#not all of them are native seed focused but they do have places you can find them

[snekdood]

hey if ur in the midwest or more specifically missouri here’s some websites i’ve found helpful for finding native seeds and live plants (they’re not all in missouri or the midwest specifically but have some seeds from around here too bc truly human made borders are fake and plants go wherever they want so):

wildseedproject.net

mowildflowers (this websites cool bc they’ll deliver live plants to you if you live nearby enough and they also go to different places around missouri all year to sell plants at festivals or events or whatnot)

nativewildflowers.net

swallowtailgardenseeds.com

strictlymedicinalseeds.com

toadshade.com

treeseeds.com

ouriquesfarm.com

putnamhillnursury.com

sugarcreekgardens.com

prairiemoon.com

seedvilleusa.com (also on etsy)

mybutterflylady on etsy

everwilde.com

and if u ever need help or info or whatever about plants or even find a place to exchange plants and buy some on a forum check out dave’s garden

if anyone knows any other websites and wants to add them on i’d totally appreciate that c: !

(i will update this with more websites too if i come across any)

[kermit-p-hob-brainrot]

Ok y'all I have promised my beloved mutual @pop-squeak that I would write a post on my most beloved invasive marsh plant, Phragmites australis also known as the common reed. This thing is so invasive that it is considered a model for invasive plants as a whole.

Some things before we start

Most of this is focused on Virginia since that's where a lot of the research on this bad boy is being done but it does exist elsewhere

I will have citations at the end if you want some more reading

This is based on research I did for a paper like a year ago so there might be new research I am unaware of due to having other classes to do

Please brush off your shoes when you enter/ leave a park so you don't bring stuff places it shouldn't be

Please read I promise it is really really interesting and important to the resilience of out coasts in North America especially in the mid Atlantic to the south :)

If you have questions don't be scared to drop them in the replies/ reblogs

I am an undergrad!!!!! I am generally new at this but I am fairly familiar with this specific subject and trust that everything in this post is accurate, but in general with invasive species it is a heavily nuanced topic that can be very complex. This is my best attempt to simplify this species for general consumption since I think its just really cool and important to coastal botany rn.

This thing lives in the marsh which is the area often between forest and the ocean/ body of water of varying salinity. This thing loves moderate salinity marshes since it can somewhat resist salt water intrusion. This is a part of what makes it so invasive especially in this era of severe sea level rise. Many coastal forests are dying as sea level is rising pushing the marsh farther inland. Part of the problem is that many native species can not move as colonize the new land as fast as the common reed can.

Phragmites as is incredibly good at reproducing and growing so close together that nothing else can live even close to it. It makes clonal offshoots of itself (THEY CREATE CLONES OF THEMSELVES?!?!?!?!?) and creates networks for communication. this dense packing leads to a monoculture where for miles in the strip of marsh 95% of what you see is phragmites. It is a magnificent and horrifying sight as you see the dead trees in the middle of these fields of phragmites knowing it was only 5-10 years ago that that was where the forest line was. It is the beautiful horror about being slowly consumed by the ocean. This monoculture does not only apply to flora but also fauna.

Farmers often actually welcome phragmites to their land and are resistant to get rid of it. This is because as native species have died off, phragmites has been able to colonize these areas fast enough to help resist further salt inundation and prevent flooding. This unfortunately is only a band-aid solution, especially in southern Virginia near the Chesapeake bay which has some of the highest rate of sea level rise in the country, since native plants and diverse marshes make them more resistant to flooding. It is better than nothing though, so we must keep in mind transition plans for farmland when trying to manage phragmites. We practice science to help every day people, not in spite of every day people. They should be included in all management decision making. We work for them not the other way around.

Competition is the name of the game for Phragmites. It beats is competition not only with its cloning abilities (there's a lot more to this but i had to read like 7 different papers to figures out wtf anybody was talking about so I'm not going into it) and sheer density, but it can also just poison the other plants around it. It can release a toxin that inhibits growth and seed sprouting in other species. It is also resistant to flooding and drought and it has been found that ground disturbance can make it spread faster. This makes it highly resistant to most disturbances that occur in marsh and wetland habitats.

Because it is resistant to like everything it is so hard to kill. To the point where some of the people who management have told me that eradicating it for an area is near impossible and an unreasonable expectation. Reduction has become the best case scenario. This makes early identification important. You can try to kill it by herbicides, mowing, fire, smothering with a plastic tarp, throwing a bunch of salt on top of it, and flooding with fresh or salt water.

The common reed is an interesting mix of being both a native and invasive plant. Phragmites australis has a subspecies native to North America, but this subspecies has been largely replaced by a more aggressive non-native European subspecies. Phragmites can grow from three to thirteen feet with broad sheath like leaves. Its considered one of the most invasive plants in the worlds having a broad geographic range. It exists on every continent except Antarctica.

As someone who has been in a field of them you can not pull these out of the ground. The tops break off but you have to dig them out of the ground if you wan them out. Also just a pain to walk through.

Here's a pic: (Yes that a person, yes they can be that tall)

Works Cited

Langston, A. K., D. J. Coleman, N. W. Jung, J. L. Shawler, A. J. Smith, B. L. Williams, S. S. Wittyngham, R. M. Chambers, J. E. Perry, and M. L. Kirwan. 2022. The effect of marsh age on ecosystem function in a rapidly transgressing marsh. Ecosystems 25: 252-264.

Humpherys, A., A. L. Gorsky, D. M. Bilkovic, and R.M. Chambers. 2021. Changes in plant communities of low-salinity tidal marshes in response to sea-level rise. Ecosphere 12.

Accessed 9 December 2022. Invasive alien plant species of Virgina: common reed (Phragmites australis). Department of Conservation and Recreation, Virgina Native Plant Society. https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural-heritage/document/fsphau.pdf

Accessed 9 December 2022. Common reed (Phragmites australis). Virgina Institute of Marine Science. https://www.vims.edu/ccrm/outreach/teaching_marsh/native_plants/salt_marsh/phragmites_facts.pdf

Theuerkauf, S. J., B. J. Puckett, K. W. Theuerkauf, E. J. Theuerkauf, and D. B. Eggleston. 2017. Density-dependent role of an invasive marsh grass, Phragmites australis, on ecosystem service provision. PLoS ONE 12.

Accessed 9 December 2020. Phragmites: considerations for management in the critical area. Critical Area Commission for the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Coastal Bays. https://dnr.maryland.gov/criticalarea/Documents/Phragmites-Fact-Sheet-Final.pdf

Uddin, M. N., and R. W. Robinson. 2017. Allelopathy and resource competition: the effects of phragmites australis invasion in plant communities. Botanical Studies 58: 29.

Meyerson, L. A., J. T. Cronin, and P. Pysek. 2016. Phragmites australis as a model organism for studying plant invasions. Biological Invasions 18: 2421-2431.

[brightgnosis]

The Anti-Lawn "Conversation" Needs More Nuance

The whole "plant natives not grass" thing is so frustrating to me as a Master Gardener and Civilian Conservationist specializing in Plains Natives because it's just ... It's a lot like the "Save the Bees" nonsense.

Is it well meaning? Yes. Is the core message important? Yes. But the entire focus is out in left field. And a lot of that is because nobody talking about it usually has any real clue what they're actually talking about or doing 80% to 90% of the time; it's a conversation of Activists, frequently, instead of Experts. And there is also somehow zero nuance ever involved- which is always incredibly problematic.

And the really unfortunate bit of that which causes a huge slew of problems? Is that good intent still causes horrific environmental damage on a bad day and does nothing at all to actually make change on a good day. Because the "solution" or "focus" is not actually the right one for the problem at hand; you may get lucky if it's a tiny bandaid at best ... But while we're saying this over and over again, no one is actually listening- especially because what's being said by experts is frequently not in line with what activists themselves want to hear, or the way they've decided is the "right" way to be an activist in this manner / on this subject.

Guerilla Gardening and Seed Bombs also scratch this itch, in that they are also things which are great in theory and intent, but horrid and damaging in legitimate practice because the vast, vast majority of people carrying it out do not actually have the training to do it correctly, on a truly non-detrimental level.

Like ... In regards to "Save the Bees", y'know, obviosly those facts are that "Save the Bees" is a problematic campaign becusse it focuses almost solely and exclusively on the Honey Bee. But Honey Bees are a Domesticated Farming Species that is not at risk and does not need any help (what issues they were facing was already largely dealt with)- but especially not generic "save the bees" seed products mostly comprised of generic non-native box store plants ... It's the thousands of native species of Bees that actually need help (most of which have very specific food and habitat needs these plants do not meet), which the STB campaign completely ignores- and which helping Honey Bees actually actively helps to harm further, because Honey Bees are so efficient they outcompete Native Bees for food.

But in regards to Lawns? The thing literally no one wants to hear, is that Lawns actually do have multiple legitimate purposes and benefits. It's not actually Lawns themselves that're the real problem ... It's Lawn Culture and the cult of middle class capitalist conformity ("Keeping up with the Joneses")- a system which places an absolutely insane set of stipulations and expectatuons on what a lawn is, what products must be used to create it, how it must look, and how it must be maintained. This is whan needs to be dismantled, or abolished, or rethought, whatever.

But also, the most common conventional Turf Grass replacements that people choose to use to reseed their Lawns after they "get rid of them" (because they are still recreating a Lawn, they just don't understand what a Lawn is and so therefore don't understand they're doing it)? Are not actually the adequate environmental replacements that people want them to be. Because even though they may be naturalized in some cases, they're still not an adequate food source and provide no safe habitat (much like generic "Save the Bees" seed packets).

And also, there are, in fact, actually a lot of native grasses that are far too overlooked, that function perfectly fine as Turf in Lawns, that can replace conventional Turf Grasses (which are invasive, and difficult to get rid of, and have horrid water runnoff rates, etc)! And a lot of them can be maintained the exact same way and provide the exact same benefits as traditional Turf- while also providing food, habitat, etc, for local natives in a way that common introduced replacements (like Clover) actively cannot. And these same grasses are often water retainers and drought tolerant, and require far less resources to maintain! And yes they are natives! This is the nuance!

I just want to take people by the shoulders, and very gently shake them. Because while you certainly don't have to know Botany to love the Earth, by God please take at least one class by an academic professional before trying to fix it; true environmental activism really is one of those areas you can't actually just "Fuck around and Find out" in. It's an area where not actually knowing what you're doing or talking about can actively hinder your overall goal, damage the environment even further, or outright do nothing at all.

And, like, as with all things, that does not mean, that you have to go out and get a whole ass College Degree first in order to do anything ... But, like ... There are hundreds of thousands of books written by Academics on the subject, and libraries (and the ILL system) exist. So many states have Extension Services that offer free (or low cost) training at certain times of the year- and they and the Colleges they're connected to have free, up to date, academic grade resources online. So many Colleges themselves have free classes online for non-students, too, now and again. Many Proffessors and Proffessionals are absolutely exatatic if you just email them to ask questions and chat, even! They love that shit so much and many now even have Social Media presences specifically for civillian Scientific Outreach. And there are so many legitimate, professionally run programs and organizations to get involved with that require no to minimal prior education, or will outright provide the required education for you: Master Gardeners, Civilain Scientists, some local Cleanup Programs, Master Naturalists, Invasive Species Councils, Civilian Conservationists; the list goes on.

You don't need to be highly trained with the best degree and all the knowledge before you do anything. But good Ecological Activism that has a greater chance of helping rather than harming actively needs to start on a solid foundation of academic and scientific knowledge about the ecology you are trying to save; it needs to be a conversation of Experts first, not Activists like it currently is. And this information- good, solid, well researched information- is easily accessible if you know where to look (though there is still a conversation to be had about cost barriers that reduce that accessibility in some areas).

[mesaprotector]

As a follow-up to my last post, I think one thing the Warrior Cats series does fantastically well is its sense of place. The whole forest Thunderclan lives in, the journey to Highstones, especially the long voyages in the second series, everything makes you feel the distance from place to place and it makes some places feel cozy and others feel far-away and wild.

And to some people, this is something they just don’t experience at all. Some people’s idea of a good Minecraft seed is one where it takes minimal effort to flatten out a huge area and produce every useful item wihout going anywhere ever again. Some people hate “slow” travel in any type of game and if there’s a way for them to skip all of that, they will. The same people are the reason I can buy bananas in Alaska for a fairly cheap price, while anything native to the area is really expensive.

I think most of us do connect to the sense of place of where we live. It’s the main reason, in addition to friendships and family connections, that most people in the world live in one place all their lives even when they have enough money to travel. But enough people don’t care that that kind of thing is getting gradually harder to find.

And when I read Warrior Cats as a young teenager, I found so many things I’d always wanted and not really found in my childhood - community, friendship, love, and above all, places I could have an emotional connection with, that felt like home. (An angry tabby cat devoted to killing me wasn’t really part of the dream but I might have accepted it as a drawback.)

