Going down a rabbit hole for a feature I’m writing on Indigenous fire 🔥 and ended up with Kari Marie Norgaard’s book “Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature & Social Action,” a case study on the Karuk Tribe in NW California. This right here about sums it up:

Well, glad we settled that little privacy issue, Facebook

OKAY but my ~favorite~ facts from the hutia Wikipedia page was that, while many of the 10 species are threatened, and 10 other species are now extinct, these little rodents are absolutely THRIVING at Guantanamo Bay, because of course. And their nickname there is "banana rat" because of their 🍌💩

The world may be a flaming garbage pile, but did you know it still contains 10 species of hutia, real life Rodents of Unusual Size? They DO exist. These Caribbean critters strike a mix between rat, squirrel, and capybara and tend to live in trees and rock crevices. The biggest are 2 ft long, 18 lbs!

If you’re looking for a summary of how Southern California (and the rest) ended up in catastrophic flames, here’s the long view, as told by @Manjula in The Last Fire Season: colonization, resource extraction, genocide, fire exclusion, boom/bust development, climate change

On a lighter note: Today's AI transcription fluke reveals a higher truth about my inbox. There are a certain number of emails that can give birth, but at an exponentially higher rate