On a hot July day, a single mature tree in your yard pumps somewhere around 100 gallons of water up from its roots and out through its leaves as water vapor. A mature elm with 150,000 leaves can clear that in a day.
As that water evaporates off the leaf surface, it carries heat away with it, the same basic physics that makes sweat work. The air around the canopy drops measurably.
The cooling effect of a single large tree transpiring 100 gallons of water is roughly equivalent to two household air conditioning units running all day. Except it runs on sunlight and groundwater, costs nothing, and has been doing it since before your house was built.
A yard with mature canopy runs 5 to 10 degrees cooler than a paved or treeless yard next door. That's not a feeling. It's a physics difference you can measure with a thermometer. The urban heat island is real, and it gets worse one removed tree at a time.
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is this weekend, before another hot ass July like this one comes around.
I have no regrets other than how I handled the fallout, but I don’t shame myself for it because how the fuck are you supposed to handle that? How do you handle losing everything you worked so hard for, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The scariest thing about life is you can spend nearly a decade with someone, build an entire life, friends, family etc and suddenly one day you never talk to any of them again. You have to pretend like it never happened while looking back to make sure it was even real
Fish in Utrecht had a problem. They were piling up against a 400-year-old canal lock every spring with nowhere to go. Predators found them. Many didn't make it.
Two ecologists fixed this with the Visdeurbe, or "fish doorbell."
They mounted an underwater camera on the Weerdsluis lock and built a website where anyone on Earth can watch the livestream and press a button when they see fish waiting at the gate. The lock keeper gets notified and opens it when enough people have rung in.
In 2024, over 20 million people tuned in. The doorbell was pressed 150,000 times by viewers in the Netherlands, Germany, the US, the UK, and dozens of other countries. Perch, bream, pike, rudd, catfish, and eels made it through to their spawning grounds upstream.
A centuries-old infrastructure problem was solved by a camera, a website, and strangers on the internet who wanted to help a fish get where it was going.
The site is visdeurbel dot nl. Migration season runs through spring. The fish doorbell season has come to an end for 2026, but they'll be back online March 1, 2027. See you next season!
@Jackattack20204@minc798 Corporations would leave in roves.. Chicago would be the next Detroit. The lack of incentives for corps is why this is such a big deal. A head tax on the people already living in the loop would only raise homelessness etc. voting tax creates boundaries for the poor like u r high