FERN’s Friday Feed: An inside job

Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.

Mexican gray wolf recovery effort being ‘sabotaged’

The Intercept

“Robert ‘Goose’ Gosnell administered Wildlife Services in New Mexico for a year and a half as state director of the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a job at which he says he inherited an entrenched and systemic corruption problem,” writes Spencer Roberts. “‘I know some of those depredation [report]s that caused [wolf] removals were illegal,’ he told The Intercept, explaining that inspectors had been instructed by superiors to confirm livestock loss incidents as wolf kills’ for ranchers. ‘My guys in the field were … rubber-stamping anything those people asked them to.’”

Filling a cultural void, one braided loaf at a time

Longreads

“Ironically, I hardly ever made challah before moving to Ames, Iowa. (Ironic because I come from New York, the center of American Jewry, while here in the heartland I am a stranger in a foreign land.)  Certainly not with any regularity, not as I do here nearly every Friday,” writes Benjamin DuBow. “What I’m saying is, in that already suffused space, I don’t feel the need to perfume the air around me with the sweet scent of the ceremonial Sabbath bread. But here, in Ames, Iowa, there is a hollow, an empty space. A void I need to fill.”

A North Carolina farm helps fill the gaps in rural justice

Southerly and Enlace Latino NC

“Benevolence Farm … offers supportive transition after release from prison by providing safe housing, a guaranteed job, and other services — access to career-building classes, health appointments, and transportation —for incarcerated people who identify as women,” writes Victoria Bouloubasis. “Up to six residents at a time live rent-free in a three-bedroom house located on the 13-acre farm, which produces herbs and vegetables through a permaculture model … Residents work on the farm — from agricultural tasks to making and packaging products — Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at a starting hourly wage of $15.”

A chef who offered Chinese food in Spanish

The New Yorker

“Liang was always partial to his Spanish-speaking customers, who accounted for at least half his business,” writes Susan Orlean. “About ten years ago, he had a notion to make his menu trilingual. Up until then, the dishes were listed in Chinese on the right, English on the left. But many of his customers couldn’t read either. At the time, no restaurant in Chinatown offered its menu in Spanish. The project was a family undertaking. Liang’s daughters, Mary and Kelly, began feeding the names of the menu items into Google Translate. Their cousins in Mexico were called. ‘Some of the noodle dishes were really hard,’ Mary Liang said recently. And it was a particular challenge to ‘translate our Traditional Menu,’ she noted. ‘I mean, there’s frog on there.’”

A radical experiment in the ‘rights of nature’

Earth Island Journal and ND

“What can you find there, beyond nature? At first glance, it doesn’t look like much. A couple of trees pierce the hazy winter sky. The ground is covered in brush, colorful leaves, scrub, and grass, plants that we seldom pay close attention to,” write Inga Dreyer and David Schmidt. But now we take careful steps, as if to avoid accidentally stepping on non-human dignitaries. Because here, on this small, otherwise unremarkable lot in Berlin’s Wedding district, all living beings have the same rights. We are visiting an experiment that is pilot-testing the “rights of nature” concept — the idea that pigeons, trees, worms, and fungi should all have legal rights to survival — in a radical way.”