I do bond with places, even so, some more than others. As a kid, I knew every corner of the house I grew up in, and I knew exactly which chair was the best for dreaming up a story, for focusing on homework, or for being bored and lonely and just kind of being okay with it. Later on I’d fall in love with the view from one specific spot on the hill and I’d know exactly which street to walk down if it was drizzling and 10 at night and I just wanted to fall asleep feeling content.

And reading is one way to connect with that sense of place even when you live in this modern world that discourages it. Warrior Cats is far from the only example, but I think it’s one of the best.

[practicalsolarpunk]

Let’s talk about seed bombs

They’re pretty cool, right? Planting flowers, saving the bees, guerilla gardening, what’s not to love? But there are some things to consider before jumping in, in order to ensure that they are effective and to avoid causing any harm to the local ecosystem.

1. Native species

Many of the seed bombs available for purchase are... less than responsible about what kinds of seeds they use, even the ones that advertise as native. Read the list of species, look them up, ascertain whether or not they’re actually native to your specific region.  Take the U.S. for example. It’s a massive country, and while a particular plant may be native to the country in general, it may be native to a state on the opposite coast. Do your research, make sure the seeds are actually native to your specific area. 

Some resources to help with that*:

https://www.audubon.org/native-plants

https://www.wildflower.org/plants/

https://www.nwf.org/NativePlantFinder/Plants

https://xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/pollinator-friendly-plant-lists (scroll down on this page and there’s some international resources, too)

2. Where to place them

This one is a bit harder, because there are so many variables.  Is the soil bare? Why? Is the soil so poor nothing will grow there, not even the most tenacious weeds? Is it high traffic? Is it heavily compacted? Some kind of pollution leaking into the soil and making it inhospitable?

Or is the soil covered? Is it grass? Is it a native grass? Does it get mowed? Is it going to get sprayed? If it isn’t grass, what’s already growing there? Is it native species? Is it naturalized, polite, nonnative species that aren’t threatening the biodiversity of the regions? Or is it a highly invasive nonnative that will choke out anything else trying to grow?

Observe the area for a while.  What kind of sunlight does it get? Is it wet? Dry? Is there erosion? Mixing many different types of seeds together into one bomb might not be the best idea - even plants that are native to your area can have vastly different needs. The resources above should also have information about the growing conditions for the plants. Again - do your research. 

3. Saving the bees

Not to stir the pot too much, but honeybees, while facing issues due to pesticides primarily, are not really in danger of extinction, they’re supported by humans enough to survive.  Native bees, on the other hand, are, and we depend on them just as much, if not more, for pollination of our food than we do on honeybees. Pretty much globally, native bees and other pollinators and insects in general are in dire straits.  They are desperately in need of love, less poison, habitat, and food sources.  So, what kinds of bees and other pollinators do you have in your area? Which ones are most threatened? What do they eat? Where do they live? Many times, native insects have their own niche they fill, with specific plants that they depend on, and those plants depend on those specific insects in return.  It’s pretty fascinating to do a deep dive into local insect and plant species, and their interactions. Once again, research is the way to go!

Some resources*:

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/plantsanimals/pollinate/

https://saveplants.org/pollinator-search/

4. Over seeding

Ok, some of the recipes I’ve linked below call for absurd amounts of seeds per batch - don’t do it.  The seeds won’t spread out, so they’ll all be attempting to grow in maybe a few square inches of space at the most.  Each bomb should only have a few seeds, otherwise in their fight for space, sun, nutrients, and water, they’ll all die.  Putting a dozen or more seeds in a single bomb is wasteful, expensive, and counterproductive.  There is literally no benefit to it, please, for the love everything green and growing in the world, don’t do it.

Now that we’ve covered some of the things that need to be taken into consideration, let’s talk about how to actually do this, hopefully successfully!

1. Seriously consider making your own! The process of making them involves wetting all the ingredients, including the seeds, which may start the germination process.  If they then dry out again, they likely won’t grow.  It will likely work best to make them right before planting, and toss them before they have a chance to dry too much.  Also, if you make your own, you can be 100% sure that the species are well suited for the area, because you’ve done your research! Good for you, working hard to ensure those little bombs have a big impact!

Here’s some recipes, take your pick! (But, as mentioned above, ignore the parts that say to use too many seeds - you only want a few in each bomb. depending on the type of seed.)

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/actions/how-make-seed-bomb

https://littlebinsforlittlehands.com/make-seed-bombs-earth-day-activity/

https://seed-balls.com/basic-seed-ball-recipe

And a handy image via this site:

[photo id: a graphic titled How to make seed bombs. Below it reads: You will need: meadow flower seeds or seeds collected from the garden, peat-free compost, water, powdered clay from craft shops - use clay soil if you can’t find any, mixing bowl.  1. In a bowl, mix together 1 cup of seeds with 5 cups of compost and 2-3 cups of clay powder. 2 Slowly mix in water with your hands until everything sticks together, then roll mixture into firm balls. 3 (no words, but a drawing of seed bombs laying on grass). 4 Now for the fun bit - plant by throwing your seed bombs at bare parts of the garden!]

2. Toss them out in the spring (or whatever season they germinate best in), when you know there will be a few rainy days in row.  Seeds need wet to germinate, and good, steady moisture for the first bit of growing.  If that isn’t feasible in your region, consider going back to water them gently at least once a day for a few days or a week or more, until the seedlings are strong enough to withstand a bit of drought.  Unless, of course, the seeds are wet loving, and have been tossed somewhere that already maintains a decent moisture level for them.

3. Where to get seeds

Collect from native plants already growing in your area, that you have permission to collect from, or that are on public land.  Make sure you are 100% sure of your id - don’t want to be spreading invasive species around!

Buy them from a reputable source such as*:

https://www.prairiemoon.com/ (they have lots of awesome info about native species in north america - a great resource!)

https://www.nativeseeds.org/  (focuses on food crops mostly, but a fantastic resource all the same)

https://www.seedsource.com/

Another method if you’ve got space is to buy seeds, but plant them in your own garden and collect seeds from them. Those seeds can get really expensive, so this way you only need a few, and then with time they’ll multiply!

Try to make connections with people in your area already growing native plants - they’ll probably be happy to help you get started with some seeds!

Phew that was a lot of information! I hope it helps you all in your bombing adventures!

- Mod S

*North America focused, I’m sorry, I tried to find resources and databases for other regions and couldn’t find ones that looked reliable or comprehensive. If anyone has any, please add it on or send in an ask.

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

What Do Botanists Do On Saturday?

by Sarah C. Williams

Here in the section of Botany we’ve adapted in some strange ways, just like plants do, to the changes of the past year and a half. Let’s learn about the off days of some of our Super Scientists in the Section of Botany!

Mason Heberling, Assistant Curator of Botany

Collecting specimens has become a focus as more time was able to be spent in the field when we weren’t allowed to be at the museum. As our new Botany Hall entrance video shows, Assistant Curator of Botany, Mason Heberling and Collections Manager Bonnie Isaac collect plant specimens on a pretty regular basis. They also snag iNaturalist observations for these plants, taking photos that show what the plant and habitat looked before being picked and pressed.

Mason studies forest understory plants, in particular, introduced species and wildflowers in our changing environment. Mason has a bunch of fun projects going on this summer, ranging from coordinating seed collections of an uncommon native grass to send to Germany for a large greenhouse study to working with a team of students to study the effects of climate change and introduced shrubs on our forest wildflowers.

In addition to work in the field, the herbarium has been a busy place this summer too! Mason has been working with Alyssa McCormick, an undergraduate research intern from Chatham University, to examine stomata (the pores on leaves for air exchange for plants to “breathe”) and leaf nutrients in everyone’s favorite plant – poison ivy!  Poison ivy has been previously shown to grow bigger and cause nastier skin rashes with increasing carbon dioxide in our air due to fossil fuel emissions. Alyssa is using specimens collected as long ago as the 1800s to examine long term changes in poison ivy.

Mason, where can we find you on a Saturday?

“This summer has been a lot of going to various places around western PA like Presque Isle or Idlewild to get out and enjoy the fresh air with my family. I can also be found most Saturdays around the house doing chores!”

Bonnie Isaac, Collection Manager

Bonnie, one of CMNH’s TikTok celebrities, and All-Star in the Mid-Atlantic plant world, has spent a lot of the past year doing fieldwork. Her PA Wild Resource Grant involved looking at most of the populations for 10 Pennsylvania rare species. She and husband Joe Isaac spent many days on the road and a few in the bog! You can see some of her videos about these unique Pennsylvania finds on Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Tiktok account: @carnegiemnh.

She diligently keeps track of various data points from latitude and longitude and elevation, to flower color, size, and associated species within a habitat. In addition to trying to make sure the plant names in our database are correct, she has also been busy georeferencing some of our specimens so that we can see on a map where each one was collected.

Bonnie, where can we find you on a Saturday?

“On most Saturdays I am either home taking care of my many chickens or getting some exercise in one of my kayaks with my spousal unit, Joe. I sometime even take a fishing pole for a ride or see how many different kinds of plants I can find on a hike. As long as I can get outside with Joe, I’m happy.”

Cynthia Pagesh, Herbarium Assistant

Specimens make their way home to the museum, where we assure they’re bone dry, flat as a pancake, and have been frozen twice to get rid of any pests. They then find their way into the nimble hands of Cynthia Pagesh, our resident plant mounter. Cynthia has luckily been able to do some mounting both onsite and at home over this past year, really honing her craft. She uses Elmer’s glue, dental and sculpture tools, linen tape, and a paintbrush akin to a magic wand: transforming roots, stems, flowers, and fruits into scientific and artistic renderings on an 11.5x16.5” archival herbarium sheet.

Mounting can be very detailed and challenging: wrangling a dry and brittle rare plant you want to salvage every detail from, or an oversized leaf ‘how-will-this-all-fit?’ ordeal, or finessing a delicate petal that glue is especially heavy on. Bulky bits, crumbly bits, spiky no nos: Cyn handles them all. Her work is just as much an art as it is a science. When she’s not making masterpieces, she’s probably doing something with plants.

Cyn, where can we find you on a Saturday?

“You can find me on Saturdays helping prune young trees in my community, collecting wildflower seeds or in my kitchen making preserves or homemade pasta noodles.  I volunteer in vegetable, herb and flower gardens.  I have a pollinator garden at home and raise Monarch caterpillars.  I tag and release them to migrate south.

There are lots of Community Science projects for people of all ages: ask someone to help you find one related to a subject you have an interest in.  I have an interest in pollinators including bees.  I participate in a Community Science Project every Summer that counts types of bees on certain plants when they bloom.”

Iliana DiNicola

After another stint in the freezer for bugs-be-gone, it’s everyone’s favorite day: Picture Day! Each plant: sturdy and mounted, all data logged and super official, makes their way to the imaging station to spend some time under the bright lights. Since 2018, students, interns, and volunteers have lovingly held these plants’ hands as they get their close ups. We take high definition photos using a specially made lightbox and special software.

While this is part of a limited project, called the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis, we are still hard at work going into our last year of the time we were given. This past schoolyear and summer, former Pitt student, Iliana DiNicola was taking pictures for us on the regular while also interning with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. She just graduated and I’m excited to hear what she does on her Saturdays in the future.

Iliana, where can we find you on a Saturday?

“I just graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in Environmental Studies, and I am now on the lookout for any jobs related to the environment back in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. I am interested in working with anything from sustainability, to policy or political work, or maybe even something more related to ecology and outdoor work.

On a Saturday, I am definitely helping clean my house since I am a semi-clean freak, I love to go hiking if the weather isn't too hot, enjoy drawing and working on any art projects, or work on my future hydroponics garden.

As somebody who interned for Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, I highly recommend participating in any camps or activities the conservancy has to offer. It was super fun learning more about Pittsburgh's history and ecology and getting to teach kids about these topics, alongside participating in fun outdoor activities.”

Sarah Williams, Curatorial Assistant

Next up, Sarah Williams, the Curatorial Assistant in the Section of Botany, is overseeing the digitization project, morphing the photos from raw camera files into smaller files for sharing and detailed files for archival storing using Adobe Lightroom. She takes the images from the newly photographed specimens and makes sure they get uploaded onto the Mid-Atlantic Herbaria Consortium’s website to be shared far and wide across the world.

There is also a lot she does in sorting, filing, and taking care of the specimens as well. She does a bunch of scheduling, hiring, and training of work study students, interns, and volunteers. We consider her a jack of all trades.

Sarah, where can we find you on a Saturday?

“Most weekends I work with a local catering company called Black Radish Kitchen. I usually end up serving delicious vegetable and farm focused meals at least one day a week, commonly Saturdays because they’re prime for celebrations. The re-start up since the pandemic has been cautious, and I’m excited to be amongst people and help them to make mouthwatering memories again. I’ve worked in the restaurant industry for over a decade and the skills I’ve learned doing it as well as the friends I’ve made are matchless. It has a big piece of my heart.

