Rewild it all 🌲 @samfirke@a2mi.social

Submitted v 2.0.0 of my #rstats janitor 📦 to CRAN! Now hoping it passes all checks and is accepted.

Big milestone. I'd said I didn't have time for this project, that it was done, that I wanted to focus on other things. And yet there is a lot of good, thoughtful functionality added in this major revision!

I finished my longread (!) on #a2council factions:

http://samfirke.com/2020/06/29/the-factions-of-ann-arbor-city-politics-and-why-theyre-a-problem/

An exciting part of a livable future will be easy access to shared all-electric vehicles, displacing private car ownership.

VW appears to be launching an all-electric microbus in 2022. Let's get some shared ones, Ann Arbor.

https://www.caranddriver.com/volkswagen/microbus

Via the Ithaca, NY Tenant's Union: the Ithaca City Council passed the nation's first #CancelRent bill

https://www.ithacatu.org/cancelrent

Cancels three months of rent. I think still subject to state approval though?

I can get behind the argument that while his death-causing via climate change is less direct than Hitler's gassings, he is aware of the deaths he's causing and that climate change will ultimately cause much more death than any other event in human history.

But say Cruz or Gingrich had won in 2016 and taken the same inaction on climate change. I have no reason to think they would have acted differently. Would that make either of them the worst criminal in human history? Maybe?

Pondering this Chomsky interview on Trump: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/noam-chomsky-donald-trump-coronavirus-george-floyd-protests

Does Trump's abetting the climate crisis make him the worst criminal in human history?

It's not right that there's no national park in Michigan. We came close to getting the Huron Mountains National Park, but an elite 50-person hunting club killed the effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huron_Mountains

#rewilding

Need a positive, grand vision? America deserves and needs hundreds of new National Parks.

https://rewilding.org/episode-36-michael-kellett-on-establishing-hundreds-of-new-national-parks/

I gather it's a month until the filing deadline for the Ann Arbor Board of Education and so far 0 candidates have filed for 3 openings.

Between the mess of operating schools during COVID, *and* the likely huge budget shortfalls -- that aren't even known yet -- this is not a fun time to be running a school system.

https://www.michiganradio.org/post/school-districts-face-perfect-storm-balancing-budgets

Change my mind: Ann Arbor needs a full-time city council.

Maybe we could get by with part-timers when we just tinkered with the status quo but given that we need "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" (IPCC's words), and all of the other time-intensive change possible (reimagining the police, hundreds of emails from residents, etc.) it's a full-time job.

Recent meetings having super-long agendas and running past 1AM are a symptom.

#a2council

"People are everywhere associated with trees."

@ed_packet had already uploaded a public domain scan of the 1913 edition of "Michigan Trees" 🎉

Re: https://a2mi.social/@ed_packet/104317417936838519

Blogging: the shorter the post the better. Luckily the shortest ones are the fastest to write. I really need to remember that.

I blogged tonight, the URL says it all: http://samfirke.com/2020/06/09/sand-the-bottom-of-a-door-that-sticks-without-taking-it-off-its-hinges/

After Ben Connor-Barrie (@damnarbor) ID'd yet another tree photo I sent him, I decided I want to try to be like him a little. He suggests starting with "Michigan Trees" and learning the ~150 trees of Michigan.

If I learn a tree a day it would be less than half a year...

Ann Arbor Public Schools Superintendent Jeanice Swift released a statement committing herself to abolishing the police:

"I commit to grow myself as an abolitionist and co-conspirator in this effort toward change, and I hope that you will join me in doing so."

https://www.a2schools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=17841&ViewID=7b97f7ed-8e5e-4120-848f-a8b4987d588f&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=16822&PageID=11460

Things are moving fast.

Truthful, moral career advice from George Monbiot. He gets asked for it so much he wrote it up as a tab on his website:

https://www.monbiot.com/career-advice/

My small backyard rain garden is almost done! I screwed up my order for native plants but my neighbor is letting me split plants from his rain garden 💚 I'm going with:
- Wild Geranium
- Goldfinger Potentilla
- Wild Strawberry

Plus a Prairie Dock or two in the middle: https://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/prairie/plantx/pr_dockx.htm

And then maybe a Blazing Star or Sedge purchased from Argus.

"Reintroduction of wolves tied to return of tall willows in Yellowstone National Park"

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-reintroduction-wolves-tied-tall-willows.html

Nature!

No job is perfect but I think I would enjoy researching the effects of wolves on the trees of Yellowstone.

Some animal tunneled up into it during the end of the storm last night! It must have dug more this morning too b/c claw marks were visible this AM. Here's last night when I spotted the hole plus today, dry.

What animal made this?

Pics from yesterday and today of my new rain garden in its first storm

📜 New blog post: mending knee holes with sashiko📜

http://samfirke.com/2020/05/15/mending-knee-holes-with-sashiko/

in my darkest moments of climate dread, like after I read Deep Adaptation (which I don't recommend), this is what I feared. But for this man, it's not a "what if someday" fear -- it's happening now as the lake dries up.

A good reminder that the climate crisis is coming, but it's also already here for some people.