The Daily R-r-r-ibbit

Free Energy (video)

This video made me smile. The powershift is coming!

 

 

Reason number three-gazillion-and-one to stop blowing up mountains: salamanders

   

Untitled video by Joe Milmoe at Vimeo has some familiar faces in it.

Emma Watson Supports Fair Trade Fashion | GlobalShift

While Lindsay Lohan spent her summer vacation in the courtroom and Paris Hilton smuggled drugs in Las Vegas, at least one young starlet used her fame to do something good. Emma Watson, who recently left the set of the final Harry Potter movie, spent her summer lending her name and image to the Fair Trade clothing company, People Tree, and traveling to India to see the difference fair trade makes.

via www.globalshift.org

 

 

GlobalShift.org uses the creativity and experiences of everyday citizens to call attention to injustice in the world today. They aim to make others aware and to inspire people to do something about that injustice in a way that can meet and respond to the tremendous environmental and societal challenges for our planet. Check out the Global Shift website here and the Emma Watson article here.

You can visit the website for the free trade, organic fashion company, People Tree, here.

Alaska Native Wisdom for Modern Times

There is a single place in the United States where indigenous peoples still live on ancestral lands, consume over four hundred pounds of wild foods annually per capita, and indigenous elders still remember the arrival of the first Westerners in their regions. That place is Alaska. Despite daunting challenges to cultural integrity and ways of life, Alaska’s Native peoples retain vast storehouses of their traditional knowledge, wisdom, and lifeways. Thus, many traditional Alaska Native lifeways and understandings about how human beings fit into the bigger matrix of creation remain relatively intact. These ways have allowed our cultures to survive and thrive for thousands of years, even in the face of many daunting ecological and economic crises. In today’s challenging times, such ways, having evolved through an intimate and profound relationship to lands, waters, and all life, have much to offer the American people and the entire human family.

via www.yesmagazine.org

Cathie's notes: Great article at Yes! by Ilarion Merculieff, a member of the Aleut Community of the St. Paul Island Tribe.

Some thorny characters in Frog Pond Holler

I started another post this morning -- Stewardship Among Flowers and Thorns -- but it went places I wasn't expecting and it's going to take some time to finish and may be kind of long. I decided to put that one on hold for today and just introduce one of the thorny characters in the holler for future reference:

Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia)

                                                                                  [Photo by Cathie Bird]

This tree was a little difficult to get a lens around. When I tried to get a photo of the whole tree, its masses of white flowers kind of merged into blurry balloons, but I came in a little closer to get this fairly decent image of several branches. It's as awesome from a distance, though, as it is up close:

                                                                                    [Photo by Cathie Bird]

                                                                                        [Photo by Cathie Bird]

The thorns on this tree are stout, and (for this species) appear as un-branched pairs:

                                                                                    [Photo by Cathie Bird]

Black locust wood is strong and slow to rot in the humid, wet Tennessee climate. People of the Cherokee Nation planted and cultivated it to use for nails, bows and darts; white settlers used locust for fence posts and base logs for houses.

Black locust is a species that moves into areas that have been disturbed by human activity. This one grows near a gravel road, pretty much at the edge of the road cut.

I also get hung up on crab apples, blackberries and hawthorns on a fairly regular basis here in the holler. The hawthorn will be featured in my longer stewardship post, and as soon as I get a few more 2010 photos of the other two species, I'll do another post for them.