I’ve been ill for a few weeks, unable to write much. I’ll give myself some credit: I’ve been able to keep it together well enough to finish out the school year with my home-educated daughter, hold our life admin relatively on track, and fulfill minimal work obligations. Beyond that, though …
Well, I’m lucky, even in my condition. My daughter is healthy, and we are together every day. My home is secure, and we have enough to eat. We have abundance. So, I take seriously my duty to pass this along. We all have different ways we’re called to pay it forward. Mine is to serve Mother Earth.
This takes a variety of forms. When I’m well, I provide low-cost or free legal consulting for nonprofit groups that work to save habitats and species. This can look like evaluating an agency’s proposal to log a mature forest, attending a public meeting and speaking in defense of a threatened or endangered species, or writing an opinion piece for the local press.
I also see my work here at Fearless Green (and its companion site, the HOME | Nature Directory) as being in service to the Earth. With every piece I write or each nature-based publication I link to, I think about what ripple of insight or change or, and maybe this is most important — love — might spread from our collective words.
I don’t kid myself that my individual voice is particularly consequential, but I do try very hard to speak for those who have no voice and no way to be heard in the larger discourse without a human to represent them: nonhuman beings and their networks of habitat. Life in its myriad permutations.
After decades in the professional environmental movement, I've retrained myself not to frame all my words in terms of benefit to humans and our civilization. (Remember this campaign? Save the rainforests — potential medical miracles lie within! How about this one? Restore coastal marshes so they can buffer our cities from sea-level rise!)
Environmentalism as a whole has, I fear, been irretrievably hijacked by voices that seem unable to appeal to our innate human love for this gorgeous planet and our magnificently splendid wild cousins. Instead, the conversation now is almost entirely about ways to handle climate change without changing how we live.
There’s an overwhelming current of utilitarianism that demands we, for example, set aside our love for a place should it require paving with solar panels in order to “power x number of homes.”
That’s not environmentalism. That’s human supremacy.
I’ve had to find inside me the voice of the 12-year-old girl who once sobbed at the loss of the Amazon rainforest, and let her speak again. She didn’t cry because human civilization is at risk if the forest disappears, or because we might miss out on some potential cancer cure, but because the forest is a multicolored treasure chest that far exceeds the most legendary dragon’s trove. Each jewel-toned frog or shimmering winged beauty has a price above rubies, and the loss of even one such species to human advancement is not, and could never be, worth the trade we’re urged to accept.
So as I’m writing here, I’m always thinking: What would that 12-year-old girl think of this? Are these words coming from love or fear? Will they (maybe, if I’ve done something right) cause the reader to feel love, or (if I’ve done something less-right) fear? If love is with grief intermixed, as it seems it can only be, do my words offer a way forward?
Today I felt well enough to visit the plant nursery. I’m a couple of months late in that. Usually, by mid-spring I’ve planted out a range of Oregon native plants1 in my yard. Every year, I help out the local wildlife in my tiny way by planting so as to skew the balance of native to non-native plants in my zone of care toward a more supportive ecosystem. Mostly, I do this by converting additional segments of my half-dead, weedy lawn to beds of perennial plants that provide human food, wild animal food, or both.
I do this by hand, digging up deep-rooted weedy helpers like dandelions and wild carrots and making a fine compost of them. I lay down cardboard to attract worms and deter the scraggly grass, and I layer compost and mulch over top to plant new starts in.
I never, ever use herbicides. Never. There’s no need to add to the toxic load of this poor chemically burdened agricultural valley where I live, nor would I wish to attract pollinators and other animals to my yard just to serve them a dose of pesticides.
Today I brought home eight plants. We’re in the lull following the spring planting rush, so the native plant selection on the nursery table was pretty ragged and the plants were unlabeled. I buzzed in with only a few minutes to spare before an appointment and grabbed the few that were left. I see now that I’ve scored several rose checkermallow (Sidalcea malviflora), which I know from experience loves my yard’s microclimate, and two wild nodding onions (Allium cernuum).
On the nursery table, the onion blossoms all had tiny wild bee visitors, of a sort I’ve never seen before. I was sorry to take the plants away from them, but I was happy that the onions will thrive and spread here, and hopefully feed many more tiny bees over their lifespans.
**Rather Exciting Update: within an hour of setting the new plants outside in my yard, several tiny, curious metallic blue-green Ceratina bees (small carpenters) had found them and were busily zipping in and out of the wild onion blossoms.
There’s a good trick, by the way, if you’re ever aimlessly roaming a plant nursery and wondering what to buy. If they offer native plants, and you’re going to buy something anyway, then that’s an easy choice. They’ll bring you untold joy over the years as they draw in animal species you never even knew existed and in themselves, will thrive and develop and spread in surprising ways.
