mikey way onstage at the fall out boy concert? what next, all of mcr onstage? playing welcome to the black parade? dallon weekes coming onstage playing this is gospel? dan and phil coming onstage- wait is that a pride flag-?
You ever thought about how it was actually kind of fucked up to get scolded or actually punished for “making people worried for no reason”, and being told to stop acting in ways that kids who aren’t OK act? Like what kind of logic is that?
“Hmm. My child is expressing behaviours that raise concerns in the other adults around me. Should I be concerned about my child’s wellbeing? No, it’s the manipulative little shit making me look bad on purpose for no reason.”
“Plant blindness” was coined as a term relating to the tendency to fail to notice plants in your environment, to view them as unimportant backdrop.
The tendency that concerns me the most is not this per se, but rather the inability to notice plants that comes from the inability to identify them, causing your brain to see the world in terms of “grass” surfaces, “weeds,” “flowers” and “bushes” and “trees”
I can identify most wild plants I encounter on sight now—it’s hard to even imagine how I lived differently.
The change is shocking. Learning to see plants was not just a matter of adding knowledge to my head, but creating totally new neural pathways. I believe my brain’s capability for noticing and processing detail is profoundly increased. I can look much more closely at surfaces and objects and notice and be immediately drawn to small details.
The way I take photos is very different. When I look at outdoor photos from before I learned the plants, they are very broad and zoomed-out pictures of only the most obvious and unmissable features. It really appears like I was stumbling through the world almost blind, able to see big, obvious objects and nothing else.
And when I started learning to identify plants, oh, it was so painful, they all looked the same, and I couldn’t even see the small details that set them apart! And there were no good resources or guides! I was fighting for my life!
And it’s normal, that’s the wild thing, most people go through life not being able to name the common plants that are all around them. This thought is scary and alien to me now, but a couple years ago I was entirely aware of my ignorance and felt no need to fix it. I didn’t even know what the trees in my backyard were and I had lived here for 10 years and I wasn’t troubled by it.
Reasons knowing the plants is important:
Baby trees pop up everywhere but they get sadly mowed down by people who can’t see them.
Likewise, if only you could recognize the plants you were mauling with that weed-whacker—STOP don’t destroy the milkweed, black-eyed susan, purple coneflower, and goldenrod! Every place has biodiversity but our management tactics are to ignorantly raze everything.
Wild fruits and other foods!
There could be a rare plant in your back yard and you wouldn’t even know it! (This happens more than you think…)
If only we were knowledgeable to see and take care of what is in the world around us already, instead of going to the Home Depot to buy plants, the world could be a flourishing place…
stats: insert your own statistics currently (re)watching: hunter x hunter, mob psycho 100, bojack horseman currently listening to: rina sawayama, deb never etc: insert whatever extra you'd like here!
