Status Updates From Concrete Botany: The Ecolog...

"Beauty" means different things to everybody; it's a subjective concept, often the result of cultural conditioning.

Plant a crepe myrtle in California and the thing will forever be dependent on a morphine-drip of irrigation, the dry summer air will suck moisture out of the leaves like a sponge and it'll be stressed.

No plant species evolves in a vacuum.

The key element many of us humans (with our short life spans) don't think of when considering ecosystems and the species assemblages that exist within them is time. These components of ecosystems function well together because in most cases they have spent millions of years coevolving in the same living machine.

We'd be better off spending time applying our collective intellect trying to solve the problems our misguided civilization is needlessly creating, rather than trying to find excuses to deny it's happening in the first place.

Conversion of forest to cattle pasture composed of invasive grasses accounts for a large portion of land clearance.

Most American kids can easily name 5 fast food chains but not 5 native plants. Most adults can't do much better.

Bulldozing a region of its plant life before you've had a chance to properly inventory what's growing there is like disassembling a highly complex machine and then losing the parts.

As a species, we're like a 22-yr-old cocaine addict that just found a duffel bag of cash on the sidewalk in Vegas, about to burn through everything in a night, trash the hotel room, and nearly kill themselves without a thought toward the future. Our individual life spans are just short enough to fool us into thinking we won't have to suffer the consequences for any of our shitty behavior as a civilization.

I liked working nights so I didn't have to look at the human world during the day, because I found most of it so damn ugly- billboards, freeways, parking lots, shopping centers- the embodiment of "life as a transaction." A boring and ugly mess.

I got a job with the railroad, a job I liked more than any normal person would have. I liked being out in the middle of industrial wastelands working midnight shifts, loudly banging heavy pieces of equipment together, throwing rusty iron railroad switches, pulling cut levers, and cursing a lot.

These lineages were so old that they spent more than half of their existence with dinosaurs. I was starting to piece together a picture of history that dwarfed my lifespan, the existence of my species, and the recent history of the continent I was living on.

I had no idea how to pronounce it at the time, but I also didn't give a shit. If they were in the same family, that meant something - a degree of relatedness. I thought back to how long ago their most recent ancestor must've lived. One descendent ended up in the highlands of Tasmania and another ended up in the foggy coastal forest of northern California.

The entire concept of an "invasive plant" vs a "native plant" -a plant that had evolved in a given place as a functioning and interconnected member of that region's specific ecosystem - wasn't on my radar yet.