Invasive Plant Quotes

if there is a garden of maybes, you are the invasive plant I can’t ever get rid of.

Invasive plants—Earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines.

And no one wants to be noticed because of something like that; it’s like being an invasive species that no one pays any attention to until you’ve strangled and ruined all the beautiful native plants. The

Self-criticism is an invasive weed in the garden, but too many of us have been taught to treat it like a treasured flower, even as it strangles the native plants of our sexuality. Far from motivating us to get better, self-criticism makes us sicker.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. 

What are its enemies?
 
Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. 

There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed — it would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity—

What civilization needs:

confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the civilisations—or civilising epochs—have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversations and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.

In the latter country alone, very many (probably several hundred) square miles are covered by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live. Before their introduction, however, the surface must have supported, as in other parts, a rank herbage. I doubt whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river.

The genetic codes of animals, insects, fish, plants and yes, even people are being mixed together in labs. This is corrupting the image(s) YHVH originally created.

Curiously enough, many of the strongest antibacterial and antiviral plants are invasives.

...a plant can only function as a true “native” while it is interacting with the community that historically helped shape it.

This mitochondrial invasion (or endosymbiotic event, as biologists like to term it) made complex life possible. (In plants a similar invasion produced chloroplasts, which enable plants to photosynthesize.)

Your hands itch to pull out invasive species and replant the native flowers. Your finger trembles with a wish to detonate the explosion of an obsolete dam that would restore a salmon run. These are antidotes to the poison of despair.

During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into the artificial unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet. And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages ts guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.

Like the teachings of Hippocrates, the Charaka Samhita describes the qualities needed by a physician, and instructs how he should go about examining a patient to find the root cause of a disease, and how to make a prognosis and prescribe treatments. These treatments are minimally invasive, and involve specific diets and exercises and more than 2,000 plant-based remedies. The emphasis throughout the Charaka Samhita is on preventing illness by maintaining good hygiene and a healthy diet.

Laisvė recited her understanding of the word history, in triplets: “Explosion, cosmos, chaos. Water, land, cells. Plants, fish, animals. Indigenous humans, habitats, stories. Dreams, desire, death. Invasion, dispossession, colonization. Money, ships, slavery. God, goods and services, slaughter. War, power, genocide. Civilization, progress, destruction. Science, transportation, cities. Skyscrapers, bridges, poison. “Nations, power, brutality. Terror, insurrection, incarceration. Collapse, raids, water.

Although harmony with nature is of considerable importance in planning a garden, it must never be allowed to obscure what lies at the heart of the design;the salvation of the human spirit. In creating a garden, we acquire, by force, a patch of land from the jungle; we mould it so that it becomes an oasis amid the wilderness. It is an endless struggle. Turn our backs for a moment and the darkness of the forest begins its insidious invasion of our tiny haven. The plants that we insert -- artificially, it must be noted, for no garden is a work of Mother Nature -- must not only provide shelter for the soul, they must be able to absorb and then disperse the creeping darkness of the jungle around us. The decorations do not merely adorn, they protect. They create a place where, at the end of our lives, we may find peace.

[08:41] MAV: You fucking kidding me? [09:55] HOUSTON: Admittedly, they are very invasive modifications, but they have to be done. The procedure doc we sent has instructions for carrying out each of these steps with tools you have on hand. Also, you’ll need to start electrolyzing water to get the hydrogen for the fuel plant. We’ll send you procedures for that shortly. [09:09] MAV: You’re sending me into space in a convertible. [09:24] HOUSTON: There will be Hab canvas covering the holes. It will provide enough aerodynamics in Mars’s atmosphere. [09:38] MAV: So it’s a ragtop. Much better.

It’s prairie planted but you have to weed out the invasive stuff forever to get prairie reestablished. I think it almost broke Mom. But you should see it in spring when the prairie lilies come out. Every single plant has its own pollinator so you have to coax those in too. Like, well, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Ancient and modern psychonauts (people who use natural psychedelic plants and mushrooms for spiritual purposes) have known about the Aeons for thousands of years. They design life-forms (for more information on this practice, consult the works of Rudolf Joseph Laurence Steiner). Their spiritual purpose in originating genetic life-forms is for the purpose of uttering an infinity of Divine Expressions. The Aeons created the Human Genome.

[08:41] MAV: You fucking kidding me? [09:55] HOUSTON: Admittedly, they are very invasive modifications, but hey have to be done. The procedure doc we sent has instructions for carrying out each of these steps with tools you have on hand. Also, you'll need to start electrolyzing water to get the hydrogen for the fuel plant. We'll send you procedures for that shortly. [09:09] MAV: You're sending me into space in a convertible. [09:24] HOUSTON: There will be Hab canvas covering the holes. It will provide enough aerodynamics in Mars's atmosphere. [09:38] MAV: So it's a ragtop. Much better.

When we hear radical stories of long-distance dispersal, it is all too easy to place a human mindset onto the events, and it is worth spending a moment to address this. There is a temptation to describe these rodents and monkeys as hopeful adventurers, with a narrative of pioneering spirit and survival against the odds in an unknown and inhospitable land, an inappropriate framing that owes much to the era of colonialism. Where an animal or plant from one part of the world appears in another, some might use the language of invasion, of a native ecosystem despoiled and rendered lesser by newcomers. Frequently, this is an appeal to nostalgia, to the landscape known in childhood, contrasted with the altered, often depleted world of today. It brings with it an implication that what was was right and what is is wrong.

A survey of oceanic (i.e. remote) islands found that, as far back as records exist, they have been accumulating alien plants. In 1860 the average oceanic island had less than 1 introduced plant for every 10 natives. By 1940 the ratio was 1 alien for every 2 natives, and today the ratio is about 1:1. Despite all these new arrivals there have been very few extinctions among the original inhabitants, so the number of plant species on such islands has approximately doubled. Thus, although left to themselves remote islands tend to have rather few species (compared to similar continental areas at the same latitude), so many species have been introduced to Hawaii that it now has as many plants as a similar area of Mexico. Moreover, the evidence suggests that remote islands are by no means ‘full’ of plants, and that there is room for even more alien plants to establish, and thus for total plant diversity to increase: at the current rate the average oceanic island will have 3 aliens for every 2 natives by 2060. Do we have any idea how many different plant species might eventually be able to coexist on an island like Hawaii? No, we don’t. Or, to express that conclusion in a more general form, in a report from US ecologists Dov Sax and Steve Gaines: ‘we have a relatively poor understanding of the processes that ultimately limit how many species can inhabit any given place or area

Plants have long been, and still are, humanity’s primary medicines. They possess certain attributes that pharmaceuticals never will: 1) their chemistry is highly complex, too complex for resistance to occur — instead of a silver bullet (a single chemical), plants often contain hundreds to thousands of compounds; 2) plants have developed sophisticated responses to bacterial invasion over millions of years — the complex compounds within plants work in complex synergy with each other and are designed to deactivate and destroy invading pathogens through multiple mechanisms, many of which I discuss in this book; 3) plants are free; that is, for those who learn how to identify them where they grow, harvest them, and make medicine from them (even if you buy or grow them yourself, they are remarkably inexpensive); 4) anyone can use them for healing — it doesn’t take 14 years of schooling to learn how to use plants for your healing; 5) they are very safe — in spite of the unending hysteria in the media, properly used herbal medicines cause very few side effects of any sort in the people who use them, especially when compared to the millions who are harmed every year by pharmaceuticals (adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association); and 6) they are ecologically sound. Plant medicines are a naturally renewable resource, and they don’t cause the severe kinds of environmental pollution that pharmaceuticals do — one of the factors that leads to resistance in microorganisms and severe diseases in people.

According to the antimicrobial hypothesis, spices kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms and prevent the production of toxins in the foods we eat and so help humans to solve a critical problem of survival: avoiding being made ill or poisoned by the foods we eat (Sherman & Flaxman, 2001). Several sources of evidence support this hypothesis. First, of the 30 spices for which we have solid data, all killed many of the species of foodborne bacteria on which they were tested. Can you guess which spices are most powerful in killing bacteria? They are onion, garlic, allspice, and oregano. Second, more spices, and more potent spices, tend to be used in hotter climates, where unrefrigerated food spoils more quickly, promoting the rapid proliferation of dangerous microorganisms. In the hot climate of India, for example, the typical meat dish recipe calls for nine spices, whereas in the colder climate of Norway, fewer than two spices are used per meat dish on average. Third, more spices tend to be used in meat dishes than in vegetable dishes (Sherman & Hash, 2001). This is presumably because dangerous microorganisms proliferate more on unrefrigerated meat; dead plants, in contrast, contain their own physical and chemical defenses and so are better protected from bacterial invasion. In short, the use of spices in foods is one means that humans have used to combat the dangers carried on the foods we eat. The authors of the antimicrobial hypothesis are not proposing that humans have a specialized evolved adaptation for the use of spices, although they do not rule out this possibility. Rather, it is more likely that eating certain spices was discovered through accident or experimentation; people discovered that they were less likely to feel sick after eating leftovers cooked with aromatic plant products. Use of those antimicrobial spices then likely spread through cultural transmission—by imitation or verbal instruction.