But even in the general (non-native and native cultivars) stock you can find helpful plants; I’m no entomologist, so I just look for which flowers are being visited by wild bees or hoverflies, and sometimes even butterflies. I figure if they like a certain plant at the nursery, they’ll like that plant at my house.
I try to avoid flowers that are being ignored by pollinators altogether, or are visited only by honeybees and no other insects. Honeybees are not native to the US, and while it is nice to provide for them, I do like to give a helping hand to our 4000 wild — and sharply declining — bee species as a priority. Readers from different continents would have different thought processes.
Of course plants provide many other services to animal life besides nectar and pollen, but there again, native plants are generally going to be of the most benefit to insects and other wildlife species that evolved alongside them. Here’s one accidental discovery as an example.
When I moved into my house, I scattered some wildflower seeds across a muddy rectangle that had until recently served as a garbage bin storage site. Next spring, a raft of multicolored Clarkia amoena, known as Farewell-to-Spring, emerged in all their shades-of-pink glory, from candy-pink to deepest fuchsia.
Nothing of note, other than happy pollinators, occurred the first year, but in year two, I noticed many of the Clarkia blooms had little half-moon sections of their petals removed.
A little research led me into the glorious world of the Clarkia bees, which will — and oh, this brings me an internal pop and fizz of delight — cut half-rounds of Clarkia petals to line their underground nests. We all have our secret joys, and one of mine is imagining a mother bee busily layering lilac, cotton-candy, and hot-pink petal blankets for her future babies to emerge into.
Clarkia bees are not all that well described as far as I can tell, but some appear to be Clarkia-obligate, meaning they must have access to plants in the genus to complete some stage of their life cycle.
There are petal-cutting bees of the Megachile genus (leafcutting bees) that prefer Clarkia petals for their nests. There is also a species called the Clarkia Evening Bee in the genus Hesperapsis that will apparently only gather nectar and pollen from Clarkia flowers to provision their nests.
If you live on the west coast of North America, you could plant the hell out of some Clarkia. There are several native species. Seeds for the Pacific Northwest region are available here, and for California here, and they’re cheap. If you don’t have a yard, you could maybe get a pack anyway and guerrilla garden somewhere in your town, perhaps in a forgotten bit of earth behind a closed-up factory, or try to get a patch going in your community garden, if you have access to one.
So, today I was able to write a little bit, and I was able to plant a few more food sources for local wildlife friends (and oh yes, for my own joy as well). I dug up and composted several non-native thistles that are just here visiting from another continent through no fault of their own, and replaced them with some cultivated thistles destined to become human food (aka “artichokes”). I will leave many of the artcihoke buds to bloom fully, instead of eating them in lemon butter or mayonnaise, because my local bee population is obsessed with artichoke nectar. Seriously, it’s like an interspecies bee rave in those incandescent purple pleasure-dome artichoke blossoms each summer.
Like right now, there are days, weeks, even months, in which I can’t take the big legal swings for the environment that I’m trained for.
Still, there are some things I can do even on a bad day, when I can barely stand upright from the pain, or when the brain fog is too thick to work or write. I can usually manage to pull off one of the following, minimal though it may be:
Put the food scraps in the compost bin instead of the garbage or sink disposer.
Water my native garden if it needs it, and maybe pull a few competing weeds and compost them.
Choose not to eat meat.
Share some good nature writing or art I’ve found, so that others may be inspired by it.
Teach my daughter something about the wild world.
Walk somewhere instead of driving.
I’m embarrassed, writing this paltry list. These are minuscule things, so small as to have no impact toward mitigating on our global catastrophes, even if I did all of them every single day. But here I am, just me. This is my life, and I’ll have just the one, so I have to live each day in a way that makes sense to me.
I know too much about the death stalking our wild world for my own complete contentment to be an option. But at least for the sake of my sanity and soul, at the end of each day I can know that I spent some part of it outside my own head, that I gave a bit of my mental space to the benefit of our other-than-human friends. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Thanks so much for your readership and support. I have a series of half-drafted pieces lined up to complete and share in the weeks to come, so I hope to be back with you soon!
Julie Gabrielli has launched the magical NatureStack Journal over at her site, Homecoming. It’s gorgeous, and full of beauty and inspiration. You won’t regret setting aside a morning to read through each piece she’s gathered there.
Until next time, be well, and enjoy the wild world around you!
~~Rebecca 🦉
“Native” and “non-native” are terms without much real scientific meaning. I just use “native” here as shorthand for species that were not recently transplanted to this continent from another.
Hi Rebecca, I just wanted to let you know that I hope you are feeling better soon. Sending healing energy your way.
I loved reading this. I live with chronic illness, and there is nothing ‘paltry’ about giving what you can, when you can. There is nothing paltry about living consciously and kindly. ❤️