This editorial review, written in 2012, made this statement: "Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity" as the world was already producing more than enough food for all of humanity. A bit depressing. 🧪 1/🧵 Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10440046.2012.695331​

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

Please always carry bear spray and do hike in groups of three or more. Tis the season Little cubs make mamma bear extra defensive. She'll avoid a group, but might just get aggressive with a lone hiker. www.yahoo.com/news/article...

#WeekTforTime #AlphabetChallenge #SquirrelSunday 🐿️ #Twofer “Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is?” This #squirrel lounging among the rocks at #LoversPoint, #PacificGrove, #CA doesn’t know or care & definitely has the right idea when it comes to time well spent. #Chicago #HunterFranklinPics

Your 'moment of doom' for May 28, 2026 ~ Top shelf doom. "The last bit of ice shelf in front of the glacier is poised to disintegrate... We don't know quite how this ice shelf is going to break up, but it's definitely going to go." www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

My new book PONDS: An Illustrated Guide, from Yale University Press. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... 🧪🌿🌎🪶🐡 #wildlife #scicomm #sciviz #scientificillustration #visualscicomm #sciviz #scicomm #ponds #lakes #freshwater

re-posting

The question is not when we stop hurting the planet. The planet is our body. The question is how much pain we are willing to feel in our own flesh before we stop pretending it belongs to someone else. #PlanetaryScale #Emergence

Daniel R. Brooks makes so much sense. Love this book! mitpress.mit.edu/978026204868...

A reminder. Tick, tick..

How Rural Immigrants Build Community: When formal systems fail, mutual aid sustains rural life barnraisingmedia.com/networks-of-...

The story of the American chestnut tree and its demise is an example of ecological fitting. The Eastern forest ecosystem didn’t collapse. It changed. A guild formed between other tree and shrub species, taking over the function and processes of the American chestnut trees.

Reading and finding out that I'm in agreement. Evolution is the process by which the biosphere has recovered from all previous episodes of climate change. The Major Metaphors of Evolution (search for the pdf)

The Ebola outbreak seems like it shouldn't affect me...yeah, right. ...“death by a thousand cuts” scenario (Brooks et al. 2019), press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

What a great life and good decisions. May we all learn from good examples. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtFi...

False Solomon's-seal is another big and robust wildflower from the Lily family. Now in flower occupying open woodlands, thickets with partial shade and moist soils. Found throughout all fifty states and most Canadian Provinces! (iNaturalist). Peak flowering during May.

Tagetes minuta is native to South America, but has naturalized on other continents. Farmers in some African states mix the dried leaves with dried beans to deter bean weevils in storage. The roots have a very strong fragrance. I'll be planting some of these among the garlic to deter nematodes.

Fang feng or siler root or Radix Saposhnikoviae is in the parsley family. Got very large (small bush) and lasted in the garden for a few years. Then, one year it all died. Trying again because it's just too fun. Radix Saposhnikoviae uses in East Asian medicine: www.meandqi.com/knowledge-ba...

Lobelia inflata (left) and Lobelia siphilitica (right) have similarly shaped leaves. Photos of young plants help me to id unknowns that sometimes sprout somewhere.

They are very hard to tell apart until they form seed pods. I'll keep trying to find some differences.

Nigella sativa and it's not been easy to germinate.

We found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% under Texas’ abortion ban. Here’s how we did our analysis. (Published Feb. 2025)

Yellow Baptisia (Baptisia sphaerocarpa) is finally doing well. About as easy as licorice seeds to germinate. Best technique I've found is to soak the seeds in wet paper towel for a few weeks and then nick the outer seed coat with very sharp scissors or such.

Some success from cold stratification (3 months). Echinacea pallida.

These are two different plants in two different plant families. Observation skills practice! What difference do you see? 😉

Very exciting! Yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica) from seed. Here in Zone 4 and 6 months of winter, it has to live indoors. I'll put it out in July though.