I also moved into a new house this year about five minutes from my mom, so if I’m not running to say hi to her and ‘borrow’ some groceries, I’m doing laundry, dusting and yardwork… but only after I sleep in, eat some delicious breakfast with my partner, and hang out with our two cats, Santi and Gil.”

We hope you enjoyed getting to know us here in the Section of Botany, look forward to updates and more introductions in the future as we continue to host volunteers, federal work-study students, and interns on their journeys to learn even more about the plant kingdom.

Sarah Williams is Curatorial Assistant in the Section of Botany at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

[elminx]

Energy Update: Taurus new moon 5/11/21

Tomorrow afternoon we are experiencing a new moon at 21° - both our Sun and Moon will be conjunct in Taurus, square to Jupiter in Aquarius, trine to newly retrograded Pluto in Capricorn, and sextile to Neptune in Pisces. As with most of our recent lunar events - there is a lot of potential in this energy but also a great deal of tension.

The Taurus new moon is characterized by planting seeds and tending spring growth - it is always a time of renewal and reconnection with our earth energy after the long winter slumber. It cannot be removed from the context of this past year though or even from the general energy of 2021 as a whole so I suspect this energy may include more weeding the garden - we are still in a time of removal and reevaluation.

Though this new moon in Taurus is not an eclipse - its sister full moon in Scorpio come November will be. This is significant - these six months will be a sneak peek into the coming eclipse cycle that will begin in earnest when the lunar nodes shift to the Taurus-Scorpio axis early in January of next year. We are warned (all year really) to get our affairs in order - to come into alignment with our true selves.

This is echoed in the aspects the new moon is making. Most notably, the Sun and Moon are squaring off with Jupiter in Aquarius. We've been experiencing squares between Taurus and Aquarius all year - Uranus in Taurus and Saturn in Aquarius will make a total of three exact squares this year but come close to squaring each other five total times. We are in a period of expansion and contraction - things need to shift and move - this energy has been unsettled and will remain unsettled likely until the final square clears in December. Taurus is a sign that is slow to change and often most concerned with comfort while Aquarius wants to keep things weird. Aquarius types will often change for change's sake alone (though they are also a fixed sign so they can get hung up in what they won't change every bit as much as Taurus). Expect things early this week to feel uncomfortable and notice what feels out of place. It may be a sign that something needs to get shifted or pruned from your life entirely. This is supported by the trine to retrograded Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto is the grim reaper of the planets - he catalyzes deep transformative change that can often feel akin to death. During the Pluto retrograde cycle, long-standing issues come up for release - things related to childhood traumas, long-standing relationship problems, addictions, and mental illness. During his journey through Capricorn, the energy is focused on broken institutions - governments, business arrangements - even marriage which is a signed contract (Capricorn rules contracts). We are being shown what doesn't work anymore (and often what has never worked). If you are stuck in a situation where you are trying to make something work that really doesn't, it may feel really challenging during this time. You are being asked to reevaluate whether the things you hold in your life work for you and for all other people involved. We're veering away from Aries energy now - the ego stories and selfishness of Aries season has passed - Taurus is all about building something that will last. Taurus is earthy and grounded energy - it has no time for false narratives or passive aggression. Taurus natives tend to tell it like it is and this new moon will be no exception - there are no room left for the lies. That thing that you've been to struggling to make work for years? It's time to put that shit down. If it hasn't worked by now, it was never meant for you. That's the thing about Taurus, from the outside, it can seem like Tauruses hold on to everything. They are slow to forgive. They tend to like possessions. But Taurus, being ruled by Venus, is very concerned with value. You won't find a Taurus keeping a friend around who annoys them, or trying endlessly at a failed marriage - if it doesn't have value, a Taurus is willing to give it up and make space for something that does. This is, I think, one of the reasons that strong Taurus natives often are among the more content signs in the zodiac. As we begin our shift of the nodal axis point from Gemini-Sag to Taurus-Scorpio, this idea of value is going to come more deeply into focus. This new moon will be our first "ping" of this energy that is to come. Things to watch out for during this week are issues around control - Taurus can tend towards control freak tendencies which may be amplified by our great expander (Jupiter) but retrograded Pluto is not having anything to do with it. Lean into Taurus' natural inclination towards having good boundaries and remember that other people (even YOUR others) have the right to make their own decisions. Stay in your own lane. I know - I've been repeating that over and over again. It needs repeating. If you tell somebody else what to do with week, expect them to blow up in your face - don't say that I didn't warn you. The way that you can support yourself through this energy is through some good old-fashioned self-indulgence. Treat yo self to a new outfit or the more expensive takeout. If you feel stuck or too grounded, you can counter this energy by reaching towards Taurus's opposite

sign Scorpio: spend some time around water or deep in mediation, both Scorpio favorite activities. This won't pack the punch of a full moon but we are in eclipse season so what happens today, tomorrow, and Wednesday is likely to be highly significant. If something comes up for you - write it down for later perusal. You may not understand the full import of what is happening right now but it may become more clear as we get closer to our eclipses.

Do you like my work? Please consider supporting me by Buying Me A Ko-Fi.

[jackalgirl]

Honey Bee Advocacy: Pollinator Habitat

So one of the two big things I picked up from my Heroes to Hives program at MSU Extension was the importance of quality forage for not just honey bees, but pollinators in general.  You don’t have to be a beekeeper to help to protect and restore pollinators -- you can actually do a lot more by providing and/or advocating for quality forage for pollinators.

Honey bees will forage in about a 3 mile radius around their hives.  So even if you’re not actively keeping a hive or don’t have one nearby, you can positively impact honey bee health with a pollinator garden (either in the ground or in containers).

Additionally, if you’re a farmer, if you plant the spots in and around your field that aren’t suitable for crops (or if you’ve got berms that you’re using to terrace slopes and/or slow down water), you get a bunch of benefits: in addition to attracting bees, a robustly diverse pollinator habitat attracts a whole host of pest enemies -- insects, birds, etc.  Pete Berthelsen from the Bee and Butterfly Fund talked about farmers being able to reduce their pesticide use as a result of integrating pollinator habitats in and around their fields.  Less pesticide on the plants means less runoff, which is good for our water supply, not to mention good for whoever’s going to be eating those crops.  And the pollinator habitat is really good for the soil -- it filters the soil, and enriches its quality.

What makes a good habitat?

In a word: diversity.  The more diverse and varied the habitat is in terms of its makeup, the better.  You want to look at what’s native to your region, and then you want to look at what blooms at what time -- it’s best to plant a variety of plants with overlapping bloom times, so that there’s always something providing nectar & pollen.  For honeybees, plants that produce tight clusters of flowers are super awesome (it’s why clover varieties are such good forage for bees, although they’re often not native).  For Monarch butterflies (if you’re in a Monarch zone like I am), you’re looking at milkweed, which can grow pretty tall.

How to figure it out

It can be tough, but there are some good resources online.

The Bee and Butterfly Fund provide a free habitat guide: https://www.beeandbutterflyfund.org/habitat-guide.html -- it’s not so much “I’m in x state, give me a list of seeds I should buy” but a bigger-picture guide of the whole process (because you really shouldn’t start by selecting seeds). 

The Xerces Society - Pollinator Conservation Seed Mixes -- and their website in general has all kinds of really good pollinator habitat information.  If you’re specifically interested in Monarch butterfly restoration, this is the first place you should visit.

Type in “(your state here) pollinator seed calculator” at Ye Olde Google.  You’ll probably get a bunch of USDA calculator sites, which is great.  You may also find a number of commercial outfits that sell seed mixes specifically designed for the CRP program (see below).  You have to make sure you find out what kind of soil you have in order to find the right mix, if you’re buying them pre-mixed.

But Jackal, this stuff is expensive!

Yes, it sure it.  Seed mixes are hideously expensive, and are often not optimized for, say, bees (maybe they’re for prairie restoration, or are targeted to help restore ground birds like quails, or they’re specifically for Monarchs, etc -- there are a lot of mixes!).  A lot of the cheap “pollinator mixes” you can get at the local hardware store don’t necessarily provide an overlapping of perennial plants that provide quality protein with all the amino acids bees need - they just look pretty.

However, all is not lost!  There are a number of initiatives and programs that are available that can help you reduce -- if not entirely remove -- the cost of planting a pollinator habitat, especially a big one.  Now, mind you, this is entirely and 100% USA-focused.  If you’re reading this and you know of similar programs in your country, please please please post about it!

Okay, back to the US:

If you have 2 acres (or more) of land for a habitat, or you and your neighbors have a combined 2 acres, and you live in:

Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, or Wisconsin

...check out the Bee and Butterfly Fund’s “Seed a Legacy” program.  They’ll help you design a high-quality mixture that’s custom-designed for your location, plus provide assistance with any site preparation you might need to do (for example, if your soil is poor quality, you might want to put down soybeans for a year, which will fix nitrogen, and then plant your habitat the following year).  They’ll provide the seed, and get it to you at either a steeply discounted price or maybe even for free.

If you’re a farmer (and here in the US, you can register a chunk of land as “farm” if it’s at least 20′ by 20′ -- yes, you read that correctly, twenty by twenty feet) and you’re registered with the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) so you’ve got a farm number, there are a bunch of programs you can use that will help defray costs for things like equipment, planting, insurance, etc.  But there are two programs in particular I’d like to bring to your attention: NCRS EQIP (Environmental Quality Improvement Program) - Honey Bee Pollination, and the FSA CRP (Conservation Reserve Program).

 - EQIP Honey Bee Pollination -- check with your local NCRS field office to see if this is something you can apply for in your location, but this is the program that helps you plant pollinator habitats around the edges of your fields.  There are some requirements (they want you to have a strip 125′ wide if it’s bounded by woods or non-field on one side and field on the other, or 250′ wide if it has fields on either sides).

 - CRP -- This is a program in which the USDA basically leases a chunk of land (minimum 1/2 acre) from you and plants pollinator habitat in it.  And they pay you for it.  Not a whole lot, but they do pay you for it.  You can find out if this is available in your area by checking with your local FSA service center.

These programs require applications and they’re competitive.  If you’re a veteran, it’s vitally important that when you apply for a program, that you mention that you’re a veteran (I personally would take my DD-214 with me to prove it), and ask to make sure your application is submitted with veteran preference.  It’s a program that prioritizes veteran applications, but the field office is legally prevented from asking you whether you’re a veteran, so you have to remember to tell them.

Advocacy

Okay, maybe you don’t meet any of these requirements.  What can you do?  Well, you can do small-scale planting.  But you can also ADVOCATE.  If you’re rural like I am, do the farmers in your area know about the pollinator habitat programs?  Perhaps you can check in with your local FSA service center and/or NCRS field office, see what they offer, and then offer to help them spread the word: write letters to the editor, hand out brochures, etc.

The Bee and Butterfly fund also helps not just individuals, but also governments and corporations: for example, they helped a solar farm plant an integrated pollinator habitat -- honey bee habitat under the panels, and Monarch habitat in a ring around the entire facility -- and partnered with a local beekeeper whom the utility company allowed to set up an apiary on the site.  How cool is that?  What’s more, even though the company had to pay more for the seed than they would have for grass, the savings they reaped in terms of not having to mow as frequently was estimated to be, over the life of the project, something like 240%.

How much roadside and public works land is given over to weed or needs to be mowed?  If you’re in a rural area, your county might be spraying herbicide on roadsides to keep the weeds down in areas that are hard to mow.  What if there were pollinator habitats in there instead?  The Bee and Butterfly fund is eager to partner with local governments to do these kinds of habitat plantings/restoration.  So you could do a lot, I mean a lot, just by going to your local city council meetings and making them aware of just this one organization’s existence.

As always, thank you for reading my book. ; )

[theramseyloft]

What is your opinion on The Crazy Pigeon Lady on youtube? Also I'm sorry for what you're going through, hope you get through it just fine.

OohI looked her up, and thus far like her over all.

We have a few differences, but they are thus far location relevant.

In the first episode, she discusses the difference between a pigeon and dove from a purely taxonomical and linguistic stand point, with out any apparent regard for the possibility that the person asking may have been asking about how to differentiate between the different domestic species.

It may not have dawned on her that that was a possible aspect of the question.

She is in the UK, where all white pigeons are colloquially referred to as Doves, and colored birds referred to as Pigeons, giving rise to the common misconception that colored and white pigeons are two different species.

In regards to whether or not pigeons are dirty, she defines ferals as “Formerly domesticated, now wild birds” which is not true in North America, because there are no wild populations of rock doves for ferals to get any fresh infusions of wild blood from.

