Liz Renner, Ph.D.

Here, have a recent birb pic of a male Downy Woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens), shot from ~20 m on my Pixel 10 Pro @ Dakota Nature Park in Brookings, SD, at 17:27 on 02/27/2026. I'm 95% confident it's a Downy and not a Hairy based on its smaller body & beak + the faint stripes on outer tail feathers.

I've found mental peace by dedicating time to working on a white paper & executive summary to pitch my idea for a nonprofit freshwater conservation research institute out here on the Great Plains where traditional institutional funding for such things has all but dried up. I hope things improve. 🫠🙃

First-year postdoc here. I found out this past week that my PI plans to retire earlier than anticipated (in large part due to sweeping university budget cuts, tenured faculty layoffs in other departments, and ever-increasing teaching loads even for full professors), so I've been feeling that, too. 🥲

The Science of Unlearning And Why Organizers Need It “Nobody had a story about unlearning that didn’t include a connection with other people,” says Lewis Raven Wallace.

Too often, activists are more focused on sorting people into categories of good and bad than on how people actually change their minds, beliefs, politics, and actions. Personally, I think this comes from a defeatist mindset. But people can and do change. So, how does that happen? Audio + transcript:

MY QUEEN @marenmorris.bsky.social

“I don’t have forgiveness for the triple Trumpers, or any of the Trumpers. You did vote for this.”

“Fox News is a propaganda machine of just like Cocomelon brain rot for Boomers but this is the result” lmao

The killing of Iranian children during an illegal war is an impeachable offense (not to mention a grave crime) and Congress should really act like it.

15 Republicans in the Senate could end this nightmare before it somehow gets even worse.

Targeting densely populated residential areas and elementary schools are war crimes. The US and Israel know this. Trump and Netanyahu just don't care.

For all the talk of toppling the Iranian regime and freeing Iranians, deliberately killing children isn't a requisite for either. It's indefensible.

in honor of his retirement, remembering the single funniest thing that Steve Daines has ever said (from 2023) x.com/NYCSamKay/st...

Satellite proposals threaten the night sky In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for authorizing satellite launches and operations…

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan.
darksky.org/news/two-sat...

MANDATORY TIMELINE CLEANSE

The end of poverty, brutal mass exploitation, genocide, major wars, all these shocking yet routine horrors - this is not a wild utopian dream. It's a realistic expectation for a technological, global civilization of thinking, feeling beings. Mere absence of dystopia is not utopia.

these politicians and american executives are not bothered enough by killing children or heads of state

Snickers, get off the cat!

Cat? What cat?

They're going to write books about all the big brain moves of this gang of imbeciles and among them will be "Spending a year trying to kill renewable energy and then launching a war that sends oil prices soaring"

Deaf 6-year-old boy is deported to Colombia without his medical devices, attorney says A Hayward woman and her two young children were detained and deported to Colombia after they showed up earlier this week for an asylum appointment in San Francisco, her attorney said.

ICE deported a 6 year old deaf child with severe disabilities to Columbia.

Before deporting him, they dragged him from camp to camp without providing his assistive hearing devices or a translator.

This innocent child had no way to communicate or understand what was being done to him:

US Postal Service expects to run out of cash in a year without help from Congress, postmaster says The U.S. Postal Service will run out of cash within a year unless Congress lifts a decades-old cap and allows the agency to borrow more money.

I can't help but to feel they sabotaged the USPS on purpose

wlox.com/app/2026/03/...

It’s not enough.

USAID’s Emergency Food Security Program spent $4 billion in FY2022 to feed 114 million people in 55 countries. We just blew that much money in four days of this war.

Former Marine Sgt. Brian McGuinness stood up in Congress to say what millions of Americans are thinking: We don’t want to fight a war with Iran for Israel.
Security dragged him out and broke his arm. Veterans are speaking out. The American people don’t want this war.

A screenshot of terrain from satellite imaging on the OnX hunt platform. On the left, a section of land with a harvested field adjacent to a wetland and surrounding slough is labeled "Living Trust" with a name blocked out in pink, and a duck hunting waypoint is denoted in orange. On the right side of the screen, abutting farmland bordered in orange to denote property lines reads "Living Corinne Arnold Trust." A waypoint across the fence line/property line is bright blue and shaped like scat.

For the low, low price of $300 USD*, I will personally fling the contents of your hermetically-sealed bags of feces across a barbed-wire fence and onto farmland held in trust by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Arnold Noem's maternal family. 💩

*Shipping not included. Some restrictions apply.

As the American state crumbles by the hour & my future safety/well-being here as an openly queer, outspoken leftist ecologist looks increasingly bleak, precarious, & fraught with unnecessary state censorship, violence, and impoverishment, now's a great time to announce my latest business endeavor! 🧵

a man with long hair and a beard is smiling and saying thank you . ALT: a man with long hair and a beard is smiling and saying thank you .

Thank you so much for taking the time to engage with my poetry, @rmcl82.bsky.social! Sending my best fishes and all the sanity I can spare from Lincoln NE. ✌🏻

Thanks for reading my work, JSnow! I really appreciate it when folks engage with my poems. Sending good vibes from Lincoln NE toward ATL. @atljohns.bsky.social

The image depicts a ghostly yeti crab, perched on a rock or deep-sea hydrothermal vent and spotlit by underwater submersible, and the meme caption reads: "This creature has adapted to the crushing pressure and oppressive darkness."

Mmm, such an excellent word. Reminds me of my all-time favorite meme:

Ding-dong! The Dutch Fish Doorbell needs you to help migrating fish A Dutch lock is closed for the spring, and its employees want you to tell them when migrating fish come knocking by ringing a digital doorbell

A Dutch lock is closed for the spring, and its employees want you to tell them when migrating fish come knocking by ringing a digital doorbell

A collage of close-up photographs showing early spring budburst on trees and shrubs. Swollen pink and red buds, fresh green leaf shoots, unfurling scales, and pale catkins are shown against soft blurred backgrounds, illustrating sap rising and plants coming back into life in March.

March’s full moon, rising on 3rd March, is called the Worm Moon or the Sap Moon. As the soil warms, earthworms emerge, and plants stir as sap rises and buds begin to unfurl. This year’s March Moon is especially notable as it coincides with a total lunar eclipse in the night sky.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

The hole in the ozone layer was actually very serious and a global effort allowed it to recover. Y2K WAS actually a serious problem and people worked countless hours to make sure nobody even noticed. Air and water pollution was catastrophic in many places and incredible effort reversed that damage.

America’s teachers are working two jobs and barely getting by | CNN Business Ashley loves her day job teaching math, reading and science to fifth-graders in Washington. But like many other teachers, Ashley relies on a side hustle or two to get by.

The overwhelming majority of American public school teachers (71%) hold at least one side job, according to a new survey released today.

www.cnn.com/2026/03/02/b...

One of the biggest problems with having a perpetual imperialist war machine is that "our leaders lied us into a war again" should be considered a crime that permanently ends the freedom of everyone involved but instead ends up just being background noise.