Reading List

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headspace-hotel:

We can “protect” a natural area, but that has implications. What quality is being protected? What does it mean to protect?

It isn’t the presence of “nature” (which is everywhere) but the absence of a particular pattern of destruction. The forcing of the ecosystem into boxes of usefulness. The infinite variations of the landscape are crushed, sanded down, smoothed away. This place is a “yard” this place is a “field” this place is a “parking lot” and their “maintenance” forces them to remain those things.

But it isn’t absence either. In the forest, flowers grow beside the trails that do not grow anywhere else in the forest. The frogs and turtles need the farm ponds dug by the farmers long ago, the bobwhites need the pastures, the lichens love the gravestones in the cemetery. Before that, the groves of plums and pawpaws and hickory trees and white oaks and the lush canebrakes that fed the bison herds were tended by people.

Nature is not human inaction. Nature cannot be protected by leaving it alone; nature cannot be left alone. I see proposals to “set aside” half of Earth for wilderness, and think to myself, “Which half? And how will we let the insects, birds, rivers, plants, aquifers, mountains, and winds know where we draw the boundary lines?” The mosses growing between the bricks of the apartment building are breathing your breath. We are all joined.

We ask “How to make sure humans leave the wilderness alone?” It’s impossible. Instead, we need to ask, “How do we become wild again?”

But that’s not right either. We are wild. We are animals, wild animals. So maybe the question is, “How do we escape captivity?”

But that’s not right either. We are not being conserved ex-situ, instead our captivity, the built environments and ways of life which are clashing with the patterns of other living things, spreads over the globe to capture more and more of the earth.

So the question is really, “How do we make our captivity wild again?”

Most places, right outside our homes, we don’t have a perfectly pristine forest or grassland ecosystem close at hand to “protect.” We have lawns and concrete, drainage ditches that used to be creeks, eroded and dead soils.

“How do I make nature?” No. Nature is still there. Nature is always there. The change, the chaos, the growing, the moving, the happening, that’s Nature.

You look up native plants that help the bees, you make a flower bed…but you’re not quite there. The flower bed is still a flower bed, and the plants were chosen by you, and you pull the the weeds that pop up, and you keep it neat… that is, you make it stay the same. You make it remain the thing that you planned, the thing you expect.

“What is Nature doing in the flower bed?” The weeds are growing where there is space for them to grow. Where the soil has been disturbed, where the plant community has been disrupted, there the weeds arrive. The more you try to destroy them, the more they grow back.

“What are these weeds, and what are they doing here?” So you look it up. Let’s imagine that you’re in the southeastern USA. Seems to be a crabgrass.

“What are you doing here, Crabgrass? What are you up to?” Maybe you learn that many crabgrasses come from Africa, and the seeds of some species are grown for food. Maybe you wonder if the Crabgrass came here with the enslaved people who were forced to come here many years ago. Maybe you observe that the Crabgrass’s tiny hairs collect the dew and keep the soil damp. Maybe you notice how the Crabgrass sprawls out horizontally, covering the bare ground and protecting it. Maybe you notice the seeds sticking to your shoes, and wonder whose shoes carried the seeds here in the first place.

Maybe you wonder it about all the weeds: Where are they from? What peoples know their names? Whose ancestors used them for food, medicine, clothes? Why are they here? What allowed them to thrive? What have the generations and generations of their ancestors been up to all this time, in the ditches, in the flower beds, in the cracks of the pavement?

After an ecosystem is swept away, how do you build it again? You need weeds, you need chaos, you need unpredictability. You need to let it be uncontrolled, to defy you, to surprise you, but you can’t leave it alone. You need to not control, but meddle. You need to plant new stuff, dig stuff up, stomp around in it with your big ol boots, dig holes, try random stuff. You can buy the plants that look pretty and behave nicely, but you need more. You need the seed that grows into the plant you can’t imagine.

The mosses growing between the bricks of the apartment building are breathing your breath. We are all joined.

We ask “How to make sure humans leave the wilderness alone?” It’s impossible. Instead, we need to ask, “How do we become wild again?”

But that’s not right either. We are wild. We are animals, wild animals. So maybe the question is, “How do we escape captivity?”

Those may not be exactly the right questions, but they are still beautiful thoughts – especially in this era of surveillance cameras, A.I. cookie trackers, mega-billionaires buying our political systems, and ICE raids on our cities.

Which are all intra-human, societal, issues, and not what you’ve written about here. But I do think it’s connected. Where to put the new parking lot is a political decision, after all.

And tapping into the existential dread of modern loneliness by asking: “How do we become wild again?” “How do we escape captivity?” may be the best way to seed a little enthusiasm for solving the problems of healthy ecological balance.

https://capricorn-0mnikorn.tumblr.com/post/831386813074669568