There are unaltered, still wild native Rock Dove populations in the UK with which ferals can interbreed, making them at least some degree of genuinely wild there.

Her answer concerning pigeons as a disease risk was accurate and thorough.

I’m going through their pigeons as pets series, presently.

Episode one revolves around why some one might want a pet pigeons that is very detailed and largely accurate.

She is not correct in Ringnecks or other species of doves having similar temperaments to pigeons, or in them being more than minorly social (other columbid species pair bond exclusively and do not flock year round the way domestic Pigeons do).

I like that she differentiates Pigeon vs. other columbid species cooing. ^v^

I also like that the why you would want one is followed by “here are some potential issues to consider to make sure this will be a good pet for you before you get one.”

She goes into cleaning, briefly, but succinctly.

And a bit about social needs and commitment.

And considering whether or not you want to breed.

Great introduction, with minimal inaccuracy.

Episode Two is focused on selection and aquisition of the bird.

Ooh! She begins by discussing pros and cons both of purchase from breeders and adopting from a rescue.

Most of the pros from a breeder are excellent and correct, but she does mention among the cons “A pigeon purchased from a breeder takes a home away from a rescue, so consider that if that’s important to you”, which is not true, as people choose to go to a breeder or a rescue for entirely different reasons.

A particularly excellent con she mentions of going to a breeder is that breeders tend to breed in very large numbers, and probably won’t have spent any real time getting to know any individual bird, so the individual’s temperament may be a bit of a crapshoot.

This is something we ae trying to change, but is still very much true of the vast majority of pigeon breeders, and is a fantastic point to consider for looking into the acquisition of a pet.

Their pros and cons of adopting from a rescue were accurate and balanced.

And acknowledging that it is a responsible action for a first time pigeon owner to take time to consider whether or not they can care for a traumatized, disabled, or special needs bird is something I greatly appreciate.

She goes from here into pros and cons of different types of pigeons, categorized as Exhibition, performance, utility, and rescue.

Her assessment that healthy performers can’t or should not be kept indoors (only disabled or geriatric individuals) is inaccurate.

As many of you have seen from my own birds, Homers and Rollers can be perfectly happy indoors, so long as they are not caged in anything smaller than a pigeon proofed room.

It is not a requirement that they be allowed free flight outside to be physically, mentally, or emotionally healthy.

Interesting side note: Apparently, meat pigeons eaten in the UK are more often sourced by hunting than farmed, so commercially bred utility birds are not much of a thing there.

She also goes into whether to start with a single bird or a pair, in excellent detail.

She also lays out that housing and a carrier to bring the bird home in should be prepared before going to get the bird.

She discusses checking the claenliness of the breeder or rescues loft (I like that she specifies to also check a rescue’s cleanliness, rather than assuming a rescue will be clean because it is a rescue.)

Her advice to talk to the breeder or rescue is excellent.

And she goes into a lot of detail of what warning signs to avoid while trying to select a healthy bird.

Going into detail about what healthy poop should look like is an excellent and often overlooked addition that I am especially pleased she has not missed.

She even goes into sexing, meds, and vaccinations.

The discussion of acclimating a  new bird to the changed environment is excellent.

One week is WAY too short a time to isolate a new bird from previous residents. Most pigeon diseases take two to three weeks to develop symptoms, so my minimum quarantine is four weeks.

Their acclimation advice otherwise is fantastic.

Episode three focuses on enclosures and equipment.

Fantastic point was made that there is not an indoor cage large enough for a pigeon to live in full time, and flight time outside of it is a must for several reasons.

Considerations for what type of enclosure of what size in what location is excellent.

Planning for enclosure maintenance is excellent.

Would have liked for her to have shown the enclosures she uses for her birds, but the descriptions are detailed and accurate.

She includes that perches need to be flat on top and not too crowded or numerous.

Pleased by the recommendation of at least one brick. ^v^

I would not advise lining a pigeon enclosure with a towel, because of the ease with which strings can be picked out of place with their claws in the course of just walking over it, which could tangle around the toes and cut off circulation if the string comes free of the towel or break the toe if it doesn’t, and the tangled bird panics.

Fleece is a safe alternative that doesn’t come apart in full threads and will not tangle this way, if you like the idea of a fabric floor.

She details news paper, puppy pads, wood shavings, and sand accurately.

LOVE that she detailed deep ceramic ramekins as being ideal for water, while preferring shallower ones for food and grit.

aaaand there she goes into what to use to feed greens. >v<

Pigeons cannot digest anything but seeds. 

Please do not feed them greens, roots, tubers, stems, flowers, or fruits. 

Yes, there are nutrients in those things, but they do the pigeon absolutely no good if they cannot process those items to get to those nutrients.

This is a very common misconception stemming from parrot care.

The discussion of carriers is succinct and accurate.

Gram scales, claw clippers, measuring equipment, and bath dishes were also discussed in excellent detail.

The next does into diet, and I expect to do a lot of yelling about the addition of veggies. >v<

But, at this point, I think I’ve sampled enough to give a verdict.

The vast majority of what I have seen on care of pet pigeons is accurate, and she breaks things down in perfect detail for beginners looking into getting their first pigeon.

There are a few linguistic and location-specific differences between UK and North American pigeons; things that apply in one that do not in the other. For example, meat pigeons being bred for consumption vs hunted, and whether or not ferals can accurately be described as Wild or semi-wild.

One potentially dangerous bedding material being recommended, one misconception about recue versus breeder, and further perpetuation of a very common dietary myth are the only inaccuracies I have seen so far.

This woman pays close attention to her birds, and they are comfortable and happy in her company, which speaks volumes for her relationship with them.

Her advice for starting to build a relationship with a newly acquired bird is absolutely spot on.

If you, or any of my other followers, would like me to continue reviewing her care series on pigeons as pets, or any other pigeon related content, you are welcome to submit videos for commentary in my ask box.

I greatly respect blogs like @is-the-owl-vid-cute and would not mind providing a similar service in regard to pigeons.

[bedlamsbard]

Part 13 of the other side AU concept!  I am going to eventually pull these apart into parts one (Devil’s in the Details) and two (Carry the Fire) and do edits/rewrites to the extent they meet my standards for going up on AO3 as chaptered, titled fics, but I don’t currently have the mental and emotional energy for that.  (Have you...met January 2021?)  In the meantime here are my in-progress playlists, if there’s interest: Devil’s in the Details and Carry the Fire.

About 5.8K below the break.

*

Zeb got up to keep watch, since he had the best ears of the group; Kanan took his place on the tree root and Ezra leaned back to keep his head tipped against Kanan’s knee, barely able to comprehend that single point of connection.  Kanan’s presence radiated through the Force with startling solidity, as if after years of shadows someone had suddenly turned on a light in a dark room. Ezra had to fight back his urge to roll around in that strength like an overjoyed Loth-cat in a patch of sunlight.

“I don’t know exactly what happened when the Chimaera went down,” he said eventually.  He hesitated, not wanting to get into the fact that at the time he had still been locked in his cell.  He didn’t think he could get away without telling them that at all, but he didn’t want to lead off with it if he could help it.  “I wasn’t up in the bridge – Thrawn and Pellaeon didn’t really want me near anything important.  What I heard later was that the Vong tricked the Scylla and the Charybdis – they’re the only other ships left in the Seventh – into leaving the Chimaera, and once the cruisers were out of reach they hit the Chimaera with everything they had. Their ships aren’t like ours,” he added slowly. “They’re living things, for one – I have no idea how that works.  They’re not shielded, but they’ve got some kind of – of miniature black holes that move around on their ships, swallowing up most shots before they can get through at all.  Dovin basals, that’s what they call them.  TIE pilots don’t know how to deal with them – ship gunners either, for that matter.  I don’t know how they work; the Chimaera’s scientists were trying to figure it out.”

He glanced over at Sabine in time to see her eyebrows snap together, obviously trying to work it out for herself without even having seen one.  She still had the piece of broken beskar in her hand, like she couldn’t comprehend what had happened to it.

“The Chimaera had already taken a lot of damage by the time the Vong started boarding,” Ezra went on slowly.  “Zafira – that’s the death trooper captain – let me out around then, but I was never on the bridge or anything.  I guess Thrawn had the idea that the Vong ships might not be able to survive in atmosphere since they’re alive and they live in space, so he started bringing the Chimaera down into the planet’s atmosphere.”

Sabine whistled softly. “Did it work?”

Ezra shrugged. “You saw the Chimaera.”  He was quiet for a moment, remembering the desperate battle in the narrow corridors of the star destroyers – lights flickering as power was cut off, then restored, emergency notifications about hull breaches still blaring out absurdly over the sound of blasterfire and Vong war cries.  He would have given his right hand for his lightsaber.

He swallowed past the lump in his throat and went on, “Thrawn sent Pellaeon and some of the other bridge crew to the auxiliary bridge so that they weren’t in the same place. I know they were arguing about it – I think Pellaeon wanted to evacuate and Thrawn still thought he could win.”

“Zeb and Chop and I searched the bridge,” Sabine said.  “There wasn’t much of it left.  We had to get into the communications room computers.”

Ezra nodded. “Yeah.  I was with the death troopers – we ran into Pellaeon on his way down to the auxiliary bridge and stayed with him. The Vong took Thrawn, the rest of the bridge crew, others – there’s no accurate count on how many died and how many the Vong took captive.”  He resisted the urge to say that as far as he was concerned, the Vong were welcome to keep Thrawn; with his luck they’d team up and that was the last thing he wanted or needed.  “No one was in the auxiliary bridge when the bridge went; by the time we got there it was too late to pull the Chimaera up.  Pellaeon ordered the evacuation then; the Vong were already pulling out.  I guess they got what they wanted.  By then the Scylla had come back; Charybdis was still trading punches with the Vong out in space.”

He pulled his legs up and rested his chin on his knees.  He didn’t think he would ever forget the sight of the Chimaera crashing, which he had seen from one of the evacuating gunships.  The shock wave when the star destroyer had struck the ground had tossed the gunships around with toys; two of them had crashed into each other and exploded. Even the Scylla, making a reckless atmospheric approach in an attempt to save as many of the Chimaera’s crewmembers as it could, had been thrown aside.  Ezra never wanted to give Imperial any more credit than necessary, but the fact that Commander Kisujo had kept the Scylla from crashing was probably a minor miracle, especially given how much damage the cruiser had already sustained.

“Pellaeon went back afterwards to look for survivors,” Ezra said eventually. “There weren’t any. There were Vong hunting parties all over the place, though, seeding their blasted worldshaping plants.”

Hera stirred. “Those are the plants all over the Chimaera?  We thought the ship must have been there for years until we got into the computers.”

Ezra nodded. “This planet is already pretty close to what they like in a world –”  He gestured at the jungle that sat heavy and waiting all around them, “– but I guess they do it as a matter of course whenever they’re grounded for a while.  Change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the groundwater, destroy anything that looks like technology, enslave the natives – I don’t think this place has any, though.”

“So what are you doing out here?” Zeb asked over his shoulder.

“Looking for the Vong,” Ezra said.  He rubbed his aching shoulder, where a Vong warrior had slammed him into a bulkhead on the Chimaera, and which had gotten further banged up when the shock wave from the Chimaera’s crash had tossed them his gunship around like confetti. Getting thrown into that tree hadn’t helped it either, nor did it help that it was the same shoulder he had been shot in six years ago.  “Pellaeon thought he’d send someone who actually had a chance at making it back. And who he didn’t mind losing,” he added sourly. “TIE patrols spotted the Vong camp out this way – or the one who made it back said so, anyway.  Pellaeon wants Thrawn back for some reason.  And the rest of the crew, I guess.  Even if they’re Imps they don’t deserve what the Vong will do to them.”

He fell silent, thinking about some of the holos he had seen of Vong-controlled planets the Chimaera had found.  He had only been allowed groundside on one of those occasions, when Thrawn had decided he wanted to see what a Force-user would make of it, and he’d wanted to claw his own skin off within minutes of touching down.

“This isn’t the invasion fleet,” he said eventually. “I don’t know where they are.  Thrawn thought it was some kind of advance scout fleet to figure out how hard the Vong would have to hit the Empire.”

Hera exchanged a look with Kanan over Ezra’s head.  Sabine and Zeb both swore, Sabine in Mando’a, Zeb in Lasat.

“What?” Ezra said. “What did I miss?  Uh, besides everything that happened in the last six years.  You can just give me the highlights.”

Sabine rested the piece of beskar on her knee and ticked them off on her fingers. “Tarkin’s dead, Vader’s dead, the Emperor’s dead, Alderaan got blown up, the Empire’s in pieces but Palpatine still tried to destroy it from beyond the grave, the New Republic’s being run by idiots.  Did I forget anything?  Oh, the Jedi are back but all they do is argue about doctrine.”

Kanan sighed. “That’s an oversimplification.”

“Wait – what?” Ezra said.

