We are remaking the world in our own image. From carbon emissions to water use, to shifting climate zones and exotic plant choices, to habitat loss and oil extraction, not one square inch of this world is unaltered. It’s far easier psychologically to reframe this sad reality with hope – hope that things will get better, that we will wake up, that we will change, that someone or something will step up and lead us out of our trouble. But none of that will magically happen. We are hopeless – and there lies the great power of change.
If we can look honestly at ourselves, especially through our landscapes, there is hope. If we can accept and even embrace the damage of our action and feel the hurt deep, deep down in our hearts and souls, then there is hope. If we can cry in a landscape. If we can feel the loss and the joy at once. If we can hear the absence and learn what caused it, then there is hope. Otherwise hope is as dangerous as tar sands oil extraction and invasive non native plants.
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I’ve been following the story of a 150 acre mall being built in Castle Rock, CO, directly above one of the largest remaining prairie dog towns on the front range. After several hearings with a room packed full of prairie dog champions, the unanimous city board continued to allow the mall to go ahead on schedule. Protestors want construction to wait until June when the prairie dogs can be safely relocated – right now mothers are giving birth and caring for their young. Why are prairie dogs important? Because literally hundreds of other species need them to live, from ferrets to beetles to snakes to the threatened burrowing owl which nests exclusively in abandoned prairie dog burrows.
One of the councilmen on twitter applauded another’s tweet about creating an open hunt day for residents, and selling the meat to foreign governments – I know, makes no sense to me either. What sadness many of us will feel driving by that mall in a year, knowing of buried and poisoned prairie dogs beneath the asphalt, hollow tunnels carrying the echo of our nation’s prairie legacy to extract and decimate, to create a monoculture of greed, torture, and self destruction hidden beneath the guise of jobs, opportunity, and community. Did you know prairie dog language is more advanced than apes or dolphins? They even have a specific call for a human with a gun.
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I see the same greed and hubris in plant choices. The plants we buy are the ones forced into bloom early at the nursery, the ones that look pretty in that moment – and that’s all that matters, how they look to us. Plants are nothing but another commodity, an affectation to suit our whims, as all life is. Why don’t nurseries share more knowledge than growing conditions on plant tags? What about a QR code that links to the ecosystem the plant comes from, what species it supports, what roll it plays in nature? Why don’t we stop before making a purchase, pull out our phones, and find out whether the plant is native or not, and what benefit it has above and below the soil line regardless? Why do we assume we know better than evolution, that our wishes are right or at least will be right some day, somehow, in some magical way? “Life evolves, nature finds a way” I hear all the time; what defeatist, white-flag thinking to negate our momentous responsibility and potential.
I have felt the loss of pollinators around my Japanese iris – and I dug them up to replace with natives and felt the loss no more. I have witnessed the loss on uneaten hosta leaves and dug them up to replace with natives. Butterfly bush? Spiraea? Both gone. Action has become hope, even if things don’t get better on a larger scale in the decimated tallgrass of my region, at least my garden is a selfless nexus of defiant compassion for all life, an example of hope manifested with agony and joy. And more and more these gardens are popping up in my city. Hope abounds at the tip of a milkweed.
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