Killing your lawn is the best thing you can do. There are SO much better things to do with the space than host a lawn (which is effectively a desert).

If you need something green to walk on there are plenty of herbal/clover mixes that produce flowers for insect life. Alternatively you can build raised beds and plant flowers and vegetables. Or native wildflowers. Or trees.

Getting rid of my lawn was the best decision I've made w.r.t. to my land.

Or that farming is the only productive use.

If the LA River is any historical precedent, yes.

If you'd like the "Orange Hellsite" to stop showing up in your browser history, enable "noprocrast" in your Orange Hellsite profile, then set maxvisit to 1 and minaway to 700 or something similarly large.

Nah. That only works if you are logged in. It's trivial to delete and account and make a new one. There's nothing particularly special about one's account (and, in fact, I regularly delete mine and create a new one so I don't get too attached to the 'number going up' on the karma.)

Wood in the ocean will float for a long time, eventually sinking and storing that carbon. It will be broken down over a very long span, and the CO2 will enter the hydrocycle and eventually be released as a gas. Probably on the order of millennia.

That said, it's not clear what impact smothering the ocean floor would have in the habitats there, nor how we would get the wood to sink reasonably rapidly and stay sunk -- we don't want massive logs floating back up and hitting ships.

I (personally) believe we are better served by heating the wood in an oxygen free environment (pyrolysis). This produces a charcoal like substance and energy, we can bury the biochar or use it as a soil amendment to achieve the same result (hundreds to thousands of years of sequestration) and get energy out of the process.

Probably worth considering pyrolysis before burying it. By heating the wood and baking it into char you get a few nice benefits:

* You produce biochar, which is almost pure carbon, and therefore you are only sequestering the weight/volume of the carbon, not all the water and other stuff.

* Biochar can be used as a soil amendment to improve microbial cultures and store carbon for hundreds or thousands of years

* You can produce energy in the form of heat or wood gas

* You can produce wood vinegar, which may have some agricultural or industrial uses

I think there's a nascent industry in converting biomass into biochar and sequestering it, but it would be very interesting to see it done with forestland more generally.

> I think there's a nascent industry in converting biomass into biochar and sequestering it

To expand on that, biochar seems to be the majority of carbon removal delivered commercially to date:

https://www.cdr.fyi/

Of course the entire CDR industry is nascent.

Bio-oil via pyrolysis is another option. Charm Industrial is trying to scale that up.

This is really fascinating, is biochar notably different from, say, charcoal? Or is it a trendier name for what we've already got?

I've looked at pyrolysis for home sustainability and have yet to find a good set of resources for it outside making charcoal.

I've tried to read up on biochar but actually no treatment was as clear as yours.

Where's a good place to read up on it with an eye to practical applications ?

Trees gather up a ton (sometimes many tons) of carbon during their lives. When they die and begin to decompose, fungi and bacteria return most of that carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2.

If we could find a way to prevent that, then those trees could be used as machines to pull CO2 out of the air and store it, preventing it from being a greenhouse gas.

And what of the effects on the rest of the cycle of life that rely on the fungi and bacteria decomposing the tree?

Interestingly, many forest stands are actually overpopulated with trees. Removal of organic matter helps the existing trees grow taller and more healthy, improves the habitat for other species and animals, and can result in a more biodiverse, healthier forest less vulnerable to parasites and invasives. It can also reduce the severity of forest fires.

Source: I manage forestland in the PNW for the purpose of habitat restoration, and was surprised to learn how removing tree mass from a system can actually improve the overall health and biomass of a system.

Nobody is suggesting doing this to every tree.

There's a part of me that loves this and there's a part of me that finds this sorta sad. Not pejoratively, just, evocatively for me there's a sense of sadness in the ephemeral nature of this installation.

I have a really complicated relationship with nostalgia -- on the one hand I love it and seek it out but on the other hand I love seeing people create new things.