“Not everyone on the Provisional Council is an idiot,” Hera said.

“Wait, what?”  Ezra felt like he had just been hit with a very large brick. “Palpatine’s dead?” he said, focusing on that.

“Probably,” Zeb said. “Skywalker’s the only one who saw it happen.”

“Who’s – wait, like Anakin Skywalker?  But he’s –” He stopped abruptly, remembering what had happened on Malachor.

There was an awkward silence shared between Kanan and Hera; Zeb and Sabine just looked at each other and shrugged.  Sabine said, “If Palpatine was still around there wouldn’t be a dozen warlords – mostly former Imperials – running around trying to carve up the Empire between them.”

“Yeah, and maybe the Provisional Council would stop arguing with each other,” Zeb grumbled.

“The Jedi?” Ezra said a little wildly.

“Yeah, all three of them,” Zeb said.

“I’ll explain later,” Kanan said quickly. “It’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you about the Death Star,” Sabine said. “Mark one and mark two.”

“The what?”

“Let’s focus on our current situation, shall we?” Hera said quickly.

“Don’t even get me started on Mandalore.”

“I’ve always tried not to!”

“Hera went to another universe.”  Sabine considered. “And she has a baby.”

“What?”  Ezra almost fell off the tree root twisting around to look at Kanan and Hera.

Hera bit her lip. “Jacen’s not a baby, he’s six,” she said.  She looked at Kanan and smiled, soft and fond.  “He’s back on Ryloth with my father.”

“I need a drink,” Ezra muttered, then, louder, “Congratulations.  Wait, you, went to another universe?”

“Kanan too,” Sabine said. “Oh, Ahsoka’s back too, but that was a while ago.”

Ezra rubbed at his forehead. “Okay, can we catch me up later?”

“The relevant part is that neither the Imperial Remnant nor the New Republic is in any position to repel a full-scale invasion,” Hera said.  She sighed.  “The only reason the New Republic let us come out here – officially, I should say – is because there have been rumors about Thrawn for years.  If he’s in contact with anyone in the Remnant –”

Ezra shrugged. “Believe me when I say that I’m the last person Thrawn ever talked to.  About anything.”

“How much of the Seventh is left?” Kanan asked.

“The Scylla and the Charybdis are the only ships left, and they both got pretty beat up in that last fight with the Vong,” Ezra said, thinking back.  Pellaeon didn’t tell him much more than Thrawn did, but he had seen the makeshift command post in the Scylla before he’d left.   “Everyone’s taken pretty heavy losses since Lothal –”  He looked up suddenly, his heart in his throat. “Lothal –”

“Fine,” Sabine reassured him quickly. “Ryder’s governor again, everyone’s fine, Loth-cats as far as the eye can see.”

Ezra’s shoulders slumped in relief.  Eventually, he said, “At least ten thousand back at Chimaera Camp and on Scylla and Charybdis, but I don’t think they’ve got more than fifteen thousand left altogether.  I guess it depends how many the Vong took off the Chimaera.”

Kanan drew in his breath sharply.  Ezra couldn’t blame him; the Chimaera’s full muster was for forty thousand, but it hadn’t held that many people since well before the purrgil had reduced it substantially.  Most star destroyers, Pellaeon had remarked once, seldom held a full muster unless they were expecting to go into battle; in the normal course of things a star destroyer simply didn’t actually need nearly ten thousand stormtroopers who would do nothing but take up resources and start fights.

“That many troops plus the cruisers is enough to give any of the warlords a leg up on the others,” Sabine said practically. “Even without a star destroyer – or Thrawn, for that matter, I can’t see him letting Isard or Zsinj hold his leash.”  When Ezra frowned at her, she clarified, “Those are two of the warlords running around making trouble.  Isard used to run the ISB, Zsinj is just annoying.”

“He’s gotten a lot of people killed,” Zeb said harshly. “That’s more than ‘just annoying.’”

Sabine made a gesture of apology.  When Ezra looked uncertainly between them, Zeb explained, “Before I volunteered for this, I was with New Republic Special Forces – the Pathfinders, not the droppers. The droppers are all crazy.”

Ezra filed that away to ask about later.

Kanan and Hera shared one of those silent moments of communication that Ezra had been so familiar with half a decade earlier, then Hera said, “We’ve stayed here too long already. Ezra, were you on your way to or back from the Yuuzhan Vong encampment?”

“To.  I know about where it is.  And I can’t sense the Vong –”  He glanced at Kanan and saw the older man’s nod, acknowledging that it wasn’t any fault in Ezra’s command of the Force, “– but I can sense the captives they’ve got.  And what they’re doing to this planet.”

Kanan nodded again, his expression grim.

“Will you take us there?” Hera asked. “We’d better see this, and then we can decide what we’re going to do. Regardless, the New Republic has to know.”

Ezra nodded, a little puzzled at the odd tone in her voice, then realized abruptly what might be going through her head right now.  “I’m not one of them,” he said. “I didn’t switch sides.  It wasn’t all awful, but I spent most of the past six years in a cell except when Thrawn decided to haul me out in case having a Force-user around helped.  No one on the Chimaera ever forgot whose fault it was they were out there,” he added, gritting his teeth against the sudden quaver in his voice.  He touched a finger to the white streak in his hair; it was probably invisible in this poor light, but it was part of the reason he kept most of his hair cropped short these days.  “I got this the last time some of them decided I should pay for that and shot me in the head.  That was the fourth time someone tried.  Thrawn executed a hundred and thirty-seven people for it, including all the death trooper officers.”

He heard Zeb’s growl, low and furious, and the leather of Sabine’s gloves creak as she closed a fist.

“I’m not an Imperial,” Ezra said, fisting his own hands against his knees.  He had nightmares about that day sometimes, about getting dragged out of his cell and down to the starboard hangar bay; the death trooper commander, who had been in charge of the attempted lynching, had wanted as many crewmen as possible to see it.  Ezra had heard later that there had been a significant number of the conspirators who had wanted to execute Thrawn as well, blaming him for bringing Ezra onboard, getting them lost in the Unknown Regions, and attracting the attention of the Yuuzhan Vong.  As it was, Thrawn, Pellaeon, and most of the other senior officers who weren’t also in on the conspiracy had been locked in one of the conference rooms before they had managed to get out.  He had found out later that Thrawn had actually wanted to execute more of the conspirators, but had decided not to under the circumstances.  As a result Ezra had spent most of his time in the medbay worried that one of those who had escaped the executions would come after him to finish the job.

He looked at Kanan, knowing that he would be able to sense it even if he couldn’t see it, and added, “I’m still a Jedi.”

“I know,” Kanan said, reaching down to squeeze Ezra’s shoulder.

Ezra felt something tight inside him unknot.  He reached up to grasp Kanan’s fingers, feeling sick with relief.

“I believe you,” Hera said. She looked over his head to Kanan, who nodded in response. “I believe you,” she repeated.  “We’ll have a job of it convincing New Republic Intelligence, but let’s not borrow trouble before we have to.”

*

Before they left, Ezra found his sniper rifle and the sheared-off barrel.  He handed the barrel to Sabine so that she could inspect the severed edge, comparing it to the dead amphistaff, and broke down the rifle until it was in its heavy blaster pistol configuration.  He packed the rifle components away rather than leave them there; the machinists back at Chimaera Camp would either be able to repair them or use them for another purpose.  The pistol went on his belt in the holster he had brought in case he needed to use it in that configuration.

Sabine returned the barrel to him and regarded the amphistaff’s corpse thoughtfully.  Ezra had already tried and failed to get his vibroknife out of its neck, to his disgust.

“Can I take this with us or can they track it?”

“No idea,” Ezra said. “It’s never come up before.”

“Don’t take the risk,” Hera said.

Sabine sighed regretfully but admitted, “I’m guessing this isn’t the last time we’re going to run into these things.”

“The Vong are worse than grass ticks,” Ezra said, looking around until he found where he had dropped his night vision goggles.  When Zeb reached for them, Ezra shook his head and explained about the amphistaff poison, which had already eaten through the lenses and left a brown patch on the ground where the goggles had lain.  Ezra wouldn’t touch them again; he had seen too many people die from a drop of it on bare skin.  It ate through stormtrooper armor only a little more slowly than it did cloth.  At least five people from the Chimaera had had limbs amputated where they must have touched somewhere it had been, even if the venom itself was no longer visible.

“I’m really starting to dislike these things,” Zeb growled.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Ezra said.  He looked around until he saw the thud bug that the Vong warrior had thrown at him early in the fight, and found it lodged into the thick bark of one of the nearby trees, which must have prevented it from returning to the warrior the way most thud bugs did.  The fact that it hadn’t taken a chunk out of the tree impressed him, since he had seen them rip holes in durasteel plating a few times.  That must have been very hard wood.

He pointed the thud bug out to Zeb and Sabine; Kanan and Hera were talking quietly to each other a little ways away.  “We’ve been calling them thud bugs – they’re some kind of beetle; they can change their gravity somehow to hit incredibly hard.  The Vong throw them – razor bugs too.  That name’s probably self-explanatory.”

Sabine fingered a scratch on what remained of her armor.  She looked oddly unbalanced without the missing portion of her breast plate, which she had stowed in one of her hip-pouches. “Ran into a couple of those. Lightsaber goes through them,” she noted, glancing at Kanan.

“Does it go through the armor?” Ezra asked curiously, hoping the answer was yes.  He would feel better to know that something did.

She and Zeb both shook their heads. “Kanan’s real good at finding soft and tender places, though.”

Kanan turned his head at the sound of his name.  Ezra felt the flicker of his attention at the edge of his mind; he hadn’t been listening in on their conversation.  He was exquisitely aware of Kanan’s presence now that he knew the other man was there; if he had been paying more attention he might have realized when the Ghost arrived in-system.  As it was, he had had his mind focused on the area immediately around him, trying to make certain that the animals and plants of the planet would tell him the Yuuzhan Vong crept up on him.  He hadn’t flung his mind wide into the Force.  No one on the Chimaera was Force-sensitive; the Empire screened even the weakest Force-sensitives out of the service.

He might have been more concerned about the way his awareness of Kanan’s presence was blotting out his awareness of the rest of the Force, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Kanan was here.  All he wanted to do was creep over to Kanan’s side and bask in the sheer strength of his presence in the Force, like a Loth-cat in a patch of sunlight.

They left soon afterwards. Ezra took the lead with Zeb, wishing for the night vision goggles but knowing he didn’t need them.  Even before Malachor he had trained blindfolded with Kanan – which he still remembered vigorously protesting at the time – and afterwards he had worked twice as hard at it, even though he had never told Kanan as much.  He didn’t need his eyes when he had the Force, and with all his attention on the Force, the planet itself would tell him if the Vong were approaching, let alone Zeb’s sensitive ears and nose.  Zeb had confided to Ezra that this planet reminded him of Lasan before its fall – Lira San, he had said, was nice enough, but somewhere between too similar and not similar enough to be comfortable for long.  If Lira San was anything like, Ezra didn’t want to visit; he had already had enough of jungle planets and this was the only one he had been to.

He pushed his awareness of Kanan’s nearness to the back of his mind with a force of effort.  Six months ago he had woken up from a sound sleep, shocked and shaking and knowing that some essential truth of the universe had just changed.  Since it had happened he had touched that knowledge a hundred times a day, trying to work it out without having any way to do so.  He had spent long hours in meditation, reaching out into the Force and falling just short every time.  He had thought he might go mad with frustration.  Thrawn, who never missed anything, had certainly noticed, even if Ezra had refused to say what had caused his sudden discontent.  If Ezra had thought that there was any way he could get back to known space on his own, he might have made a break for it.  He had considered it – Thrawn had certainly made the point enough that as a Force-user Ezra should have been able to – but by the time he had nerved himself up for it the Vong had begun hunting them in deadly earnest.

Being back here with them felt odd.

Ezra had certainly dreamed about it enough times, and if he hadn’t been so aware of his bad shoulder he might have thought that he was back on the Chimaera, sound asleep.  He knew it was a danger, too; that his awareness of them ran the risk of distracting him at a crucial moment.  As much as he pushed his knowledge of their presence away, trying to keep his mind only on the simple facts rather than the emotions involved, he knew he was putting them all at risk.  He had to trust that between the five of them, they would be able to tell if Vong warriors searching for their missing patrol approached.

It took the better part of three hours before they reached the edge of the jungle.  Halfway through, Ezra and Kanan both sensed the passage of another Vong patrol – sensed the wildlife and plant life reacting to it, rather – but the warriors were far away and showed no sign of approaching them. Dawn was filtering through the forest canopy in a gray-green haze as they ghosted up to the edge of the tree line. Like the path Ezra had taken earlier, the jungle ended barely a meter short of the cliff-face, forming a kind of bowl around the valley below.  Ezra eased forward on his belly, pulling the riflescope out of his pack.  He could sense the passage of another Vong patrol on the rim of the cliff, but it wasn’t near enough to be concerned with unless they were here for a while.  He didn’t intend to stick around longer than he could help it.

