uosɯɐS ’s Reviews > Concrete Botany: The Ecology of Plants in the Age of Human Disturbance > Status Update

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

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.