#politics of language

[omgellendean]

[fluentisonus]

everybody's a theatre nerd on here until it's time to appreciate that comedy as a medium is just as rich & fascinating & culturally important as tragedy

[reasonsforhope]

"In an unprecedented step to preserve and maintain the most carbon-rich elements of U.S. forests in an era of climate change, President Joe Biden’s administration last week proposed to end commercially driven logging of old-growth trees in National Forests.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, issued a Notice of Intent to amend the land management plans of all 128 National Forests to prioritize old-growth conservation and recognize the oldest trees’ unique role in carbon storage. 

It would be the first nationwide amendment to forest plans in the 118-year history of the Forest Service, where local rangers typically have the final word on how to balance forests’ role in watershed, wildlife and recreation with the agency’s mandate to maintain a “sustained yield” of timber.

“Old-growth forests are a vital part of our ecosystems and a special cultural resource,” Vilsack said in a statement accompanying the notice. “This clear direction will help our old-growth forests thrive across our shared landscape.”

But initial responses from both environmentalists and the logging industry suggest that the plan does not resolve the conflict between the Forest Service’s traditional role of administering the “products and services” of public lands—especially timber—and the challenges the agency now faces due to climate change. National Forests hold most of the nation’s mature and old-growth trees, and therefore, its greatest stores of forest carbon, but that resource is under growing pressure from wildfire, insects, disease and other impacts of warming.

Views could not be more polarized on how the National Forests should be managed in light of the growing risks.

National and local environmental advocates have been urging the Biden administration to adopt a new policy emphasizing preservation in National Forests, treating them as a strategic reserve of carbon. Although they praised the old-growth proposal as an “historic” step, they want to see protection extended to “mature” forests, those dominated by trees roughly 80 to 150 years old, which are a far larger portion of the National Forests. As old-growth trees are lost, which can happen rapidly due to megafires and other assaults, they argue that the Forest Service should be ensuring there are fully developed trees on the landscape to take their place...

The Biden administration’s new proposal seeks to take a middle ground, establishing protection for the oldest trees under its stewardship while allowing exceptions to reduce fuel hazards, protect public health and safety and other purposes. And the Forest Service is seeking public comment through Feb. 2 (Note: That's the official page for the proposed rule, but for some reason you can only submit comments through the forest service website - so do that here!) on the proposal as well as other steps needed to manage its lands to retain mature and old-growth forests over time, particularly in light of climate change.

If the Forest Service were to put in place nationwide protections for both mature and old-growth forests, it would close off most of the National Forests to logging. In an inventory concluded earlier this year in response to a Biden executive order, the Forest Service found that 24.7 million acres, or 17 percent, of its 144.3 million acres of forest are old-growth, while 68.1 million acres, or 47 percent, are mature."

-via Inside Climate News, December 20, 2023

-

Note: This proposed rule is current up for public comment! If you're in the US, you can go here to file an official comment telling the Biden administration how much you support this proposal - and that you think it should be extended to mature forests!

Official public comments really DO matter. You can leave a comment on this proposal here until February 2nd.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Long considered extinct, pentl'ach has now been declared a living language and added to British Columbia's official list of First Nations languages.  The reclassification of pentl'ach (pronounced "PUNT-lutch") was the result of both linguistic and administrative work by the Qualicum First Nation on Vancouver Island's east coast, with support from the First Peoples' Cultural Council.  The Coast Salish language had been considered extinct because the last well known fluent speaker died in the 1940s.  But Mathew Andreatta, a Qualicum member and researcher with the pentl'ach revitalization project, said the language was never truly gone.  Andreatta called the reclassification "an affirmation of something that we've always known and that we've always felt." He said the move is important because it is healing for his people, but also because it opens more doors to continue revitalizing the language. 

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[mysharona1987]

[useless-catalanfacts]

Sweden saying they'll vote against allowing the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European Union Parliament because "there's lots of minority languages and we can't allow them all" is so funny because CATALAN HAS MORE SPEAKERS THAN SWEDISH

Catalan is the 13th most spoken language in the EU. It has more than 10 million speakers, which means it has more speakers than other languages that are already official EU languages like Maltese (530,000), Estonian (1.2 million), Latvian (1.5 million), Irish (1.6 million), Slovene (2.5 million), Lithuanian (3 million), Slovak (5 million), Finnish (5.8 million), Danish (6 million), Swedish (10 million), and Bulgarian (10 million).

Neither Galician (3 million) nor Basque (750,000) would still be the least spoken languages to be allowed in the EU representative bodies.

But even if any of them did, so what? Why do speakers of smaller languages deserve less rights than those of bigger languages? How are we supposed to feel represented by the EU Parliament when our representatives aren't even allowed to speak our language, but the dominant groups can speak theirs?

It all comes down to the hatred of language/cultural diversity and the belief that it's an inconvenience, that only the languages of independent countries have any kind of value while the rest should be killed off. After all, isn't that what Sweden has been trying to do to the indigenous Sami people for centuries?

[odinsblog]

[kristiliqua]

CHUNSIK MY BELOVEDDDDDD

[dduane]

A splendid flow of invective

I just want to point folks at this, both for the rightness of the sentiment and for the fabulously emphatic response. The actual tweet (with the video) is here.

ETA: here’s the link to @bookersquared’s original TikTok post.

[brazilspill]

Me about non-Brazilians

[spider-artdump]

[kyonshi-8610]

more than one week i will be gone

translations and img descriptions in alt thing

[kaurwreck]

I typically keep work/Tumblr separate nowadays, but the Senate passed the TikTok bill, and the President is aching to sign it.

It's wildly unlikely TikTok will manage to divest within 270 days, and the potential three month extension won't do much either, so this amounts to a ban. But more than just TikTok, the language of the bill-soon-to-be-law grants the President incredibly broad authority to ban or force the sale of other foreign-owned apps, too, especially given its very expansive definition of "foreign-owned apps."

I don't have a particular call to action that I care to offer here. But, it's something people (not only US citizens) should be aware of, as this is a pretty big fucking deal.

[feministteapot]

Tim Walz is getting a lot of attention for that clip where he's calling Republicans "weird"

I just need you all to know that in Midwestern/Minnesota Nice™️ saying that something is "interesting" or worse "weird" is how you say "this is worst thing ever and I can't fully express my opinion in polite company"

[mysharona1987]

Starting to suspect a lot of these Israeli government ministers don’t realize Google Translate exists.

[fauvester]

little moshang fan kid <3

spoiled, aloof, a bit of a bitch, terminally 'weak constitution'-ed, lowkey lazy, prefers reading his dailies in the office and pretending to do paperwork to fighting