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.