Status Updates From Concrete Botany: The Ecolog...

This is a sign of a culture that's insistent on pretending to be somewhere it's not: a savanna-like European parkland.

Countries like Costa Rica and New Zealand have a nature awareness that is exemplary; they even have fungi on their currency.

It was the invasive plants growing and dying every year, building soil with their old roots, stems, and leaves, breaking up concrete, holding in moisture, supporting the few pollinators present, and covering the barren ground with green life. It is far from an ideal situation, but it is life.

In those years or decades in between the land being cleared and the land being intentionally restored by people, it was the invasive plants that were holding it down and supporting what little life could survive there despite the asphalt, concrete, and constant onslaught of human disturbance.

Home native plant gardens need not stress for "ecological purity" --Earth is in the middle of a mass extinction. Getting native species in the ground, providing habitat for wildlife, and killing the friggin' lawn are the main priority.

Lawn is strangely what most people in the US associate with being outside. Tell someone to "Touch grass".

Lawn requires a permanent source of life-support because of how counterintuitive it is. No plant species has evolved to be repeatedly cut to a height of only a couple inches every week, never flowering, never growing to the height that it grew to for the eternity of their prior evolutionary history.

The geologic timescale, evolution, the phylogeny of life on Earth, and an understanding of ecosystems have now become the basis for an understanding of my own existence.

The arriving cultures in N & S America-The Europeans-were foolish to destroy [the land]. It was like taking apart a finely tuned machine. This grandiose mistake occurred because the newly arrived settler culture didn't know any better-the connection to the native living ecology had been lost centuries earlier in European culture, especially after a few centuries of authoritarian feudalism.

Lack of exposure becomes more of a reality as we continue to destroy more habitat. In this way we alienate ourselves from that which our existence depends on: functioning ecosystems. It becomes normalized for people to grow up biologically and ecologically ignorant.

An air of cynicism a somewhat dark sense of humor are important to get by and survive in today's world.

The plants that grow here are slowly creating soil, slowing the river, filtering the water, and creating habitat, among numerous other ecological services. If they are invasive, they might be the wrong pieces, but they are still pieces of the living machine.

I don't celebrate invasive species or deny the damage they do. I don't glorify them. I do pay attention to how these plants are coping with our bullshit, though. The plants that grow in these places are still evolving. They are serving as the first step in a process of ecological succession that is never to come.

The places few other people visited became places where I'd find comfort, fun, and adventure. I found solaces, peace, and adventure around empty lots, train tracks, industrial corridors, shipping canals, rusty iron bridges, abandoned railroad towers, and abandoned factories. You could take a walk in any of these places and actually be left alone, able to clear your head.

When I was a teenager, all of my favorite places required ignoring "no trespassing signs" to get to, along with hopping chain link fences or rusty fire escapes.

A monoculture is exactly what most human agriculture is going for. Herbicide is the key to maintaining such a setting.

When humans change habitat to such a large degree [developers completely level an area], many of the natives simply couldn't come back and get re-established.

The human environment unintentionally selects for plants with short lifespans, fast growth rates, abundant seed production, and self-pollinating flowers.