Macska Moksha Press

Weeding Is Not Unskilled Labor

September 12, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Bouquet of weeds: Thistle, Wild Lettuce, Bindweed

Weeding is an essential task in farming and gardening, whether you’re growing vegetables, medicinal herbs, fruit/nut trees or field crops (such as grains and legumes).

The term “weed” is relative, of course. Broadly speaking, a “weed” is any plant that the gardener or farmer doesn’t want in their growing space, but this will vary from person to person and place to place, and sometimes from one period of the growing season to another. The term “weed” is generally used as a pejorative, and while that isn’t entirely fair to the plant species itself—which is after all only following its own nature, and is neither good nor bad in and of itself—I will be using it here for convenience.

I am speaking from my own observations and experiences as a gardener and a farmer and a farmworker. As with virtually every other activity or tradition in our society, I have not participated blindly, and have always striven to retain and sharpen a view from the outside the arena, as much as I have been able. I have always been aware of the fact that—relative to both history and to other contemporary societies—it is just the game imposed on us in this time and place, and its rules are neither sacrosanct nor unquestionable.

On most farms where I’ve helped out, either as a paid worker or a volunteer, weeding is considered an unskilled task that anyone can do. But the more time I’ve spent in agricultural settings, the less I agree with that. First of all there are practical considerations, and I’ll start with those. I have deeper concerns as well, and they follow.

Reminder: Another World is Possible

August 12, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Graphic from Poeta de Alba

Today I want to talk about something that frustrates me about how talk about civilized humanity’s relationship to the environment. I’ll also explain how I see my role as an activist writer.

Everyone who’s paying attention to the state of the environment can agree that things need to change. We are collectively depleting the planet’s “resources” (I don’t like that word but it’s convenient here) faster than they are being replenished, and are producing immense amounts of pollution of various kinds. Wildlife habitat is being diminished and extinctions are increasing. Poison is infiltrating water, air and soil. Eventually, our own survival as a species will be in question. In the meantime, quality of life for us and more-than-human creatures is in sharp decline. It’s a bad road we’re on, and we must get off it.

Where people part ways is in how to do that, which is readily apparent in the many discussions that take place online and IRL.

What frustrates me is how such discussions are often derailed by where people are coming from in terms of what’s possible, what’s probable and what’s needed. Or put in other words: what we can do, what we’re likely to be able to do, and what we must do. These are three different things but are often thrown together haphazardly.

This happens no matter what the subject is, whether it’s the genocide in Gaza, politics in the US, economic systems, social justice, or the environment, the last of which is my current area of focus.

If farming doesn’t make you humble, you’re not paying attention

June 5, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Agricultural field in Colorado

Though I am a lifelong plant lover and gardener, I didn’t come to farming until my mid-30’s. As I told here, my inspiration to scale up my growing efforts was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I was living in Portland at the time and friends of mine from the herbalist and anarchist communities went to New Orleans to help with the mutual aid activities. They reported that big players like FEMA and the Red Cross were ineffective or even harmful, and that the most successful activities were grassroots and neighborhood-based. The lesson was clear to me: in an era of more frequent crises, it’s up to us to support each other, and to not count on being rescued.

So I took up farming because, well, food is so obviously essential to survival and I enjoy working with plants. I also went into it with the goal of learning more about life and myself, and so a part of me has always been standing aside, observing.

I mention all this because my motivation was not to make profit but to contribute to a greater cause: that of building people power by developing my own skills and knowledge, and also to cultivate awareness in myself. Financial concerns have been important of course, but there’s a difference between getting by and getting greedy. I am sad that our culture here in the US prioritizes the latter, though I’ve also known and been inspired by many people who buck that trend.

Balsa Wood Logging for Wind Turbine Blades is a Nasty Scene

May 7, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Balsa tree (Ochroma pyramidale). Photo by Alejandro Bayer Tamayo from Armenia, Colombia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I get why the “green” energy narrative appeals to people. We do indeed need to de-carbonize our societies. We should leave fossil fuels in the ground. So people are relieved when presented with the idea that coal, oil and gas can be replaced by ostensibly “clean” alternatives like solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power, and battery storage.[1] For example, since electric vehicles lack tailpipe emissions, they must be a silver bullet.

However, the narrow focus on greenhouse gases paints an incomplete picture of the impacts of all of the above modes of energy production. Carbon is not even the only bad thing about burning fossil fuels, and as I wrote recently: “Emissions are SO not the only problem with cars.”