The Japanese aesthetic known as wabi-sabi is all about accepting transience and imperfection. Have you ever thought about the ephemeral nature of art installations from that point of view?

I recently spent a day killing time by walking around Stanford medical center. There is a rather grand atrium, circular and several stories high, with most of the center taken up by an abstract art installation. All the walls are a combination of rough and polished stone. Hundreds of tech companies' and individuals names are etched into the walls. While all very impressive, the permanent opulence of it all evoked a similarly negative emotion in me.

I was around to see the actual installation when it was present. The thing is, it didn't just exist on its own, but was part of, or maybe the initiator of, a trend to make post-it art. I still see it in office windows, sometimes in videos of distant foreign countries.

So if you wanted to make it known again...go get some Post-Its and have at it.

Left handedness used to be about 2% of the US population. Now it's about 12%.

While it could be that somehow we've got an epidemic of left-handedness that blossomed in the 1920s, what's much more likely is that we've gotten more accommodating and understanding of left handed people, so there was less incentive to fit the mold of right handed folks.

I'm sure there were people who were alarmed at that rise, who felt that we didn't really need left handed tools and accommodations for the "2% of people who are left handed", but when you made those things available, we stabilized at about 12%.

Antidepressants and ADHD meds are, imo, in a similar place -- we've increased our understanding, we've increased our accommodations, we no longer force the people who experience those maladies into the stress of acting 'normal'.

Once you remove demonization, of course diagnosis are going to skyrocket. When it's no longer a scary thing to admit depression, ADHD, or autism, it becomes easier to get evaluated and care for them. I experience depression, I am on an SSRI, it helps me a TON. Historically, I might have been involuntarily committed or been told to "deal with it". I guarantee you I would not be as successful as I am now if I didn't have the support I do.

(Similarly, I expect you see a lot more people being "out" in the LGBTQ+ community as a result of a similar phenomena. Once it's no longer criminal or "get lynched" territory, we see numbers of gay and trans folks increase.)

These things seem like fads. They usually aren't, they are usually the case of a particular mode of people being pressured to be silent and invisible. When you remove that negative stigma, the revert to the mean can be dramatic, but it will stabilize at a new normal level.

I've also noticed family members benefit greatly from SSRIs. The main skeptic point I have is I've also seen them absolutely get wrecked by what appears to them as supply chain failures (usually because they're unable to get a meeting with a physician in time for refills and no physician will grant them a "bridge" to the next appointment). Of course as we saw during COVID, supply chain failures of all sorts are possible even when society has not collapsed.

From the outside one of the biggest concerns I have is one of these supply chain failures will put them in even worse place than had they never taken them, as I've personally seen their withdrawal symptoms look far worse than their unmedicated baseline. It seems to be a "better day to day" with the added risk of extreme withdrawal and associated risks during these few in a lifetime supply failures.

I would expect withdrawal from almost any medication for any chronic medical condition to be worse than baseline.

I’ve been allergic to milk for at least 15 years. I didn’t know it until 3 years ago. Now that I’m not ingesting a toxic substance every day, any accidental consumption has an extremely bad reaction.

It’s similar with my bipolar medication. Now that I don’t spend half of every day trying to not kill myself, I don’t have the tolerance I used to for paranoia, psychosis, and compulsive thoughts.

There's a swath of people who (would) benefit from SSRIs that don't have day to day suicidal ideation, but might have it during the intense withdrawal process. The compounding issue is these supply chain disruptions by their very nature are correlated with stressful events like moves, natural disasters, foreign travel with unexpected extensions, etc.

This mere observation is not meant to advise someone for or against taking SSRIs.

We've had decades of systematic removal of protections and healthcare for people. There is zero political interest in improving things (and even when there is some, it's opposed brutally.)

Both parties are responsible for dismantling the infrastructure to care for the humans who live here in favor of profit seeking. Republicans perhaps only slightly more so, but this is the obvious "finding out" result of the "fuck around" period we've had since the 70s.