20 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2022
    1. The idea here isn’t to actually protect each grain of rice, or salmon, or squirrel, as if it’s a human being.

      Then why is the rice itself "pressing the lawsuit?"

    2. The most obvious change would be to the local area — it would be a blow to the continued use of the Line 3 pipeline, which has been operational since October of last year.

      What would be the potential effects to the surrounding area and the people living in it?

    3. by writing it into the law, you’re saying that you think nature’s personhood is just as valid as, say, tax law.

      Nature is a physical thing. It does have a conscience, a psyche, or whatever you'd like to call it. It cannot argue for itself in a court of law. Why would the proceeds go to nature and not to the indigenous folk that land was stolen from?

    4. t might sound unusual, but we’ve used conceptual versions of what a person is in law for quite some time — corporations, schools and law firms, for example, are all technically allowed to enter into contracts as if they were singular human beings.

      Corporations, schools, and law firms all have people in them affected by law. Rice is significantly different from a company.

    5. But can wild rice sue a state agency? The short answer is: yes. This is the story about what might happen if rice wins.

      What does the rice win? Money? What's it going to do, spend it on jewelry?

    1. “Colors are cultural creations and they’re kind of shifting all the time, sort of like tectonic plates. Color is not a precise thing. It’s changing, it’s living, it’s constantly being redefined and argued over and that’s part of the magic of it!”

      Everything ever created has social rules and associations, even things as natural as color.

    2. The color blue became associated with Mary and rose in prominence.

      When did blue start to be considered a "male" color?

    3. It was only with the rise of Christianity and the cult of the Virgin Mary that blue became fashionable in the West.

      That's interesting. I've always though of blue as the universally loved color, for all of civilization.

    4. This green pigment was derived from a compound copper arsenite which is incredibly toxic — and  that a piece of Scheele’s green wallpaper that was only a few inches long had enough arsenic to kill two adults.

      Why use a pigment so toxic? It seems that the cons outweigh the pros in this situation.

    5. political turmoil in the Mediterranean where it was manufactured

      Why was a color so politically controversial?

    6. There was even legislation that dictated who could or couldn’t wear the color.

      Was it illegal to wear purple?

    7. When squeezed or prodded, this gland produces a single drop of clear garlic-smelling liquid that when exposed to sunlight, turns from green to blue, and then finally to a dark reddish purple.

      I wonder how the sunlight affected a clear liquid this way?

    8. eams that wore red during matches statistically did better than they should have

      This is a statistic I have heard for years and years as a soccer player. To extent it seems to be "true": for example, a team I used to play against called the Mustangs wore red, and they were consistently one of the top teams inn the league. However, another team called the Islanders who also wore red consistently ranked near the bottom. I believe this is a myth, somewhat of a placebo effect.

    1. By some estimates, one-quarter of all power outages are squirrel-related.

      Is there any way to prevent squirrels from chewing on wires or even having access to them at all?

    2. No one stopped to wonder if there could be such a thing as too many squirrels, which might have been a mistake.

      Why wasn't overpopulation an original concern? A few dozen growing to 5000 in a few years seems to be a tipoff.

    3. People would hunt birds of prey because they were considered “mean.” Meanwhile, other animals like pigeons and squirrels were considered peaceful.

      Predators vs. prey? Eliminating "threats"

    4. at least: certain kinds of animals.

      Interesting how humans pick and choose which species are worth our protection.

    5. the idea of populating them with squirrels traveled, too.

      It makes sense but somehow I never would have thought that squirrels were brought into the city by humans.

    6. you could walk through a place like Boston or Philadelphia or Manhattan and you would not see a single squirrel

      How did they wind up in urban society?

    7. grey squirrels are so much a part of the urban fabric that for a long time, it never occurred to anyone to study urban squirrels at all

      They are such a regular part of life that they go unquestioned. They become a part of the background and we grow accustomed to their behavior, so it doesn't occur to us to look closer in to it.