Greenstorm's Journal

They did a backburn and they're not currently worried about the highway out of here. Phew. I really am always amazed by what the fire folks can achieve. The planes and water bladders and all that look so miniscule compared to those fires, and more often than not they'll have the fire walk right up and then drop their line however they do it and preserve, like, every single structure on a landscape that's otherwise totally torn up.

Got the truck stuck at work today, or at least the summer student who was driving did. It's funny, the whole district is tinder-dry and we got buried up to the axle and then some in liquified muck. We were also a three hour drive away from town/the office, and off the maps of known roads. We called it in something like 1:00, it took work till 2:30 to send someone out (the office is pretty sparse lately), but he made good time and got to us by 4:30 so we were home by a little after 8. That is a long day. It was especially a long wait in potentially the densest cloud of blackflies I've been in since 2015, blackflies being the ones that bite you and leave a bloody swollen bit and also that fly into your nose and eyes. Luckily I was dressed for it -- headscarf etc - but the summer students weren't super happy. They were still good company though.

That part of the landscape was like an extreme version of the whole area up on the omineca. Glaciation is so recent: everywhere is either a pile of glacial debris which is mostly super-dry wiggly gravel bumps with kinnickinnick and pine or douglas-fir and birch, superfine clay dropped by remnants of glaciers as they melted and left behind that impermeable layer which became a swamp with black spruce, grassy open swamps ringed with willow and browse species left by filled-in beaver lakes, or gently-abraded slopes of the troughs that glaciers flowed through full of dark marching spruce with balsam-fir (not balsamea but lasiocarpa, foresters are weird) on the tops and aspens forming dappled clearings. The soils are so young, they haven't complexified yet even in the bogs full of peat.

Anyhow, all that is to say I used my bird app and realized that the sound I hear in the evenings is a snipe winnowing. That means the little remnant glacial swamp across the road from me, that I can see from my bedroom window, is a relatively healthy and functioning wetland. I never thought of it that way before, it's so small, but it makes me really happy. People worry about old growth but wetlands are even rarer and more damaged.

Look up the sound of a snipe winnowing. It's pretty neat. I guess the sound is made with the wings?

Goddammit I am really tired of people's ecological hot take memes.

I just listened to a podcast where they interviewed Dan Barber. In that interview he said, basically, that the reason we have so many ecological issues is that people choose what they want to eat and then force the land to grow it, rather than eating what grew well and was available (the podcast is "Gastropod" and I like it the two episodes in I've got so far). That's apparently not obvious to folks and it was nice to hear someone say it.

But I went from that to a meme that basically tried to invoke arguments from authority (Sepp Holzer and some indigenous quotes, likely out of context) to imply that if BC just, um, built our roads on mountantops instead of valleys the roads would be fine. And that, um, if we just work with the landscape everything will be fine. I think there was an anecdote about planting perennials around a creek in a pasture.

I guess it's fashionable for folks to just share these ideas without taking half a second to think of consequences and ramifications. Don't get me wrong, I think we should be working with the landscape and not against it. But what does that mean in a province where the flat land is maybe 2% of the landbase, and of that anywhere that doesn't get to -40C is in what used to be a wetland (and incidentally contains over 90% of the people)? Well, let's see:

-First Nations often moved seasonally, to the water to fish and provision and then away from the water. This kept them in manageable relationship to high water and to wildfires (as opposed to deliberately set fires). Mobile or disposable housing and a lack of fixed or permanent structures wouldn't fit well with private property, our concepts of ownership, lots of manufacturing and infrastructure, etc. This is a great way to fit into the landscape of this area. It would mean a tremendous change to our society on every level.

-The reason there's water at the bottom of the valleys is because it lands all over, including the top, and moves down. It brings soil and rocks with it either frozen (avalanche) or as landslides and mud or really flashy (get huge and then small again) creeks, depending on whether you're in the interior or the coast respectively. One of the highways that took the most damage from water (the meme shows a picture of the road at river-level where it's been washed out) is most often closed because of snow issues where it goes through high elevations. There's not just a simple solution to where to build roads that everyone is ignoring. This means: travel can be seasonal on nonpermanent roads including frozen lakes and rivers(coast/boat and then overland was super common, the grease trail network was enormous and my town used to be enormously powerful because it was on a huge lake nexus), it can be by plane, or we can fix our permanent roads pretty often.

-Which maybe leads to my actual issue, which is: nature wins. Natural forces are big and they will disrupt and uproot us from time to time even if we do everything "right". I am in no way arguing that we're not deeply wrong right now. I am arguing that while natural disasters absolutely should cause us to evaluate our infrastructure (or ideally periodic reviews before natural disasters, honestly), the fact that a particular piece of infrastructure has failed doesn't mean it was built wrong and if it was just "built right" it wouldn't fail. Sometimes it means our social goals aren't supportable without occasionally (or maybe even frequently!) replacing infrastructure. Living "in harmony with nature" doesn't mean that nature turns into a neutral backdrop. It means there is *give* and there is *take* on both sides, and that give and take is accepted as part of a harmonious life and not viewed as a failure or a slight or a sign from god(s). Or maybe it's viewed as a sign from god(s) to do some introspection and make sure we're both giving and taking.

-This was also posted by someone living on a fucking floodplain in the location that doesn't declare all the weird uncharismatic minifauna there that are going extinct as endangered because they'd have to reflood the wetland. Which, let me say, infurates me on many layers: that used to be very rich farmland. Good farmland almost by definition floods some-definition-of-regularly. Before that is was marsh/swamp/etc and highly productive of fish and birds and biomass. But over time it's been taken out of swamp and then of farms and put into homes which means those homes endanger two super important things -- agriculture and rare productive ecosystems -- and require the highest control of nature because farmland can handle being flooded from time to time. So yeah. Move everyone. Rejig our society in almost every respect. I am actually really, really down for this. But it's not as simple as you think it is, and literally you are the problem.

Bah.

All the queer people I've met in person are single-on-disability or are supported physically and/or financially by a live-in partner, except one. They talk about how queer means breaking out of normative thoughts and behaviours. They talk about how difficult that is and how it's penalized in so many ways.

Today on the poly group I frequent someone talked about how he and his partner had decided to see each other less frequently, how they didn't like the feeling of routine and so they decided to only meet up when they really wanted each other. His way of gauging that was through her messages; did they seem like they really wanted him? Then they'd have a date. The comments slammed him for manipulation and he took down the post. The moderators said, how could you blame people for being triggered by withholding sex as a relationship tactic?

Autistic groups talk about "female autism" constantly. Sometimes they say "FemaleAndNonbinary autism". Every once in a blue moon someone mentions men who have something more like female autism.

People who advocate for shorter work weeks and lots of vacation time to build a more humane and even productive system slam the leader of the province for taking a vacation to travel and see his family during an official wildfire emergency, after 18 months of covid emergency, going into more covid emergency, and the wildfire folks have had their prioritization in place for years.

I think about the concept of autism a lot. I think about what about that concept overlaps with me and what doesn't. In the last days I've been thinking about how I abstract differently than other folks. Stepping out a little, I *bundle* differently than other folks.

When we learn anything from ideas to actions we learn in tiny pieces that, through use, disappear into a larger coalesced whole. In academia complex concepts get used until they're easy to compress into jargon: whole life-work ideas become one word in a sentence of many words. Physically many tiny motions and corrections and attention-directions are practiced until they come together into one fluid action and then become an automatic response. Abstraction is part of bundling this way. Driving is part of bundling this way.

The more we use our bigger bundles the more we see those bundles as a real entity and not a collection of smaller parts. We forget the reality and the precision of the foundations because our minds cannot hold each foundation stone at once and still build atop them. If "land tenure" or "species" needs to be unpacked in a statement the statement will fall under its own weight, much as driving skill vanishes when each calf muscle and each eyeflick needs to be consciously controlled.

I'm shit at bundles. It takes me a long time to put them together. I ask too many questions and can't easily exclude variations or incongruities so jargon or even language feels imprecise. I can't squint properly and blur the edges of a category with enough conviction. It takes years for me to link the perception of a particular kind of shape and colour to the tension in that calf which sets it on the other pedal with exactly the right amount of pressure without a stop in my conscious awareness and a check-- is this the right bundle for this circumstance? Is this what people do? Social behaviour is just a bundle, just like driving, just like assuming "men" or "species" means something similar in anything other than a very rough non-overlapping statistical cloud. Social behaviour is the easiest of these: this topic, that facial movement.

I think when people care about something their bundles solidify. They tighten up. The contents compress into invisibility, and just the big abstraction is left. We lose the ability to create new bundles and double-down on what we have. We hit the gas or the brakes without thinking; we double down hard on categorizations; we say words louder and with less nuance.

