cosmic-ribbons - Tumblr blog

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You shouldn’t point a knife at people

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Saw this frame on a different reblog by @thatssroughbuddy but why does it look like Iroh is using his phone to take a photo of his nephew at a landmark

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Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

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pros: it would most likely vastly improve my life in a multitude of ways

cons: might get scared

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stop rping with ghatgpt. you should be rping with a bisexual internet woman u have a relationship that constantly straddles the line between platonic and sexual with. tyou're ruining the ecosystem

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masturbation is evil not for any puritan anti-fun reason but because it has permanently claimed so many verbs

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regardless of a myriad of other AI discourse talking points i'm not touching with a 10 ft pole, i think it should always be disclosed when i'm looking at something AI generated. like that's a basic level of societal courtesy, right. AI images more than any new technology that has changed the course of humanity seem to be inseparable from a purposeful obfuscation of their origin. the gimmick is to deceive human perception, their entire purpose is to make you believe you are looking at something created by sentience. AI is at its core a tool for deception and i mean that as a neutral statement. it's a mimic, a pantomime. impersonation. and that is, ethics aside, annoying as all fuck

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and I love you, it’s ruining my life

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Team Avatar having a fun time 🦆🐢✨

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please only answer if you’re old enough to legally drink where you live

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how am i supposed to move on with my day know rebecca sugar just posted the messiest pearlrose content imaginable in the year of our lord 2024

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Highschool terumob

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I feel like i havent drawn a decent terumob theses days… going thru some personal stuff 😭

Anyway sharing some terumob doodles i had over the past few weeks