survival, foraging, etc

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Although most national parks ban commercial foraging, about three-fourths allow people to explore and collect their favorite crops for personal use. Individual parks set limits each year; some like Death Valley in California and Nevada restrict the collection of foods including nuts and berries to 1 quart a day, and only for personal consumption. Foraging is banned altogether in about a quarter of all national parks.

But things are changing in the woods, worrying those who for years have enjoyed the seasonal taste of food growing in the wild and foraging’s connection to centuries of dependence on natural habitats.

Foraging has grown so popular since the pandemic that state and federal agencies are weighing whether to impose additional restrictions.

Some leading foragers, for both personal and commercial food, say more public lands are being declared off limits, especially in places where wildfires have devastated the forest lands.

Their concern is based on the increasingly popular attraction to a striking ecological phenomenon: Charred landscapes and disturbed grounds provide ideal conditions for morels to flourish in plentiful numbers. That has attracted bigger and bigger crowds that swarm burned lands in the spring following a previous year’s big forest fire, and the foraging numbers have grown far too large to manage, officials say.

“Here in Oregon, they rarely closed burns before the pandemic,” said Trent Blizzard, president of the North American Mycological Association, who with his wife Kristen, runs The Modern Forager website. “But for the last three or four years, they have closed most of the fires, including all of the big ones.”

“We’re concerned about foraging access to all state and federal land, not just burns,” he said.

Decisions on where and when to close national forest land are made at a local level.

Quote: rxwine

Probably of interest to you.

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It breaks down your skin's ability to protect you from UV-light. If you touch the plant, cover it from the sun straight away to stop it from reacting."

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When one user asked the bot how to cook Sarcosphaera coronaria — a violet-hued mushroom that ... a bunch of people died from eating it in Europe — the chatbot recklessly claimed that enthusiasts like to sauté this "edible but rare" fungus in butter, add it to stews, or pickle it.

Quote: rxwine

Hogweed is kind of fascinating.

You start getting blisters from the sun.