Do you maybe too often ask, “What is this?” and “Why is it here?”
Yeah me too
Then like everyone else I jump on my phone and look up the answer. Then unlike most everyone else I find a book and five articles on it, find inconsistencies, get frustrated, ask a friend about it, then eventually find a better and more updated book on it and come up with a new question. Phew. It takes up a lot of my time so I’m taking up more of my time and putting it up here, you know for posterity… or commiseration… or something like that.
Fun Facts (aka how I would start a conversation with you at a bar or party):
Did you know that the root that used to be the root in our root beer isn’t allowed anymore because of ecstasy?
Did you know that near the beginning of the 20th century more than 100,000 people died in the U.S. because they were eating too much corn?
Do you wonder why we pull a bunch of spiky and poisonous plants into our houses around the holidays?
What to expect here:
Through our daily lives we interact with a lot of people: strangers, friends, family members. Most of us probably interact with more than a dozen of humans each and every day from family members to baristas at a coffee shop and people who yell angry words at you because you refuse to break the rules of traffic at a four way stop (It’s honestly not that hard and don’t wave me on this is just going to take longer now). But even though humans are wonderful and we live in a very human-centered and shaped world there is a huge slew of other species that build the world around us and that we interact with every moment of our lives.
This little blog is a journey into the very human history of the other species that shape our lives. Sometimes they are as important as the things we eat, other times they may be something inseparably living inside us. Occasionally we as humans just have an inexplicable fascination with another species that avoids any evolutionary logic – . No matter where you live, you probably live in a very altered ecosystem. Your ecological reality may have been created long ago, or perhaps it is fairly new and still establishing itself, but most likely it looks pretty different than the ecosystem that existed there before human ‘civilization’ appeared there and is unrecognizable to the community that existed before homonids moved into the area. This novel system that you whiz through everyday is unique and it shapes your life through the actions of people that lived there before you, just like you and all your neighbors are changing it into the way future folks will see it long after you’ve moved on. Isn’t that cool?… No don’t walk away, please we can talk about something else. Did you know that white oak tree species may control the population of squirrels through annual acorn production in order to spread their species?! Oh no that made it worse…Dangit.
Anyway each blog will explore weird, inconsequential questions that pop into my head as I go about my daily life and what answers I eventually dig up. There will also sometimes be some crude humor and fun photos too maybe not always kid appropriate.
Hope you enjoy!
Erick
Solespecies 