Month: August 2019

Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

From The University of Leicester:

In 2015, archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) found a unique artefact, a 2,300-year-old bark shield, during an excavation on the Everards Meadows site south of Leicester. The discovery was made as part of a routine investigation on the site on behalf of local family business Everards of Leicestershire.

The shield was made in the Middle Iron Age when local people lived in roundhouses in farmsteads and small villages, tended fields of wheat and barley and raised sheep and cattle. Excavations nearby, have revealed a busy farming landscape along the Soar Valley, used and managed by Iron Age and Roman communities, with small farmsteads scattered along the drier high ground of the valley sides overlooking meadows and controlled grazing along the valley floor. The Roman Fosse Way road also runs close by.

From Hakai Magazine:

Driftwood makes an enormous if underappreciated contribution to the food web connecting the forests and the sea. From streams to estuaries to the deep ocean floor, driftwood shapes every environment it passes through. While there’s an awareness that temperate rainforests are enriched with nitrogen from the marine environment, delivered by decomposing salmon, less well known is the fact that dead trees from those same forests travel to the sea and become a vital source of food and habitat. Driftwood is in need of a PR campaign, celebrity spokesperson, or publicist at the very least. Driftwood, it turns out, is also rapidly disappearing.

From YouTube:

A thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, a forest just outside Oslo, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until 2114.

From Moss and Fog, see also Manuelo Bececco:

From Wisconsin 101:

The bark spud is an iron tool used to remove bark from cut timber. Most bark spuds have a steel head with a hard wooden handle. The head is rounded or dish-shaped and has one cutting edge. The sharp wedge on the end of the bark spud slides between bark and wood on a log and helps to peel the bark off in long strips. In Wisconsin, men peeled bark from hemlock trees in spring and summer. In winter, they piled the bark onto sleds and took it to the tanneries. The sleds could weigh as much as 23 tons! This bark spud is from the Kuse Farm Museum and Nature Preserve in Medford, WI in Taylor County.

From NASA:

Since the 1980s, people have been clearing forests in this area for farming, cattle ranching, logging, and (recently) gold mining. To better manage this natural resource, the Monitoring of Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) by Conservación Amazónica compiles timely, easy-to-understand technical reports related to deforestation monitoring in Peru. The MAAP “hotspots” report inspired graduate research assistant Andrea Nicolau of University of Alabama in Huntsville, to map forest loss in Madre de Dios over a five-year span. Nicolau works with SERVIR, a joint initiative of NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide satellite data, maps, and other tools to environmental decision-makers in developing countries.

From the CBC:

Maple syrup producers have no precise way of knowing exactly when their season is up and the sap’s not good — something known as off-flavour buddy syrup. The sap looks clear, smells good and tastes fine. But it’s only when it’s been boiled down into syrup that you know it’s gone buddy.

Listen to the story below:

From Harvard Business Review:

The decline in demand for paper hit Stora Enso hard. By 2011 the pulp and paper giant — the world’s oldest corporation, dating back to 1288 — had laid off over one-third of its 30,000 employees. Though profitable again, the company needed to transform itself into a global renewable materials company.

From The Daily Overview: