The United States — Her Natural & Industrial Resources by Stephen Smith
Latino people are refusing to be generalized by Donald Trump or anyone else.
I love this
(via chescaleigh)
(via prometheusloafs)
Sound map of natural conditions of the United States by the National Park Service, estimating how places would sound naturally, without human influence.
The trend is higher sound levels in wetter areas with more vegetation. This is due to the sounds of wind blowing through vegetation, flowing water, and more animals (especially birds and frogs) vocalizing in more fertile locations.
You can look at higher res maps here and also see the sound map of existing condtions.
(via landscapearchitecture)
FarmBot Genesis, An Open Source Automated Farming Machine For Home Garden Use
Who wants to build me a farm bot?!
(via thegreenurbanist)
(via chescaleigh)
“When you’re President of the United States, you don’t make many new friends, and I’m not giving up the old.”
This week, we’re sharing stories of #LGBTQ history in our holdings. On Saturday, join us online for our second National Conversation, held in Chicago, on LGBTQ human and civil rights: http://bit.ly/1UB5sCs
John F. Kennedy met Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings at Choate prep school in 1933. They started the ‘Muckers Club’ to organize Choate’s pranksters, and were almost expelled when the headmaster heard about the Muckers’ plans to treat the school gym to a pile of horse manure. JFK also learned that Lem was gay shortly after they met.
In 1937, JFK and Lem travelled to Europe together. Possibly most adorable part of their European adventure was their adoption of Dunker, a dachshund puppy they met near Nuremburg.
In the 1940s, JFK enlisted in the Navy and Lem joined the Naval Reserve; they kept up their friendship through letters.
The two stayed friends throughout JFK’s rise to the Presidency, a risky decision. In the 1960s, gay Americans faced institutionalized discrimination, especially in government and politics, and this could spell the end of civil service for gay individuals and people associated with them.
As his political career progressed, JFK continued to rely on Lem’s help and friendship. As JFK put it: “When you’re President of the United States, you don’t make many new friends, and I’m not giving up the old.”
Text and image via John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
See also my post from 3 years ago, “Why don’t oil companies hire climate deniers?” listing all the oil companies taking climate action (many are not publicly traded).
(via climateadaptation)
This is quite fun. As someone far away from the academia, the PhD process made me fall into most of these jargon traps inadvertedly. Reminds me of On bullshit.
Dam removals shows promise restoring ecosystems! From the very excellent open source science journal, Elementa.
The prolonged history of industrialization, flood control, and hydropower production has led to the construction of 80,000 dams across the U.S. generating significant hydrologic, ecological, and social adjustments.
With the increased ecological attention on re-establishing riverine connectivity, dam removal is becoming an important part of large-scale river restoration nationally, especially in New England, due to its early European settlement and history of waterpower-based industry.
To capture the broader dimensions of dam removal, we constructed a GIS database of all inventoried dams in New England irrespective of size and reservoir volume to document the magnitude of fragmentation. We compared the characteristics of these existing dams to the attributes of all removed dams over the last ~25 years.
Our results reveal that the National Inventory of Dams significantly underestimates the actual number of dams (4,000 compared to >14,000). To combat the effects of these ecological barriers, dam removal in New England has been robust with 127 dams having been removed between ca. 1990–2013. These removed dams range in size, with the largest number (30%) ranging between 2–4 m high, but 22% of the removed dams were between 4–6 m. They are not isolated to small drainage basins: most drained watersheds between 100–1,000 km2.
Regionally, dam removal has re-connected ~3% (3,770 river km) of the regional river network although primarily through a few select dams where abundant barrier-free river lengths occur, suggesting that a more strategic removal approach has the opportunity to enhance the magnitude and rate of river re-connection.
Given the regional-scale restoration of forest cover and water quality over the past century, dam removal offers a significant opportunity to capitalize on these efforts, providing watershed scale restoration and enhancing watershed resilience in the face of significant regional and global anthropogenic changes. Read the rest at, Elementa