Crucially, when we look at “green” energy, we find many serious issues, among them:

Habitat destruction for siting wind farms, solar arrays, transmission lines, reservoirs, etc.
Child slave labor and other unjust practices implicated in critical material sourcing
We can now add coups for green energy to wars for oil, as seen in Bolivia.
Lithium mining for storage batteries for intermittent sources like solar and wind inflicts a host of environmental impacts
Copper mining, which is essential for transmission lines is totally not green at all (another article by me)
All the other resource extraction and refining processes needed to manufacture “green” energy components have significant environmental impacts

Wind turbine blades are an example of the last bullet item. I’ve been educating myself about the downsides of “green” energy for a few years now, but I wasn’t too informed about the details of this particular topic until I saw this fact sheet about floating offshore wind energy infrastructure from Protect The Coast PNW. Offshore windmills have been in the news recently because of Trump’s executive order “temporarily halting offshore wind lease sales in federal waters,” a move decried by some “green” energy proponents but which I personally welcomed. Declaring any chunk of nature off-limits to any form of resource extraction is an environmental win in my book. That’s not Trump’s intention obviously, or to his credit at all, but it is the inadvertently positive result.

The Planet Can’t Afford AI

March 19, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

“Artificial Intelligence” (AI) is a broad subject that can be approached from multiple directions: economic, political, cultural, creative, and environmental. Over the last couple years, I’ve read articles, listened to podcasts, watched videos, and spoken with friends about their experiences with it. Among the most helpful sources have been Robbie Martin at the Media Roots Radio podcast (which he co-hosts with his awesome sister, journalist Abby Martin), and Brian Merchant , who puts out the Blood in the Machine Substack.

Wikipedia includes the following under the heading of “Artificial Intelligence”:

advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go).

The “generative and creative tools” have been getting the most attention lately because they have the most potential so far to replace human jobs en masse, including artistic work.

A Clear-cut is a Clear-cut

March 6, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

As regular readers know, critiquing the “invasive plant” narrative is one of my main themes here. The name of the Substack is, after all, “Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They’re From.” Usually I choose to approach the topic in of two ways: 1) scientifically, drawing on the peer-reviewed literature, often from the field of invasion biology itself, to bust popular myths, and 2) culturally, pointing out how the current and historic prejudices of our society shape our worldview, saddling us with mistaken impressions about how nature really works and how we should be relating to it. This is basically how I talk about “green” energy too.

I use those two approaches because I hope they might be effective at reaching people, and not because they’re the whole story for me personally. For me personally, emotions also play a part. Namely love; love for plants particularly and for all life on the planet more broadly. And rage; rage at those humans who kill things needlessly.

So no matter how I choose to communicate about these issues, love and rage are what motivate me, and they are intertwined. In the early 2000s, when I was involved in the forest defense movement in the Pacific Northwest, I was inspired by my love for the breathtakingly beautiful old growth trees I met, and by my rage for those who cut them down. Likewise, my opposition to lithium mining in the Great Basin (at Thacker Pass and elsewhere) is driven by my love for the Sage Brush Sea, and all its flora and fauna, and by my rage at the people and the industries that want to tear it up. Anywhere I go at any time, I feel love for the plants I see, regardless of their origins, and I feel rage for people who treat them like inanimate objects or like enemies to slay.

So when I focus on the science and the culture, I’m being diplomatic. More diplomatic than I want to be all the time, I will admit. Perhaps someday I will grow weary of this soft pedaling and take more direct action in defense of mother earth. We’ll see.

The Cruelty We Inflict on Ourselves & Nature is not Inevitable

February 19, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

American sailor with the skull of a Japanese soldier during World War II. [Unknown photographer, Public Domain]

American sailor with the skull of a Japanese soldier during World War II. Look at that leer. [Unknown photographer, Public Domain]

If I had to pick just one word to describe the culture of the United States, it would probably be “cruel.”

From my perspective, cruelty is manifest everywhere, in our institutions both governmental and private, and in our social relations, including families.

The origin of the word “cruel” traces back to the Old French cruel/crudel, to the Latin crudelis for “rude, unfeeling” or “hard-hearted” (which is related to crudus, “rough, raw, bloody”), the Greek kreas, “flesh,” and the Sanskrit kravis- “raw flesh.” The hypothetical Proto-Indo-European root word kreuə- means “raw flesh.” Related words include crude, creosote, ecru and pancreas. The word is both emotional and visceral.

Contemporary definitions of “cruel” include:

Merriam-Webster: “1. disposed to inflict pain or suffering: devoid of humane feelings; 2. causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain; 3. unrelieved by leniency.”
Cambridge Dictionary: “(of a person or action) extremely unkind and unpleasant and causing pain to people or animals intentionally.”
Wiktionary: “1. Intentionally causing or reveling in pain and suffering; merciless, heartless. 2. Harsh; severe.”

For “cruelty” we have:

The Law Dictionary: “The intentional and malicious infliction of physical suffering upon living creatures, particularly human beings; or, as applied to the latter, the wanton, malicious, and unnecessary infliction of pain upon the body, or the feelings and emotions; abusive treatment; inhumanity; outrage.”
Wikipedia: “The intentional infliction of suffering or the inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily available.” [my emphasis]

“Rude,” “unfeeling,” “hard-hearted,” “merciless,” “harsh.” That’s the US. Especially the “reveling in pain and suffering” part. My childhood in Catholic schools in reactionary Nebraska was full of grief and pain, intentionally inflicted by the adults in my life, as well as my peers, and the cruelty of this upbringing, though it had its own regional and religious qualities, was hardly atypical. (And now I fear the whole country is becoming Nebraskafied.) For the most part, children in the US are raised in abusive conditions. Capitalism is an abusive condition. So is techno-industrialism, with its estrangement from nature. So is Patriarchy, which poisons our family structures.

I find the bolded portion of the Wikipedia definition—“when a clear remedy is readily available”—to be the most important: the essence of cruelty is that another—not cruel—action is not taken. To be cruel is not merely to inflict suffering; it is to choose to do so when one has the opportunity to do otherwise. Cruelty is never inevitable, though many voices and forces in our society portray it that way. The most frequent justification for cruelty is probably the tiresome, “That’s just how it is.”

How is our society cruel? Here’s a few ways:

Emissions Are So Not the Only Problem with Cars …And EVs won’t solve them

January 8, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Massive cloverleaf highway interchange with surrounding car-centric landscape, aerial view

Cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) spew an array of pollutants from their tailpipes including carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen monoxide, sulfur dioxide, various volatile organic compounds and particulate matter (not a complete list). All these substances inflict many adverse health effects on humans and other living things, and environmentally they contribute to air and water pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion and climate change (also not a complete list).

As bad as all that is, emissions are only one negative aspect of many. In fact, I’m going to list twenty harms altogether. I’m spelling them out because the push to replace ICE vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs) typically focuses exclusively on emissions, and if we continue to pursue this goal blindly, we and the planet will still be stuck with all the other downsides, a few of which will actually worsen.

Because it’s not just about the car as technology, it’s about the car as culture-shaper. Car-centric values and policy have manufactured physical landscapes designed first and foremost for driving and storing cars. These places are hostile to anyone or anything not inside a car, whether that’s pedestrians, cyclists, animals or other more-than-human life. Such places make up most places in the contemporary urbanized environment, from downtowns to suburbs to exurbs to small towns. It’s a tyrannical infrastructure and the only reason most people don’t think about it that way is because they don’t know anything else, which totally isn’t their fault. As I’ll lay out here, so much of what’s wrong about cars has nothing to do with their mode of propulsion.

The damage done by “invasives”—the word, not the plants

January 1, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Oxeye Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), as observed along a rural road in an agricultural zone in Yamhill County, Oregon, a species considered “invasive” by some.

The widespread use of the word “invasive” to describe certain plants has done great damage to the public’s understanding of plants and ecology, more than any other narrative in the last generation I would argue.

The word “invasive” is at odds with the reality of what plants are and of how life on the planet works. A vast world of complexity is flattened into a grossly oversimplified drama of good vs. evil. The multifaceted, nuanced interplay of response and adaptation among countless species with each other and their fluctuating conditions is reduced to a single perceived side effect misrepresented as a cause. Worst of all, the word manufactures a perspective that distracts us from threats to biodiversity that are, in contrast, unequivocal (with habitat destruction at the top of that list).

Copper Mining: Totally Not Green, But Totally Needed for “Green” Energy

December 17, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

This is a photo of the Morenci Copper Mine, the highest production copper mine in the United States, and third-most in the world. For scale, the tires on the dump trucks in the photo are 13’ (4m) high, meaning the vehicles are as large as small two-story houses. Mining started there underground in 1871, and then became an open pit in 1937. [ Morenci Mine at Wikipedia | Atlas Obscura ]

I’ve been there. In fact if I hopped in my truck right now I could be there in an hour and a half. Highway 191 goes right through the middle of the mine, going one from low desert Creosote Bush scrub in the south into mountainous Juniper woodlands in the north. I took that route in March 2021 to access National Forest trail heads in the vicinity. Here are wildflowers blooming in the highway divider from that trip. The lighter-colored areas on the mountains in the farthest distance, upper left, are part of the mining operations, where the vegetation and top layers of soil were removed decades ago.

Desert Margiolds (genus Baileya) and some species of Penstemon — Desert Margiolds (genus *Baileya*) and some species of *Penstemon*

The drive through the open pit itself is like being on another planet. The landscape doesn’t feel earthly. For me, it is the single most Hellish place I’ve ever been, even worse than clear-cut forests. Stripped, blasted, and scraped out, the mine is one big open wound, frightfully ugly beyond description.

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