Like putting a pill inside a hot dog in order to give a dog life-saving medicine…

Some of the only times that I feel hopeful about humanity is when I see individuals venerating and forming relationships with plants, and with specific plant species. It is when I see them coming to form relationships with specific plant species as if they were old friends. The dopamine hits I get from sharing things that I love and respect with people, and watching them learn to love and respect them, too, is addictive. Social media is generally a toilet, a place for the lonely, isolated and miserable (and aren’t most of us) to go to escape what is for most of us a very unfulfilling, depressing reality. If one or two good things can come from it, let it be the awareness of “the real world” - the world outside of human society and our make-believe world of human meaning and anthropocentrism, which is wholly disconnected from the biological and ecological reality of life on Earth.

If the act of bringing people to plants - of recruiting them to the causes of plants - means initially showing people how a plant species may be edible or useful, I only do it in hopes of it one day opening the door to them later coming to see the bigger picture, learning to zoom out, taking a more long-term and broader perspective of humanity’s place in the context of the web of life, geologic time, respect for the living machine that sustains us. It is my hope that eventually that respect turns into active cultivation and stewardship, whether it’s killing lawns, collecting and spreading seeds, planting native plant gardens, illegally planting native plants, creating habitat for life, sustaining the living machine, the living organism of life on Earth. Humans do not need to be a destructive species, that is only our unthinking, uncultivated self - the chimp running mindlessly through the forest tearing up anything that it comes into contact with and fighting with other groups of chimps intent on doing the same thing. We can be so much more than that, but it takes intellectual cultivation, self-awareness and active participation in the living world around us. It requires stepping outside of ourselves and our own psyches, it requires self-examination, and more importantly it requires examination of the living world around us.