Taliah told me about how when she was a kid, Ithaca was overrun with raccoons. It was a big issue, the raccoons and what to do about them, but they did some things (killed them, mostly) and now there aren’t raccoons. There are turkeys. Lots of wild turkeys. It turns out that the raccoons were eating turkey eggs. They’re talking now about what to do about all the wild turkeys.

Also, my mother told me a story about a woman who collects hair from barbershop floors and sends it to Tennessee to be woven into giant hair mats that are really good at absorbing oil. So the coast guard uses them to clean up oil spills. Then, it turns out also, that you can mitigate some of the toxicity of the oil (you can see where I haven’t done much reading) by using the soiled mats as a mushroom growing substrate. After that, the whole thing composts well enough to fertilize flowers on planted medians.

Everything depends on something else.