The valley below boasted a kidney-shaped lake with large patches of some kind of plant life growing on the surface – Ezra reached out curiously with his mind and winced when he realized that they were Vong rather than native.  The jungle around it had been cut back to make space for what he thought were either structures or grounded ships, all of them looking out of place here – not quite the right color or texture, with shapes that were subtly off enough to make him wince.  He counted several dozen that looked like enormously oversized snail shells, a kind of orange-y green with a faint oily sheen to them. Something else, as large as a cruiser, he thought might be a grounded ship; its material was something like coral, or at least that was what it looked like through his riflescope.

Figures moved through the structures and ships – a few he recognized as Vong warriors, each of them unique in their vonduun crab armor; others were Vong from the different castes. He could sense humans down there, the prisoners taken off the Chimaera, but couldn’t spot them.

Sabine and Hera eased up on either side of him, Hera with a pair of macrobinoculars and Sabine with her rangefinder lowered.  Ezra didn’t have to turn his head to know that Zeb and Kanan were hanging back, keeping watch against a Vong patrol.

Keeping his voice barely more than a whisper, Ezra pointed out the grounded cruiser-analogue, then the coralskipper starfighters that passed by overhead before landing alongside the starship.  He hadn’t seen them in person before, just in holograms.

“Fast?” Hera asked him very quietly.

“About the same as a TIE, I think,” he murmured back. “They’ve got dovin basals – miniature black holes – like the cruisers, too, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Hmm.”

He had to grin at the hint of considering challenge in that syllable.  If anyone could not only outfly a coralskipper solo but also shoot it down – the TIEs and handful of remaining TIE Defenders had to go after them in swarms – then it was Hera.

After a brief moment of hesitation, Ezra reached out with the Force, sorting through the thousands of human minds as he searched for the alien one.  He couldn’t sense the Vong and their living tools at all.

“Thrawn’s there,” he said after a moment, not bothering to conceal his disappointment the way he had done when Pellaeon had asked him to find out if the grand admiral was still alive. He was pretty sure Pellaeon had been able to tell his feelings anyway, but it was the principle of the thing; Pellaeon was fully capable of having him shot as more trouble than he was worth.

Sabine snorted softly. “Might have saved us some trouble if he was dead,” she grumbled.

“Tell me about it,” Ezra muttered back.  He peered through the riflescope again, letting the Force direct him.  The shell-structures seemed to be where the prisoners were being kept, Thrawn among them.  He couldn’t tell exactly which one Thrawn was in, but he supposed that when the Imperials went after him they would probably want to break all their missing troops out as well, since it would be about as much trouble.  Unless Pellaeon tried to make him do it on his own, of course, Ezra thought, and started to grimace at the thought before he realized abruptly that that was no longer an option Pellaeon had.

He was reaching back reflexively for Kanan before he even realized he was doing so, his mind brushing against Kanan’s in the Force for a brief instant of reassurance.  He felt Kanan’s response as if his master had gripped him briefly on the shoulder, calm and collected, though he knew Kanan hadn’t moved from his sentry position.  Ezra turned his face down, his eyes burning with unshed tears.

Sabine elbowed him gently. “Hey,” she whispered. “It’s all right.  We’ve got you.”

Six years ago Ezra might have said something like you took your time about it, but he just nodded.  If they could have come sooner they would have, and if they had come sooner, then Kanan – Kanan might not be back.  Six years in the Unknown Regions with Thrawn and his merry band of sociopaths was a sacrifice he was happy to make for Kanan’s return.

They watched the Vong camp for another two hours, watching the mist burn off the lake as the sun rose. Some of the lower caste Vong went into the shell-structures, probably to feed the Imperial prisoners; none of the Imperials came out.  Ezra did a rapid estimate with the Force and came up with somewhere between three and four thousand prisoners, which he supposed would make Pellaeon happy; the worst case scenario had been that all the crewmembers unaccounted for from the Chimaera were dead.  Hera didn’t look thrilled when he conveyed this information to her.

“Well, we’re not putting them all on the Ghost, that’s for sure,” Zeb grumbled; he was close enough to overhear.

All Hera said was, “I suppose we’ll have to talk to Captain Pellaeon.”

Not long after this exchange, Kanan said softly, “There’s a patrol about two klicks west of us.  We’d better clear off, if you’ve got all you need.”

“Not all we need, but all we’re going to get, I think,” Hera murmured.  The three of them retreated from the cliff face into the cover of the jungle.

Ezra got to his feet, wincing at muscles that had gone sore after two hours lying on the ground. Kanan was still sitting cross-legged on the forest floor, facing away from them with his eyes closed and his expression calm.  Ezra was barely aware of stepping towards him until he found himself reaching down to touch Kanan’s shoulder, wanting to reassure himself of Kanan’s presence. Kanan turned his face up towards him, opening his eyes, and smiled.  Ezra drew his hand back, embarrassed, then grabbed Kanan’s forearm to help pull him to his feet, the hard edges on Kanan’s bracer digging into his fingers.

Despite their precarious position, Ezra still rather wanted to drape himself on Kanan’s neck and weep.

Hera came up behind him and put a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here before Chopper decides to take the Ghost and come find us,” she said.

Ezra nodded, then nearly had a heart attack as Zeb ghosted out of the jungle to join them; his purple fur and green bodysuit and armor blended in perfectly with the foliage.  If this was true of all the Lasat Ezra was definitely never going to Lira San.

They left silently, moving through the undergrowth with surprising delicacy for the size of their group.  Ezra, reaching out with the Force, found the passage of the same Vong patrol that Kanan had sensed.  If the disappearance of the patrol they had killed had been noted, it wasn’t evident from the way the Vong had acted.  Ezra would have thought that they would have had better security, but apparently not. Either that, or the Force had led them to avoid it on their approach.

The sun continued to rise steadily as they made their way single-file through the jungle.  Zeb took point this time, with Sabine just behind him. While Zeb blended into the forest around them, the sunlight through the tree canopy dappled Sabine’s armor as she moved through it; Ezra couldn’t decide what colors it was and suspected he wouldn’t know for sure until they were back at the Ghost.  Kanan and Hera brought up the rear, nearly soundless though Ezra was excruciatingly aware of Kanan’s presence.

After a sleepless night and a fight with the Vong, not to mention the intense emotion of the past few hours, he was so tired that he was nearly delirious with it.  Everything had taken on a slightly bright edge; he could have fought if he had to, but he was just as glad for the moment that neither the Vong nor the native wildlife crossed paths with them.  After almost a full day out here, he was also extremely aware of the fact that he had spent most of the past six years locked in a cell, with only occasional breaks to go nearly get killed, either by the Imperials or by whoever they happened to be fighting at the moment.  He was almost tired enough that the cell was starting to sound appealing.

 The day wore on, the heat and humidity growing steadily.  Ezra kept his weary eyes on Sabine’s gaudily painted jetpack in front of him; it wasn’t the same color that it had been six years earlier – he would have been shocked if it had been – but the basic winged design was more or less the same, though he could spot differences.  He was so focused on that to stay on his feet that he didn’t realize they had reached their destination until the flicker of movement behind transparisteel caught his eye.

Ezra stiffened, his hand going to his blaster.  It took him a few moments for his gaze to focus; he was expecting nothing more than the endless expanse of forest, not the Ghost parked in a clearing just barely large enough for the ship.  He stared blankly at the ship, unable to believe that it was actually here after so many years.

Kanan closed a hand on his shoulder as the ramp unfolded.  Chopper, apparently unchanged from the last time Ezra had seen him, appeared at the top of the ramp, waving one of his manipulators and shouting in annoyance about how they had gone for hours, they could have died, how dare they leave him all alone.  He stopped midway through his tirade, apparently having spotted Ezra.

Kanan pushed Ezra forward gently.  Hera was walking past him, her own shoulders slumping with weariness; Sabine paused to turn on one foot, her gaze traveling over the clearing.  Zeb was already on his way up the ramp with a comment to Chopper.

Ezra took one step forward, then another one.  Chopper came down the ramp towards him as he reached it, chirping a cautious question.

“Yeah,” Ezra said. “Yeah, it’s me.”

He started to kneel down so that they were on the same level, then overbalanced and sat down hard instead.  Chopper rolled up to him, close enough to touch but not doing so.  Ezra reached out, hesitating for an instant before he laid his hands on Chopper’s chassis.  The metal was warm to touch, the pain smooth beneath his fingers except where it was starting to chip away.  He could feel the hum of the droid’s inner workings against his palms.

“Yeah, Chop,” he said again, and started to cry, his head bent forward against Chopper’s dome so that none of the others could see. “It’s me.  It’s me.”

[rookisaknight]

Raf Tanager, meet Hope County

⤘⤘⤘There’s a new Deputy in Town⬽⬽⬽

So as a side benefit of getting into this fandom again with a brand new gender and a brand new vibe: a brand new deputy. Excited to introduce you all to my boy, they were developed for a joint Deputy au with @ophiebot​ (who will do this for their Deputy Elijah Rook if so inclined). Not exactly reinventing any wheels here, but this time its about the indulgence.

FYI, Molly is still extant, but her story I think has been explored in my brainspace as much as it needs to be. 

➷The Basics

1. Give their full name, and describe them or post a picture! (Height, build, hair, eye, and skin color, etc.)

Rafael "Raf" Tanager (birth name REDACTED). 5'4", prone to chub but hardening up with the frequent exercise, solid build. Freckles on cheeks that darken as time goes on. Short hair kept red by some truly obsessive hairdye upkeep, which is harder than you might think. Hazel eyes. Burns and shrapnel scars around the eyes and mouth.

2. How old are they?

24

3. Sexuality and gender?

Bisexual, transmasc genderqueer. She/they/he but a preference for they/he when he doesnt trust the person using them.

➵Pre-Game

1. How did they end up at the Hope County Sheriff’s Department? How long have they worked there?

Raf grew up closer to Missoula, but he’s still a Montana native. They’ve been at this for around 8 months, pretty much right out of graduating college. Even they honestly aren’t sure how they ended up here, just the latest in a series of adrift jobs after graduating, taken primarily to avoid any potential financial dependence on their  family. Probably would have resigned soon were it not for. Everything.

2. Relationship with Pratt, Hudson, and Whitehorse?

Pratt: Used to hate his guts. The teasing felt too much like flirting for their comfort and he was honestly kind of a bully. Now its trickier. He's pathetic in a way that’s hard for them to be around, as awful as that is, because it hits too close to home.

Hudson: Had a massive crush on her for most of their early days that pretty much went out the window post Eden’s Gate. They still try a little too hard to impress her though.

Whitehorse: Intellectually, they resent his passivity since it means a lot of Eden’s Gate ended up falling in their lap and he’s STILL insistent that maybe they should have left it alone when they’ve all had months to realize why that was a bad idea in the first place. Emotionally, well, they’re maybe a little in need of a father figure or two.

Elijah Rook: The former Rookie. They were quietly a little intimidated by him prior to all this and that’s never fully gone away, but they’ve now been able to witness more of his dorky side that makes it a little harder to take him seriously. You try chaperoning this guy from one end of Hope County and considering him at all frightening.

3. Do they have an education?

They have a MASTERS and its never relevant to anything because its a humanities degree, specifically the classics. Part of the reason they’re a little adrift currently, there was no easy dismount out of college. Just a hell of a lot of debt.

4. Where are they from? Did they speak a different language there?

Missoula, or close enough to it. They picked up some Latin and Greek from their degree. The Latin comes in handy more often than you’d think, what with the cult stuff, but the reading material is a real bummer.

5. Is there anyone outside the valley that might have come looking for them?

They’ve never had many friends in college and high school that could outlast physical proximity and they basically ghosted their family since that was easier than coming out to them at a certain point. So no, no one they want to find them is looking.

6. Did they have a religious background of any kind?

His father is a preacher, and while there’s some baggage there they would still describe themselves as broadly religious. Or at the very least superstitious.

➷Inside Hope County

1. What was going through their head when the helicopter went down and during the subsequent chase?

The crash was honestly the easiest part. That was just panic. The chase was the hard part. The helicopter exploding ended up catching them in the face, leaving them with burns and scarring that would remain for the rest of their life. She's lucky she wasn’t blinded. Still, he was forced to stumble out of the woods in intense pain and bleeding out. Had it not been for Elijah they definitely would have been taken then and there.

2. Were they afraid of Joseph and Eden’s Gate? Angry?

Terrified. Not just because of what they’ve done but because Raf knows intuitively that he's susceptible to it. As early as their first encounter they have a hard time breaking the hold Joseph gets on their mind. Even though they’re conscious of HOW they’re being manipulated, its hard to resist it.