The bundles just have what we put into them, though. They don't have every circumstance. They are just a set of automatic thoughts and behaviours. It feels to me like this way information is lost. I know we need to build into those abstractions but we also need to test the foundation stones, to wiggle each one frequently, to see if anything no longer fits and needs to be updated.

Sometimes updating something brings the whole castle down.

I'm going cross-eyed at this tangle of metaphors. I don't fit anywhere because I don't bundle right. I don't shear off what's supposed to be irrelevant information; I don't structuralize the core of the bundle correctly. Any group is composed of people inside and people outside based on a handful of characteristics. I can't squint hard enough to only see those characteristics. Any idea is composed of generalities. I don't like using the idea unless I test the generalities for the specific circumstance. It works so well with ecosystems. People hate it.

I'm tired and I've lost my point. Perhaps I'll revisit this later.

It's a way we get things wrong.

I wish I weren't so irritated by the people pouring ashes over their heads and wailing now that the heat waves have convinced them that climate change might affect their lifestyle.

I suspect they still won't turn their attention to anything that doesn't have an actual disaster porn movie aesthetic.

Still so bitter and fragile over here.

The gifts I receive from the world are so often greater than I believed the entire world could hold.

The tree of life with humans as the pinnacle of evolution is basically just an iteration of "[humans shall] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Assuming a single instance was the initiation of life, the lineage of every thing now living has made it through the same number of years through a variety of methods. There's no pinnacle. There never has been.

But apparently this worldview runs deep. Even the folks who claim to hold animals equal to humans usually do so only when anthropomorphizing those animals. And.

The other day I got involved in an online comment thread. It's a well-moderated space that makes efforts to be inclusive. The subject was pronouns. Of course someone said, as they always do, "of course you should call people 'they' if they want, as long as [you're not calling them/they aren't asking to be called] 'it'."

For the first time somewhere public, from the cover of deep anonymity, I replied something like, my pronoun is 'it' and while you should never call someone that who doesn't want you to, and while I don't really think I can be out about it, there is a time and a place for that pronoun.

It's a friendly space. There was a little concern trolling and some questions I could answer pretty easily. The concern trolling often looks like this: that's dehumanizing and it'll lead people to think less of you or other, generally, of people who use different pronouns or have different gender presentations.

Even someone I know well once tried to reassure me that I was very human.

I've been chewing on that today I realized: it's because in those people's minds, God put humans at the pinnacle. It's because so many people believe that dehumanizing is the same as demeaning, of falling down off that pedestal of dominion.

It's not.

There's no pedestal.

And that probably begins to get at one of many reasons why that pronoun feels more comfortable for me.

Ok, here's the bear saga.

I went to camp for work for three days. A bear got into my yard, broke into my greenhouse, and ate my chicken feed for three days. She got real used to being on my property. For some reason my dogs didn't chase it off.

I got back, saw the damage, did what I could to the back electric fence, spiked the front wood fence where it was climbing over, and... came back to find this year's bear cub in my apple tree the first night back. I bear sprayed it about the time Tucker was saying "there's another bear behind you".

That was mama bear, and I was nearly out of bear spray.

THAT'S why the dogs had been hiding inside. They were outnumbered.

With a bunch of yelling and rake-beating we chased them off. They came back a couple times that night and were chased off again - generally while trying to get into the carport where I'd moved the remaining feed.

The next night they were trying to get into the carport and we treed them. They got real high up an aspen tree and stayed there a good long time while I made it as unpleasant for them as possible. Sometimes I wish my deepl fertile clay soil had more rocks to throw. I honked the horn, shone lights, but couldn't bear spray because they were too high up the tree.

They came back again that night once or twice.

The following couple nights they've stayed outside the fence for the most part: the dogs are getting their mojo back and barking, and I'm careful to go outside when they bark and yell and shine lights so they feel they have backup.

Animal control may be coming to euthanize them/mama, since breaking into structures is not a good trait in a country bear.

I have not had a full full night's sleep in awhile.

Last night someone got into the back yard - the pigs were all staring at it - but Thea chased it off. I think it is the other, better behaved bear that lives in the neighbourhood.

I have a much bigger electric fencer and a bunch of perimeter work to do; I need to look up local rules on electric on the outside of a fence. Does it need signage?

It's definitely my first live use of bear spray on a bear. My apple trees are demolished, essentially just stumps, and I never got ripe fruit off them. Hopefully some talking with the conservation officer can help me figure out how to prevent this in the future; I'd assumed a glass greenhouse with perimeter fencing and dogs was secure.

Do I need a third dog?

Anyhow, exciting times.