Black Hungarian pepper flower. This pepper grew much taller than the others. Hope the pot is big enough. More fertilizer later this summer?

The young are coming! www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mwX...

www.ms.now/opinion/step... Farewell to Colbert — and an era of comedy For many, the axing of Colbert’s show is a grim tale of how media conglomerates and authoritarian leaders have joined forces to erode freedom of speech.

Happy International Day for Biological Diversity 🌱 Biodiversity and climate are deeply interconnected. At the Bolin Centre, researchers like @yannickwoudstra.bsky.social work to better understand these links and the changes shaping life on Earth.

Thank you, authors who gave me a really important key to identifying Ligusticum and other parsley family species! Herb schools pay attention. Add training in macro and micro morphology to organoleptic skills. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Exciting. Picked up this Passiflora incarnata at the medicinal plant sale in Missoula last weekend. It will live in the greenhouse for the summer. Thanks Blue Coyote Farm! www.pineymountainherbals.com/blue-coyote-...

Experiment germinating Pedicularis canadensis. 🤔 hmm. Well, the Sporobolus is doing well. 😂 That's a grass that I'm hoping the partially parasitic Pedicularis will enjoy. Am going to have to just bury the pot in amongst the hedgerow and see if anything comes up eventually.

Growing Lycopus americana from seed is challenging. It's in the mint family and shouldn't be difficult. Meanwhile, the established plants in the garden bed are spreading like wildfire! Yikes. Underground rhizomes might be easier to dig up to share around than new plants. 😉

The cold stratification experiments are not going well. Argh! What am I doing wrong? Ah. Right. Zone 4 has it's drawbacks. Sigh.

If you chop up some broccoli and let it sit out for at least 10 minutes before cooking it, you significantly increase the formation of the powerful cancer-fighting compound sulforaphane in the broccoli. Then if you add some crushed mustard seeds, you increase production of sulfurophane even more.

I have just discovered a trick to promoting a quote. It's soooo cool! Just try to copy a quote from a substack and bingo, a jpg is formed that you can use. This is brilliant! Who made this trick? Okay, here is a quote to entice herbalists to read How Foxgloves Make Medicine from Femke de Jong

Spot on and awesome giggle reading. Why plants and plant scientists are fascinating and why people should care.

Hawai'i is the first state to successfully implement The Montana Plan to define the powers corporations are granted by states to exclude political spending. Legal challenges are expected, especially since Hawai'i's AG is on record as being pro-Citizens United.

This 👇👍

I'm grinning. I was once corrected for calling them trichomes instead of hairs. LOL. Maybe we were both wrong.

NEW: Tiny footprints. A blue blanket. The autopsy reports of babies who died after not receiving a vitamin K shot at birth included heartbreaking details about how small the babies were — and what items they had with them when they died.

Version 10. A lot. Update from new @WHO Risk Assessment www.who.int/publications.... Tidying up is needed tomorrow.

Russian sage is more than a pretty flower. It's got a lot of medicinal benefits. Paper is not Open Source. 🙁

Lomatium nudicaule from seed 4 years ago. Native to western states. There's over 100 species of Lomatium throughout North America. powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:ls...

So many people that wanted to be there...me too. www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6AG...

Curtis was the brother of the Eclectic pharmacist, John URI Lloyd

Salvia miltiorrhiza (dan shen) is coming back! Shocked. I can barely get it to germinate in the greenhouse. Kept some in pots last summer but put some outdoors. Perhaps because we had a dry, warmish winter (didn't get below zero and had little snow.

Success! Yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica) is in the lizard tail family and native to swampy, wet places in New Mexico. It's a tough one to germinate from seed because the soil needs to stay wet. It's much easier to just replant the ramets from the runners the mother plant puts out.

Patrinia scabiosifolia (bai jiang cao) is an unusual East Asian medicinal. Small pot buried in outdoor garden. Success! www.meandqi.com/knowledge-ba...