What I learned from pruning Milwaukee’s orphaned fruit trees, Grist, Lina Tran, April 28, 2022

Milwaukee’s orchards began filling vacant lots around six or seven years ago in a burst of urban agricultural activity….The groups planted more than 1,500 apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees, with the understanding that community partners, schools, and churches would care for them. But many people lost interest or underestimated the work.

Urban agriculture is a popular idea—I remember it being talked about quite a bit when I was involved in food activism in college—but it’s not very efficient, and it’s a lot of work. But in cities that have shrunken and now suffer from large numbers of vacant lots with the urban core, it might be a good way to make some use of otherwise totally empty land.

Tran quotes a tree expert who says only about half of the trees people plant actually survive. Many others are poorly cared for. It’s an interesting look at what happens after.

One in three garages has no car in it, Sightline Institute, Catie Gould, April 27, 2022

This interesting piece, based on a report from California, notes that garages are built on most homes, but off-street parking is also mandated for most residential construction. The result is that the garage ends up as storage or even a finished room, while the free (i.e. paid for by taxpayer dollars) curb parking is used instead. This is a great piece to read as an introduction to the problems with parking mandates.

The country’s skilled labor shortage is an equity problem, The Baltimore Sun, Shelley Halstead, April 19, 2022

While the overall labor shortage in America has been extensively broadcast, it is less widely known that we are currently in dire need of one specific kind of laborer: skilled trade workers in fields including construction, electrical work and plumbing.

And:

As the founder and executive director of Black Women Build, a homeownership and wealth building initiative training Black women in carpentry, electrical work and plumbing in order to restore vacant houses in West Baltimore, I have seen firsthand how educating people in the trades can create both a positive economic and social impact.

Often, talk about the skilled trades comes in the form of a conservative talking point, e.g. “learn how to be a plumber instead of wasting your money on a worthless elitist college degree.” This article looks at the shortfall in the trades from a totally different angle.

Macroevolution.net, Eugene McCarthy, Jumarts: Horse-cows and donkey-cows

Every once in a while, I like to read something wacky, and this fits the bill. McCarthy is a geneticist whose signature hypothesis is that humans are not primates, but the result of primates and pigs crossbreeding. Basically, all evolutionary biologists reject this and most of his other ideas. Usually this kind of odd hypothesis in regard to evolution or origins comes from creationists, so it’s interesting to see a wayward evolutionary biologist once in a while.

This particular post, from his blog, argues that horses and cows are capable of interbreeding and producing offspring. This is not considered true and is almost certainly not true, but I’ll admit, it’s interesting to read this kind of thing, start to feel yourself being convinced, and then put it down. There are some rare hybrid animals out there, though, and it’s interesting how at the bleeding edge of human knowledge, it can be difficulty to determine what’s true—sometimes, because we just don’t know yet.

Related Reading:

New and Old #34

New and Old #35

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