3. Did they trust Dutch?

At that point Raf would’ve happily taken literally anyone who seemed to know what they’re doing and wasn’t holding a gun to his head.

4. How did they feel about their team being taken by the cult, did they count them as lost, did they want them back, did they not care?

Absolutely the nightmare scenario: people’s lives depending on them and their ability to be decisive. Had it not been for Elijah they probably would’ve high tailed it out of there and tried to find someone higher up the authority chain to deal with this mess. Still, just abandoning them all didn’t sit right with him either, and by the time they’d liberated Fall’s End even he had to admit he was there by his own choice.

5. How did they take to the idea of being part of, if not leading, the resistance?

Again, Raf doesn’t really do well with people depending on them. Alone. they probably would have found it a lot more miserable, but Elijah significantly helped lighten that load for them in terms of having a direction. They’ve found out they’re accidentally pretty good at working with a variety of people and can even be inspiring without meaning to. Still, in their ideal world they would’ve been left alone, or at least remained a foot soldier.

6. Which companions did they recruit, and who did they travel with the most?

All guns for hire were recruited, but Sharky and Nick were their go-to’s, Sharky for personal reasons and Nick for air support. Grace was usually the adult supervision when Nick couldn’t make it but. To be frank Raf's aim isn’t great and it drives Grace a little nuts on prolonged missions. She’s tried teaching them but it never really seems to stick.

7. Did they have time to find romance amidst the chaos? How did they do it?

Sharky. That relationship was a bit of a cold opener  (and don’t bother, Sharky already beat you to that joke). After getting their face fucked up during the escape they’ve had a pretty healthy aversion to fire and explosives, making his recruitment a little harrowing. Still, Sharky's sweet in his way, makes them laugh and breathe a little easier when the pressure gets to them, and operates on a pretty similar brainwave. They’ve been joined at the hip since their first few months in Holland Valley. They’re both a little on the codependent side, but really, who are they to complain.

8. Feelings about Joseph?

Joseph taps into a lot of vulnerabilities inside of Raf intuitively. The absence of a strong support system, the loneliness, the fear, the directionlessness, the relationship with their own spirituality, it all provides him a unique entryway into their psyche that he is exactly the kind of person to exploit. As a result, he tends to fixate on them over Elijah, usually to their detriment. Still, that connection can sometimes go both ways, and there are things about Joseph that Raf understands which even his brothers never fully do.

9. Feelings about the other Seeds?

John: They have a unique capacity for antagonizing him. Probably because as an oldest child themselves they know exactly how to jab at the youngest child insecurities. Still, that relationship didn’t stem any deeper and he focused his energies a little more on Elijah. Still, they have him to thank for the Sloth scars on their arm, thanks for that. They’re starting to run out of unmarked skin.

Faith: Faith, meanwhile, was a little more directly focused on Raf, partly because her region was the first time they had to operate a little more on their own. For personal reasons, Elijah wasn’t particularly able to engage with the Bliss. Meaning if Burke was ever going to get saved Raf had to be the one to go in there, again and again. Faith, like Joseph, can tap a lot of that loneliness that Raf has, as well as some gender and sexuality stuff Joseph can’t touch. Suffice to say Sharky had a pretty good reason for being as overbearing as he was during those months, even though he was eventually able to do the job. As a side note, they haven’t had access to their ADHD meds for MONTHS and it doesn’t help when the cult drug is the first thing to make your head feel clear in a while.

Jacob: Jacob was utterly uninterested in Raf and the feeling was mostly mutual. He doesn’t really get him or what he’s about, just knows that the county would be better off when he was put down. Transition goals, though (don’t tell Staci they said that).

10. How did they handle having to kill animals and other humans? Had they done it before?

Animals yeah, you don’t live in Montana as long as they did without hunting occasionally. People....well. You can get used to it.

11. Which canon ending did they choose in-game, and would you have changed the ending at all?

Resist. I wouldn’t. Raf might.

➷Personal

1. Favorite weapon(s)?

They usually prefer to show up to spots early and lay traps, try to minimize the direct combat involvement. When it can’t be avoided though, their pistol isn’t ever far and neither is a hunting knife.

2. Stealth or firepower?

Stealth, one hundred percent. Sharky and Eli are here to do the firepower.

3. How did they spend their time, when not fighting peggies?

A lot of bad movies with the boyfriend and a LOT of poker, one of their more unknown talents. Resistance isn’t gonna fund itself.

4. Where did they live during the events of the game?

Wherever there was a bed they could fall into. Their little trailer they’d been living in prior to all this got absolutely decimated while they were healing up on Dutch’s island.

5. Any other facts you want to share about your Deputy!

He’s got almost supernatural luck to the point that a couple of their guns for hire have gotten superstitious about bringing him to certain events. Including fishing. The catch just always seems somehow a little better. Also he’s privately obsessed with the 1998 recording of Cats and is terrified of anyone finding out.

[rrameyguerrero]

Worldbuilding: Food and Water

Water is the most important element in the world. Your cities should each have a reliable water source or several. For most places, imported water is not a viable option or is not the only option. In my world, I decided to have my cities at various stages of development. Some have running water, but others may share a well.

In order for a world to feel real, it must have realistic cuisine. Think about any of your favorite fictional worlds. Butterbeer in Harry Potter, roasted boar in Game of Thrones, Baby You Can Chive My Car burger in Bob’s Burgers, and Turkish delight in Narnia- they all made me crave things I’ve never had before. These meals and treats really brought these worlds to life for me. I could watch hours of people recreating recipes on Youtube, and I probably have.

This is where the mapmaking will become useful. Certain plants (in our real world) can only grow in certain locations. Some crops have been naturalized almost everywhere, like wheat and corn. I bought some sticky notes for this, and I used my map to decide what food would be available where. I started with my MC’s home of Wen. I had previously explained that I divided the Lowasii into tribes, and I wanted each tribe to have their own specialties and staples. Every country will have staples.

The five tribes that live in Wen each have their own element, so I tried to incorporate this into their cuisine. Also, I wanted the Lowasii of Wen to all be vegetarian because of their ties to nature. This introduced several difficulties, like protein sources. Fortunately, it is popular to be vegetarian and vegan, and I was able to find that rice and beans make a complete protein. That has become my staple for most of the tribes.

First, I have the Tassi, who derive their abilities from the Salt of the sea. Because Wen’s climate is similar to Colorado, I used northern coastlines in North America as a guide. Foraging guides were my best friends, but it’s important to choose one for an approximate climate range. Things that can be foraged in South Texas cannot be found in Oregon, ect. I also wanted to leave room for creative plants that could be found.

I decided seaweed should be a major component to a Tassi’s meals. Their traditional meals are pockets of seaweed, that I called mata, filled with a variety of foods. For example, one version of mata is stuffed with diced cucumber and a (naturalized magically) pomegranate- pepper jelly. Mostly, I listed things that could be ingredients, like rice, beach carrots, dune peppers, and other beach related greens. With several ingredients, I was able to assemble anywhere from five to ten recipes.

The Onryx meals required more creativity. Their element is Stone, and people don’t really eat those. I decided that staples of their meals would be ground foods, like different types of flour. I also felt that they would likely eat root and potato-based foods. Because these foods are not meals by themselves, I knew that they had to rely heavily upon trade partners.

The Onryx’s closest allies are a water tribe called Awat. There were a few obvious things that they could eat like lotus pods (which are great sources of protein), flower waters, and moss. But I knew that I wanted them to herd reindeer as well. From the reindeer, they can have milk, butter, and cheese that they sell to other tribes. So I created a few dishes that could be made from these ingredients, like marsh stew and lotus pods.

The Yerikuu tribe was easiest. Their element is Soil, so anything that the soil grows can be a staple in their diet. The Yerikuu’s diet is most diverse. I used only New World crops like corn, beans, squash, ect. as natural crops. Anything else they grew had to be naturalized. Some recipes I made up are: spiced kalemi (an orange dish made from mushrooms and kalemi squash seeds), forest stew, peach drizzle, and raspberry smoosh.

The last tribe of Lowasii that live in Wen are the Atklas. Their element is Clay, and I felt like they were most likely to burry or pickle things to preserve them in clay pots. I also wanted them to have their own liquor, called ungog, that they make by burying an ungog root in water for a hundred years. (Lowasii live to be about 5,200 years old, so this isn’t a long time.)

The Lowasii’s closest allies are the Saplings that care for the forest of Wen’togen. These tree spirits cultivate orchards and wild fruit for the Lowasii and the creatures of the forest. Saplings do not cook, but they do make mead from honey.

Next I focused on human cultures. I had waaay too many to list each one’s cuisines, so I picked my main countries. The most important country is Parosh. Which is toward the southeastern end of the continent. It’s a semi-arid climate. I wanted them to eat locusts fried in clover flowers, peppers, and honey. I also wanted them to eat goat, so I made up a dish called goat valunta that they eat with yellow rice and orange sorbet.

Amr is an island on the very southern coast. Their specialties are bananas, mango flowers, coconut water, and pulled pork. I wanted them to be famous for a desert called coconut zmir. And of course, fish. I wanted a whole Moana feel going on.

Mizparrow is a country in the northern plains. They eat grilled quail, pheasant, and goose. They have a recipe for honied duck that I’d love to try, and they burry duck eggs. An eggplant stew called baglot, stuffed bell pepper, and pumpkin stew. I researched cold weather crops and found spinach, eggplants, pumpkins so that’s what they eat.

Charozod is a country located on a lake that collects around the Mother River. Their main crop is rice, but they grow a variety of peppers, corn, and potatoes. Their main staple is spicy fish stew. Everyone, from the king down eats fish stew. Many coastal workers and market vendors eat crawfish.

Lastly, Nagdjik had a more diverse cuisine, because most of their food had to be imported due to their location. They harvested rye, barley, soybeans, apples, raspberries, plums, and cranberries. I wanted them to have dairy cows, giving them milk and cheese, that sometimes got too old and had to be eaten. But their main meat source was pork and poultry.  

After I chose the staples of these main human countries, I considered what Goblins would eat. I wanted the Goblins in Eshe to be hunter/ gatherers. They live in a highland, north of my MC’s home of Wen, on the northern island. Eshean Goblins hunt for eagle eggs in cliffs, venison, and wild sheep. They are transitioning into a farming mentality. They plant corn, squash, tomatoes, beans, and wheat products. One recipe I explored was a venison stuffed pumpkin. It sounded tasty.

The last cuisine I have to explore is the Underling’s of Bashaan. Because they live underground, they were the most difficult to come up with native dishes. Mostly, the poor subsist off of grubs and a type of underground corn. The rich have access the finest world cuisines, like roasted bear, imported fruits and vegetables, white beans, and whiskey.

 Resources:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/13/481586649/a-map-of-where-your-food-originated-may-surprise-you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_food_origins

 Some blogs I found:

http://atbwriters.blogspot.com/2018/10/food-as-element-of-worldbuilding.html

https://mythicscribes.com/world-building/foodbuilding/

[becominghuman]

FOREST CHURCH? (Part 2)

Large, commercial berry farms are good at some things. Small, diversified market gardens are good at different things. In Part 1 of this reflection, I concluded that while large-scale farms and small-scale gardens are different models for church planting, we need more garden-like church plants. A lot of them . . . working together and focusing on the deep health of those that find sustenance in them. I want to push this thought experiment a little further.

From my desk, I see my market garden. I’m currently looking at a four-foot-tall row of snap peas. On the other side of those are seventy-five tomato plants, and on the other side of those are potatoes and lettuce.  All in all, I am growing over 40 varieties of vegetables. We work incredibly hard to manage our little slice of land.

Just past my garden is a thousand acre berry farm. I know it’s there because I drive by it everyday, but I can’t see it from where I sit. My view is obstructed by a forest. Maybe “forest” is overstated. It’s a strip of undeveloped land, and it serves as a hundred-foot-wide buffer of good ol’ native vegetation.

On the edge of the forest are an endless supply of blackberries for August picking. In the understory of the Maple, Douglas Fir, and Cottonwood trees are Lily of the Valley, which I just learned are edible and quite delicious. Next to the Lily is a patch of red clover, the flowers of which my girls love to add to their homemade pizzas. (No joke. You should try it. I recommend clover flowers that aren’t sprayed.)

I have put in a sum total of zero minutes cultivating the ground of that forest. No machine is required to harvest the berries. And the soil is spongey, rich, beaming with insect life and worms, and requires no fertilizer.

No tractors, no hoes and shovels, no compost, and no insecticides. Year in and year out, that little slice of forest produces the fattest blackberries I’ve ever laid my eyes (and mouth) on. It seems by all measurements, the forest between my garden and the commercial farm is the most successful “farm” of the three.  

