, alliances, resis...
tshaonline.org
Great book! I especially enjoyed the study on Mongolian musicians going to the countryside to learn how to play the rhythms of horses and other livestock. Can't learn that in school.
KG Hutchins@songsforhorses.com · last wk.Environmental Humanities and Social Science people, as you finish up tinkering with your syllabi for the Fall, consider:
The blue whale has been officially dethroned as the longest animal on earth*. In 2020, Schmidt Ocean Institute spotted this galaxy-shaped creature while doing an ROV dive off the coast of Australia. Based on their laser measurement system, they estimate the outer ring is 154 feet long...
Great piece about an issue that too often gets subsumed into "livestock is bad for the planet" TLDR pastoralist lands sequester a lot of carbon and sustain a lot of biodiversity, and the best way to keep it that way is by supporting land rights To add a bit: www.wri.org/insights/pas...
Pastoralists Are Protecting Many of the World’s Remaining Rangelands
As the sun sets on the vast grasslands of Mongolia’s Eastern Steppe, herders can often be seen guiding sheep, goats, cattle, camels and horses across the open landscape, moving steadily toward fresh p...
wri.org
the thing is that we would've known to expect all this if we'd trusted the reports of the first colonisers to arrive, who documented the whole thing, and later were dismissed as 'fantasists' because colonial academia couldn't believe that indigenous folk were 'civilised'
Madhusudan 🦉 Katti@leafwarbler.myatproto.social · last wk.How many of these studies do we need to bury colonial science notions of “untouched wilderness” or “pristine nature”? It is well past time to recognize that humans have been part of and have shaped ecosystems throughout the planet for millennia.
Just asked my daughter if she knows how recycling works. “Yeah it’s when we take the cans, put them in the bag, and then we set them up in the backyard and shoot them with the BB gun”
I'm not the first person to say this, but the bike industry in the U.S. is really missing a huge opportunity by not aggressively defending and promoting e-bikes. I think this is largely the result of it being an industry built on recreational cycling and not transit riding.
Wonder who on here is ready for “and also the sierras are better than the Rockies” (ducks)
Kris Lorischild@direkris.itch.io · last wk.It's so cute when people on the east coast talk about mountains
Worms like gummy bears swimming up to the surface to spawn. They are probably not complete polychaete worms, but instead, segments that detach and swim away from the main body just for spawning, while the actual worm stays safe and snug in its den somewhere below.
Not to be some wild-eyed innocent, but I think it should be slightly bigger news that The Lancet have crunched the numbers and found that Musk's USAID cuts will kill 14 million people. And that's just by 2030. That's 9,600 people a day, every day, until the next world cup rolls around.
Jørgen Heszlein@heszlein.bsky.social · last wk.New estimate of Elon Musk’s death toll just dropped www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
Wish I knew more about COP 17 in Mongolia, but sure is interesting the UN website is framing around desertification and statistics about grassland degradation that several experts have told me are dubious at best
Any time you see a picture of wind turbine blades piled up for disposal, remember - even if none of it gets recycled (which it increasingly can) - it's about a 95% reduction in solid waste from coal ash (just the ash! not the CO2 or mine waste or additional CO2 and methane from mining and transport)
Published estimates of AI energy use per prompt (~0.3 watt-hours) appear reassuring small. But they are increasingly disconnected from how we actually use AI. Modern agentic tools use around 600 times more energy per prompt, as I discuss in my latest over at The Climate Brink www.theclimatebrink....
The Dakota prairie is crawling with these beautiful, little, metallic colored Dogbane Leaf Beetles. www.prairiewanderlust.etsy.com #photography #nature #beetles #insects #prairie #northdakota
Bears Ears is an interconnected living cultural landscape. Its significance cannot be reduced to individual sites because the relationships among its waters, plants, animals, and sacred places give this ancestral homeland its meaning. Map courtesy of The Wilderness Society.
Big Bend holds a special place for me: it was the first National Park my wife and I visited together when we were dating, a big road trip we’d planned during spring break one year. This is heartbreaking.
The Bulldozers Have Arrived in Big Bend National Park
Contractors are grading roads and surveying the Rio Grande corridor even as lawmakers, outfitters, and residents plead for basic answers about a $1.7 billion border barrier project
ourpubliclandsandwaters.substack.com
Questions sparked by this story: 1) Could Rx & cultural burns reduce emissions and increase sequestration in the southern Sierra, or do they only flatten emissions peaks & troughs, w/ no added C storage? 2) Could Tribal burning initiatives generate revenue from the California cap-and-trade program?
Firing up carbon credits through cultural burning - The Australian Museum Blog
australian.museum
