Native ecosystems live here
Addressing ecosystem blindness and more on this week's Team Human
On this week’s Team Human I respond to questions and comments submitted by Team Human members through our Discord server. It’s a test-drive of what we hope will soon be a live-streamed call-in style show.
We’re highlighting a question from longtime teammate Brynna, who asked about how we can address ecosystem blindness.
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Luke Robert Mason:
So we're going to kick-off with a question from Brynna. She asks, “How do we address what they're calling ecosystem blindness?
I've spent the last five years working on my yard to restore the native ecosystem. I’ve been doing that by using indigenous practices. It's really rewarding work, but I'm the only person for several blocks doing it. I've decided to install a sign that says, native plants live here. And the neighbors have started to ask questions when they walk by, which is great, but here's where I'm starting to hit a wall: People think of plants as separate entities. I have this California lilac that's in full bloom right now. It looks and smells amazing. It's covered in bees. Two people have asked me so far if it's easy to grow, and I don't know how to answer that. I could say it doesn't require any water or fertilizer, all I have to do is prune it once a year, but the truth is, it's a plant that will die without a strong mycorrhizal network.
My first three attempts failed because there wasn't enough of a diverse group of little native weeds growing around it to trap the moisture for symbiotic fungus, and people don't want to plant those weeds. They only want showy things. I've tried to explain the complex stuff and how emotionally rewarding it is, but people start looking at me like I'm the neighborhood hedge witch.
I mean, I know I am, but that's not the point. Even the native plant groups I belong to seem to follow this individualistic, western way of gardening. They label my lilacs as finicky, and call it a day. So, how do we shift the terrain on the way of thinking about these plants?”
Douglas Rushkoff:
The phrase you used was, native plants live here. I wonder if you need to say something like, “this is a native plant system,” right?
Because it's not native plants, plural. It's a system in itself. This is not a lilac, right? This is not a blue lilac. This is a system. The temporary purple part of this collaborative organism.
In my front yard, I started to get this weird little purple weed. First, it was a green weed, and I'm watching it grow, and then these flowers came up on the top. And I said, “whoa, look at this.” It was a lot of flowers. I took a picture and sent it to Suzanne Slomin, the baker who previously appeared on Team Human, and she said, “Oh, that's called a volunteer.” I asked “Oh, is a volunteer a kind of flower?” And she explained no, it's any wild flower that just volunteers to be part of your garden.
I just love the term. The volunteer just showed up because the unkempt patch I have that passes for a garden happens to be friendly enough for this other thing to come live there. Rather than weed it out, we need to recognize it’s the prettiest thing we got.
In Arcadia, the Tom Stoppard play, they have this big discussion about the difference between these two approaches to the garden. It was the moment in history when they were changing from the symmetrical English garden to the more natural-looking chaotic style of garden that they called a picturesque-style garden. In English terms it was equally fake because what they were doing was creating something that merely looks more natural rather than creating something that looks very man made.
So the natural looking one was actually just symbolic of the chaos of the real. It wasn't the actual thing. But at least it was a step. At least people started to understand that this dominating view of nature is not nature. Nature is indigineity.
It seems obvious, right? Of course we should be using not just indigenous gardening techniques, but the indigenous native plants. Rather than working against nature and trying to make your soil more or less acidic, more of this or less of that, we should ask, “What just lives here?”
We can’t just have an attitude where everyone asks, “Can't we just have something else?” Everybody in my neighborhood, they're all fighting to get clover off their lawns. They have this special poison to get rid of clover. And I’m thinking, wait a minute. Clover's really good for everything. The bees like clover and they'll eat it and they'll make honey. It's pollinating. Why not have clover instead of lawns? First, it’s because the grass lawn is more expensive to run. The most expensive possible garden is going to be the one that's favored under capitalism.
You could begin to solve everything with a little insight like this. If people start cultivating indigenous lawns or native plant lawns it's going to require a little bit more human intervention. You're going to be doing things like watering by hand or digging. Then there's labor. You get to hire people to actually do something instead of hiring a chemical company to poison the land. All of these people who are being replaced by AI, maybe they'll have something to do and they could start saving the environment. It's interesting how quickly things can reverse.
The impossibility of it generates a little hope. The way so much is stacked against something as simple as having a native species lawn — including human attitudes? I mean, you try to create change against all these odds.
Neighbors are scared you have weeds that are going to spread to them. It looks like dirt. It doesn't look like all the other lawns on the block. It undermines the premise of the suburbs. You were supposed to believe that your house was like a manor house, that you were some kind of royalty and you had this little kingdom like in England. Now you're undermining the idea of property ownership and home ownership.
The beauty of it is that something as simple as what you're doing, something as simple as creating a native system in place of a lawn starts all these conversations. It has so many touch points. To capitalism, homeownership, our cooperation with each other, climate change, and indigeneity.
It’s a beautiful and real teaching tool, but the beauty of it, again, is you're doing it in the moment. There’s nothing wrong with giving money to the National Resources Defense Council and all. But how much more effective is the communication of just doing it in the moment with your home?
Someone seeing it happening around them and then watching over a year or two how it becomes prettier and more sustainable than their own lawn. Then, over time, the propagandistic effect of such a thing takes effect.
To answer to your question: it's slow. You just do it and people see it working and people see it be happy. I would say just talk about it systemically and maybe the language on your sign can somehow indicate that more so it doesn't look like plants plural. Instead, indicate, here's a native ecosystem, so people understand this is a living organ. This is more like a coral reef than it is a single piece of plankton.
You do something like that in real time and it forces all the other stuff. These are the high leverage points that we as individuals, and we as community members, can undertake that are just super effective.
They're such high leverage points for system change because they're systems, right? The more systems you bring in, whether it's from your gut biome to your front yard, the more systemic I think we'll become as a species and civilization.
So thanks for that, Brynna, as always.
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