I recently started following the zventenzeblog because they’ve been posting a lot of Eastern European winter festivals and costumes, which introduced me to some of the stylin’est, greatest imagery I never knew about. SO GOOD.
These remind me of my grandmother’s sets of unedited folklore from around the world, which captured my imagination as a child. The stories were always scarier, more surreal, and more beautiful than their post-Victorian retellings. My favorites – regardless of origin – gave me this same cozy-creepy feeling.
I just saw that people have cut down some of the Joshua trees during this shutdown and I want to cry
w H A T
The what trees? Someone explain? I want to be appropriately sad. I mean, I’m sad either way because trees are better than people. But why are these trees more special than usual?
They’re a rare species, and one that is very stunning, and also one that is very vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change.
And if I ever get my hands on one of the people who did this, I will be hard pressed to not kill them.
Did you see WHY they cut them down? They cut them down so they could go off roading in closed off areas of pristine desert.
Some fucking people should not be let out of their cages.
These are Joshua trees. They can be 300 years old (and at tallest, 15 meters).
Their range isn’t confined to the national park, fortunately. They are found in spots throughout southern CA, NV, and AZ.
This news makes me absolutely furious.
Read those articles. A lot of people think that you can’t “damage” the desert, because they don’t realize it’s not “just rocks and sand”, but an extremely delicate ecosystem that takes decades to grow even a little bit. Once damaged, it probably won’t repair itself in these assholes’ lifetimes.
And this is exactly the kind of thing that the national parks were established to combat – the mindset of “what does it matter if I cut down some of these trees, there are lots more right over there; what does it matter if I go off-roading, there’s more desert than anyone really needs”. It’s a profoundly selfish and wasteful mindset.
Just this week I went googling around – hesitantly – to see what the latest news is from Yellowstone. All of the parks are in danger of poachers coming in while the rangers are understaffed, but I feel like Yellowstone is especially vulnerable, because its wildlife is famous, and in cases like the wolf reintroduction there, infamous amongst exactly the same kind of people who are committing vandalism throughout the parks.
Fortunately, at least so far, I haven’t found any news reports of poachers targeting the wildlife. There are apparently a lot of local businesses (probably near many of the parks, but particularly Yellowstone) that are chipping in money for cleaning and upkeep and, one expects, security, because those businesses depend on visitors to the parks for their own survival. (Which is why the shutdown affects far more than just the 800k workers who aren’t being paid.)
Some people are absolutely awful, and the only thing I can take comfort from at the moment is that there are also many people who love the parks, know the danger they face right now, and who are trying to help protect them.
