Status Updates From Concrete Botany: The Ecolog...

All Baccharis species in North America seem extremely good at colonizing land that humans have fucked up.

The lack of a connection to the land a person lives on has got to fuck a person up. It’s an unreasonably cruel thing to deprive someone of that. But that’s the norm for millions of people in the US and elsewhere. We clear everything, import invasives, and plant vapid ornamental garbage in whatever space is left.

While not every nonnative plant is an invasive one, every invasive plant is a nonnative.

The realistic goal with invasive species is not eradication but management.

If you look hard enough in any ecosystem, you will see that nearly every species has a function and relationship to another species in this living machine.

Do we want to sow fields of shit and reap the fruits of tragedy, war, and the continuously declining quality of the living world around us? Or do we want to create a thriving biosphere that we learn to excel at nurturing and keeping healthy? In order to become experts at managing this machine we’ve been gifted, we would be wise to manage it with humility and respect and most importantly, study.

“Every plant species has its own story: where did it come from, what did it evolve with, what pollinates it, what types of chemicals does it produce, what adversity in its native environment has it evolved to cope with?”

The more I learned about plants, the more I also started to realize that there was a story behind every plant species I came into contact with; a specific kind of pollinator it evolved with, or a certain kind of chemical it produced, or an evolutionary lineage it was a part of. Plants weren’t just boring inanimate objects-they were members of lineages, each with its own unique story.

I love the author’s potty mouth. How he can both express love for our urban areas and call them “shitholes” at the same time…the abandoned concrete dumps where only invasive weeds seem to survive.

Gritty. Sort of a working class version of a Doug Tallamy book…still same core message of native plants good, invasive plants bad, but with more attitude.

The author loves plants but is not fond of humans as a group. “As a species, we’re behaving like a twenty-two-year-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.”