#plantsense

What Can Plants Teach Us About Wintry Darkness?

The poinsettia is a photoperiodic short day plant, meaning the long dark nights of winter are crucial for it to flower. Darkness triggers replenishment and growth in us, too, if we can let it in. Happy Winter Solstice!

Resources

Waking Up to the Dark by Clark Strand

What Can Plants Teach Us About Value?

What Can Plants Teach Us About Hyperindividualism?

As a tree breathes, the leaves release bacteria into the air and up to the clouds. Humidity in the air condenses around these “Cloud Condensation Nuclei”, creating raindrops. The rain then falls back to earth upwind. In other words, the trees literally call the rain. This supports the larger ecosystem.

While turning on the AC immediately brings the temperature down in a room, the ultrafine pollution from generating “clean” energy destabilizes the rain cycles, resulting in humidity, heat waves, droughts and floods. In other words, the electricity generated to power the AC for one person’s comfort can worsen a heat wave for the rest of the community.

Further Reading

What Can Plants Teach Us About Our Perspectives?

Unchecked, Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) can get out of control, spreading and "invading." In some places, however, it is prized for it's medicinal qualities (powerful against Lyme disease) and nutritional merits (delicious in pie). In those places, it is loved and harvested and isn't considered a menace at all.

Further Reading:

Invasive Plant Medicine by Timothy Lee Scott

Healing Lyme by Stephen Buhner

What Can Plants Teach Us About Striving?

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living." -- Joseph Campbell

So often, it can feel like we're spinning our wheels and burning out in an effort to DO something amazing and big for the environment, or for whatever else is going on in our lives. Yet nothing else in the natural world seems to have this dogmatic concept of "should" - they just follow their bliss instincts.

Further Reading:

Humans: Pleasure Activism, Joseph Campbell

Cows: Allen Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change