Forget a “commercial berry farm church”. Heck with the "diversified, small-scale, vegetable garden church”. I want to plant a "forest church". (Really, the blackberries are that good.)

How do we plant churches like a forest? That’s an important question, but I believe it’s the wrong one. It assumes forests are planned? Or, running with the agricultural metaphor, a forest isn’t cultivated or planted at all. Part of their success is because they’ve been left alone. They are the antithesis to cultivation.  Forests succeed because it’s the way nature works, not because a “forest farmer” had a good idea.

The better question, in light of the forest succeeding at being extremely productive, requiring no work, and perennially contributing healthfully to its surroundings, is this: How do we create the conditions for which churches can thrive like a forest?

Well, I can wax on and on with the forest metaphor, but I’ll spare you and jump to where I think this line of thinking goes. We don’t plant churches so much as we create space for them to plant themselves, to spring up naturally because the environment around them promotes, resources, and nourishes their seeding.

We ought to do exactly what the forest does: Nothing!

A forest is not the result of human influence; it’s the absence of it. It’s not the product of human planning; it’s the product of nature’s planning. A forest is not strategic but it is opportunistic; it’s not planned but it does follow certain biological principles; it’s not cultivated but it is deeply nourished. A forest is always quietly, patiently putting in the seasonal “work” to build soil and plant seeds. Some sprout and thrive and contribute to the diversity and health of a forest, but most never gain any traction. And that’s okay. Under the right conditions, a thriving forest is perpetually regenerative. I’ve found that this is true with followers of Jesus, too. Cultivate health, inspire seasonal dreaming, and together they’ll be perpetually regenerative.

I think we’re entering a time when forest-like churches are needed more than ever, which, again, is not so much a planting strategy but the promotion of a particularly healthy environment where (God’s) nature takes root in the soil (of human hearts). If you’re thinking to yourself, “How do you control for that, facilitate that, and monitor that?”, you’re thinking too much like a farmer.

Now is not the time to cultivate measurable rows of crops. Now is the time to watch closely where the Spirit is moving, where young people are gathering, where energy is palatable, where change is underway, where passion, voice, and hope are coalescing . . . and cordon off those places and protect them, affirm them, and resource them.  It is from within that slurry of energy that seedlings with sprout and take root.  It’s there, in that holy mess that a forest is being planted.  

We sure do have a lot to learn by observing the natural landscape between our properties. 

[kny111]

Decolonizing Healthcare: Addressing Social Stressors In Medicine

What does it mean to have a healthcare system that serves everybody? And what can physicians do to address the ways in which societal challenges impact our diagnoses?

Image Source: HealthSystemsGlobal

Rupa Marya, M.D., is exploring these concepts through numerous projects aimed at researching our current medical climate and collaborating with marginalized populations to make healthcare more effective and compassionate.

Following is a transcript from Marya’s 2018 Bioneers keynote presentation, in which she discusses her research and vision for the future of medicine. Watch the full keynote video here.View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Rupa Marya: I am the daughter of Punjabi immigrants who came to this country in 1973, with little money but plenty of caste privilege. We grew up with family vacations driving a VW van around the Western lands. My father would stop at the reservations. He would make us get out and listen and learn and look, and see what had happened to the original people of this land. He would talk to me about colonization, because we are also a people who had been colonized by Europeans.

I am a mother of two beautiful mixed heritage boys, and I am a farmer’s wife. I’m a physician who works in adult medicine, and who witnesses society’s ills manifest in my patients’ bodies, and a doctor who sees racism and state violence as an urgent public health issue. I’m a touring musician who has played in 29 different countries, singing in five different languages with the band Rupa and the April Fishes. To use a phrase taught to me by a Miwok elder, Wounded Knee, I am an Earth person.

What I’m going to describe for you is a system of domination in which we live, and what I believe are the direct health consequences of that system for all of us. I’ll begin with a description of how we have come to understand disease in a modern post-industrial context. In the 1850s, the germ theory was developed, which described how organisms such as bacteria and viruses made us sick. That led to the development of antibiotics and vaccines and systems to limit the spread of infectious disease.

In the 1960s, with the elucidation of DNA, we entered the molecular genetic era, where we are today. Here the gene creates a protein that can cause or protect from disease. How sick or well you were was thought to be preordained somehow by your genetics. This understanding has led to many powerful diagnostic tools and targeted therapies for specific diseases.In 2004, with the discovery of the role of RAS gene mutation in the development of colon cancer, exactly 2,000 years after Roman physician Celsus described the cardinal signs of inflammation, we are entering the era of inflammation. Instead of a reductionist approach to understanding disease, we are seeing how many pathways lead to chronic inflammation, which in turn creates the conditions for illness.

Today we will be talking about the impact of social stressors, which have been shown to cause chronic inflammation. These diseases require more systemic approaches, not simply focusing on the individual, but rather moving our gaze to the structures of society, helping us see how the individual pursuit of health is actually futile in a system that makes health impossible.

To understand the root causes of pathologies we see today, which impact all of us but affect black, brown and poor people more intensely, we have to examine the foundations of this society, which began with colonization. To me, to be colonized means to be disconnected and dis-integrated from our ancestry, from our Earth, from our indigeneity, our Earth-connected selves. We all come from Earth-connected peoples, people who once lived in deep connections with the rhythms of nature. I believe it is not a coincidence that the colonization of this land happened at the same time Europeans were burning hundreds of thousands of witches, those women who carried the traditional indigenous knowledge of the tribes of Europe.

Colonization is the way the extractive economic system of capitalism came to this land, supported by systems of supremacy and domination, which are a necessary part of keeping the wealth and power accumulated in the hands of the colonizers and ultimately their financiers.

In what we now know as the United States, this system of supremacy is expressed in many ways and with many outcomes. Today, we will focus on specific ones. First, white supremacy, which created a framework that legitimized slavery and genocide. Slavery created cheap labor, which is necessary for a functioning capitalist system. Genocide created unlimited access to resources in the form of land, animal parts, minerals, and raw materials, which are also necessary for a fully functioning capitalist economy.

As capitalism functions, it further entrenches these systems of supremacy.We all know that white supremacy is the scary guy with the swastika and the hood. But it can also look like any place where there is an abundance of white people in exclusive contexts, where power and access is not readily ceded to others. Please remember, lest you get caught up in a tsunami of guilty feelings, that as I talk about these things, I’m talking about systems of oppression that we are actually all a part of and that we all recreate, and these systems are what need to be dismantled.

There’s white supremacy and then there’s male supremacy, also known as patriarchy, which leads to the invisibilization of women’s labor, like creating the entire human race out of our bodies. Or in this context, reproducing the entire workforce and suppressing our wages, which further supports capitalism.

Patriarchy also leads to femicide, domestic violence and child abuse, which we see across all groups. We also see human supremacy, where people feel superior to the rest of living entities, thereby subjecting living soils, seeds, animals, plants, and water to horrific treatment in the name of exploiting resources, which in turn feeds the capitalist need for ever-increasing profits.

While this wheel of domination, exploitation, generation, and sequestration of wealth continues, we experience trauma as the byproduct and common pathway. Many studies show us that chronic stress and trauma create chronic inflammation. When we look at the top ten causes of death in occupied Turtle Island, we see diseases that have been described to us as diseases of lifestyle or ones that come about because of poor choices. Maybe we eat too much fried food. Maybe we don’t exercise enough. Maybe we have a genetic predisposition. What these diseases have in common in their pathogenesis is a component of inflammation, and we are just starting to parse out how the social stressors and the very structures of society contribute to and exacerbate this chronic inflammatory state.

It is unfounded to see these diseases as caused by individual poor choices in the context of a genetic predisposition. I see them as diseases that are virtually impossible to avoid because of the system in which we live, which generates a biological milieu of inflammation through trauma, chronic stress, environmental degradation, and damaged food systems. I see these as diseases of colonization.

If you’re a Native person, you’re like... It takes science and medicine a long time to catch up with Native knowledge. This is not news to Native people. When I met Oglala Lakota elder Candace Ducheneaux in Standing Rock, she talked to me about how these diseases that are so common in modern society and more heavily so in Indian Country are diseases that were brought by the colonizers.

We talked about diabetes, which I had been taught in medical school is a disease of insulin resistance. Either your pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin or your body’s cells are not sensitive to the insulin. These are both ways of seeing things that are based in a sense of individualism and predetermination.

On the Standing Rock reservation, before the damming of Mni Sose or the Missouri River, diabetes was rare. Actually across Turtle Island, diabetes was virtually nonexistent. Once the river was dammed, it ended up flooding nearby cottonwood forests. By shifting the ecology through a colonizing force, the people became more dependent on the cash economy for their food and medicine, and they lost the essential cultural connection to their traditional ways. This tragic loss of the commons is a hallmark of capitalist society, and the impact is felt in the individual body.

After the damming of the river, rates of diabetes skyrocketed. This story is similar for tribes all over Turtle Island. It is important to recognize this didn’t happen simply because people became more sedentary and consequently more obese. This happened because of colonization, not by changing the indigenous body, but by changing the social structures around that body, which in turn creates disease.

One powerful study from Alberta demonstrated that First Nations tribes that had maintained their cultural continuity specifically through language had lower rates of diabetes. Just imagine that.

This is what is protective. It’s not the low carb, paleo diet. It’s not exercise. It’s not the latest fad or trend. This study also showed that self-determinism has a powerful protective effect from diabetes for Indigenous People. These same factors had a protective effect against suicide for Indigenous People in Canada, who experience rates two to five times the national average. This example, to me, demonstrates how disease is a complex manifestation of social and biological influences on groups of individuals that results in a common expression – here, diabetes.

While we can understand this clearly from a Native American experience, we must be aware that these social structures of domination produce trauma and inflammation for all of us. We are all affected.

So what can we do in the face of this knowledge that can seem so overwhelming? Simple things can have huge effects.

To heal the diseases that are caused by the trauma of colonization, we must decolonize. If colonization represents a dis-integration and a disconnection, we must reconnect. Our work is two-pronged: to reintegrate and to dismantle. We must reintegrate what has been divided and conquered in our societies, between our peoples, between us and the natural world around us, and within ourselves. We can do this in many ways: by promoting acts that increase local autonomy and self-determinism, by exposing the myth of treating the individual as limited in its ability to actually address root causes of diseases, by reconnecting to who we were before our respective colonization – through songs, traditional knowledge, reawakening our food and medicine ways, and reawakening our relationships to each other, to the Earth around us, and to other beings. We must dismantle those systems of domination that create and recreate cycles of trauma and inflammation, those systems that work in service of capitalism.

This is my vision of holistic healthcare.

Integrated, Holistic Healthcare

What does that look like for my work? How do I use my whitecoat privilege to address things systemically? Aside from starting to address diseases with my patients in the hospital as directly related to these phenomena, I’m doing these things:

With regards to integration, I have been invited to help create a clinic and farm to develop the practice of Decolonizing Medicine at Standing Rock, together with tribal members and healers Linda Black Elk and Luke Black Elk, great-grandson of Black Elk medicine man. We have been developing a framework for how to offer care that centralizes Lakota cosmology, an understanding of disease and health, and to create a model that can be replicable to other places and in other specific contexts.

We have incredible partners, including Mass Design Group and National Nurses United, as well as the Do No Harm Coalition at UCSF, who are over 400 healthcare workers committed to ending systems of oppression as a way of insuring health for all. We have raised over a million dollars so far, thanks to generous gifts from the Jena & Michael King Foundation, Colin Kaepernick, and crowdfunding, and seek five million more to break ground on this exciting project.

The Justice Study

With regards to dismantling systems of oppression, I have been working on a national study of the health effects of law enforcement violence or terrorism, called the Justice Study. We were asked by the community fighting for justice for 26-year-old Mario Woods, who was gunned down by SFPD in 2016, to create a study that would answer this question: If the wound is police violence and the medicine is justice, what happens to our health when the medicine is not given?

We gathered a team of public health workers and researchers, and we are currently actively compiling data. It’s already illuminating, showing how many areas of people’s lives are affected by police violence. We know that Native Americans, Black and Latinx people experience disproportionate rates of police violence, and we can see that they are most impacted by the long-standing effects of violence. How does this reality contribute to the health disparities that we see?

Across all races, we are being traumatized, with black, brown, and Indigenous people being affected more intensely. We are continuing to collect data, and we’ll be offering it to policy makers who wish to shape community safety away from models that uphold white supremacist frameworks into ones that create safety and mitigate harm for all of us.

What I want you to remember is this:

Health is impossible when living in systems of oppression.

We cannot effectively treat diseases like diabetes with a drug without addressing the systems that make diabetes so prevalent.

We must redefine the scope of healthcare workers and the work of healthcare to include not only care at the bedside of the individual, but dismantling the systems of oppression that create the conditions for illness.

And finally, we must reintegrate with the Earth, with each other, and within ourselves. We must decolonize.