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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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No Lawns
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Lmao, I'm hoping I might get a reaction when swamp plants start coming up on their side of the fence. At any rate, cattails are such a dead useful plant, if I get a good crop of them (or better, a mix of them and dill/fennel), I won't be too mad at the neighbor.
your life is so much more botanically interesting than mine.
It's taken years of small, persistent effort, and it's an ongoing process. One day, I aspire to become a forest spirit that randomly terrorizes too-well-manicured suburbs and gets featured in creepypastas. Anyone can do it, it just takes time, interest, a bit of applied effort, and some luck. If you find an already experienced botany nerd in your area, you can really give yourself a boost, but YouTube U is a pretty decent substitute. There's lots of good books that your local library can help you get a hold of too!
shadow libraries are great for making yourself backups, if you rely on books for anything! having a permenant digital copy of your fav plant books in with your usual stuff is really useful. any good books on local california species and ecologies you would recommend? I haven't been on libgen for a while.
One that I'm really enjoying (though it's kind of a tome) is "Tending The Wild" by M. Kat Anderson. It goes into the interdependent relationships the native Americans had with the local flora and fauna and how the arrival of European settlement blew that ecology right out of the airlock. There's a lot of really good information both about the horrors of colonialism and genocide as well as the ways that various native species were used and cultivated.
The Horrors are pretty pedestrian to me at this point, but functional knowledge on the way various cultures, especially by region, nurtured and maintained the superabundance of the pre-columbian americas would be pretty fucking amazing to read. there's a modern less geographically specific re-discovery of the concept 'the philosophy of social ecology' by the guy whose inter-human-political philosophy largely inspired the not-a-state in what was NE syria whose name escapes me at present.
Idk, man, I thought I knew it well enough, but it shook me a few times. One of the things that still haunts me is how the native Americans had this entire cultivated relationship with the ecology here, and the Europeans just wandered in and went "pfft look at these dumb layabouts not cutting down trees, plowing fields, and killing everything that moves when God left it here for them to exploit" and proceeded to perform what amounted to not just regular genocide, but also ecological and cultural genocide by completely transforming the ecology of California.
Also, re: hyper abundance. There's some evidence that suggests that the hyper-abundance encountered by European settlers was actually the result of the collapse of agrarian societies across the continent. De Soto describes organized, settled, agrarian societies when he first encounters the native Americans. 100 years of smallpox later, and the English find what amounts to hunter-gatherer bands. It's entirely possible that a breathtaking depopulation occurred across the American continents that basically resulted in what you'd see when you functionally eradicate the apex predator from a given ecology.
oh. the stupid part is easy to understand. stupidity is usually pretty easy to understand, up until you get into some very modern innovations in the field.
devastation too. the ease of understanding it is kind of the point and why it hits so hard. read about that, fuck those assholes, murder their descendants all the way up to me, and I got bored of taking my shots at that bitch like a decade ago. it's the ecology and actual science that WAS destroyed that I'm interested in. is much of that preserved/reconstructed in the text?
There's a pretty good density of useful information from what I've read. I'm not even halfway through yet, but it's doing a good job of painting a picture around how the ecology was maintained and used, yeah.