Throughout these long centuries, no people claim the land as their distinct homeland except the Jews. Alone they cherish Jerusalem as their eternal capital, proclaiming on each Jewish New Year “next year in Jerusalem.” Dispersed for centuries, suffering unparalleled persecution in their rootless sojourn among the nations, the Jews never lose hope of returning to the Promised Land. Individual Jews continue to return throughout the ages, joining the tiny Jewish communities that never left. But the land is barren, sparsely populated and undeveloped. Visiting the Holy Land in 1867, Mark Twain echoes many contemporary travelers when he says, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… the desolate and unlovely land is hopeless, dreary and heartbroken.”17 A century later, Arab propaganda depicts things differently. It describes Palestine in the nineteenth century as a lush land teeming with a flourishing Arab population. “The Jewish invasion began in 1881,” says Arafat at an infamous United Nations speech in 1974. “Palestine was then a verdant area.”18 It wasn’t. Visiting the Holy Land in 1881, the famous British visitor Arthur Penrhyn Stanley reaffirms Twain’s observation fourteen years earlier: “In Judea, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.”19 In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigration brings the fallow land back to life. The Jews build farms, plant orange groves, erect factories. This induces immigration of Arabs from neighboring countries who join the indigenous Arab population. From 1860 on, the majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are Jewish. Even so, by the turn of the twentieth century the total population in the Holy Land doesn’t exceed four hundred thousand, less than 4 percent of the present population. As the visiting German Kaiser notes in 1898, “There is room here for everyone.”20

I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do. You say you're not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn't looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you do that makes you who you are. I'm sorry to be blunt. I've had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I'm not here to save anybody or any thing. It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?" I didn't look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me. The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they'll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don't know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They'll probably get amnesty in five. There's hardly ever a repeat offender. That kid from San Manuel died. Your sister, Hallie "What's new with Hallie?" Loyd asked. "Nothing." I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

Take a picture of yourself standing on your lawn, and you have a Wanted Dead or Alive poster for the most invasive plant and animal in North America—garden grass and Homo sapiens. No kudzu-choked hillside, no river cursed with purple plantain, no spotted knotweed waste compares to the green deserts of our yards in terms of water waste, herbicide and fertilizer, gasoline and lawn mower. And no zebra mussel, nutria, mustang, or gypsy moth has, like Homo sapiens, driven to extinction a single species or threatened to erase entire ecosystems, such as our prairies and our longleaf stands. The despised chestnut blight decimated but a single species, after all. We humans have killed off no one knows how many.

The first forests about which anything is known were made up of the simplest kinds of plants, all of them spore-produced - horsetails, club mosses, and ferns. Relics of these primitive plants still survive today; everyone is familiar with the delicate, lacy ferns that are found in damp places in the woods, growing in the niches of rocks, spreading over the remains of fallen trees. But these plants are only miniature versions of their ancestors. During the Paleozoic era, between 280 and 425 million years ago, at about the time reptiles were evolving, ferns forty feet tall and club mosses five feet in diameter and 120 feet in height flourished in swampy lowlands between recurrent invasions of the sea. As these huge plants fell over into the water and slowly turned into peat, they retained their rich stores of solar energy, acquired through photosynthesis, which compacted first into lignite and then into coal by the growing weight of millions of years of deposits. Forest grew upon forest, and each in its turn was compressed into seams of coal beneath the surface of the ground. When we burn coal, we are using a fuel made from the sun’s energy and stored away in trees more than a quarter of a billion years ago.

Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things or they will wash away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result of which is that individual soil particles are bound together. [...] Fungal hyphae, too, travel through soil, sticking to them and binding them together, thread-like, into aggregates. [...] The soil food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the passage of air and water through the soil. [...] The nets or webs fungi form around roots act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can easily be attacked.

The park itself is marked by drought. Grass is dead. A large pond contains a mere puddle of muddy water, and a few scruffy ducks pad across its oily surface. Hardy trees persist here and there, but planting beds are home to cacti and a few swathes of invasive devil grass. Even in the city people are fighting against the painful truth of change. They don’t call it the climate crisis anymore, or global warming, or any other name that might have once have been used to urge positive action. Now, this was the norm.

Hate is a living thing, a seed to be planted and watered. If adequately nourished, it blooms and grows. When the conditions are just right, it acts like an invasive species and takes over, obliterating the original plants, blocking their sunlight and oxygen. Starving them. Until they die.

Thus, the depressed tissue state is (1) likely to invite bacterial and parasitic invasion and (2) likely to be encouraged by that invasion. Actual poisons, bug and snake venoms, and unhealthy foods and drinks can also cause putrefaction.

Four Farmers Once upon a time, there were four farmers who lived beside each other: Farmer Fraidy, Farmer Flaky, Farmer Fancy, and Farmer Focused. Out of all these Farmers, only Farmer Focused had a huge harvest every year. Fraidy, Flaky, and Fancy always had very tiny harvests. Let me tell you why. Farmer Fraidy Farmer Fraidy doesn't plant too many seeds. Why? He's filled with fear. He's afraid that the seeds won't grow. Or if they grow, they won't bear fruit. Or if they bear fruit, no one will buy the fruit. He imagines the worst scenario. He's paralyzed by the question, "What if?" Such as, "What if there's a storm that will destroy my crops? What if there's a bug infestation? What if there's an alien invasion?" He entertains his fears so much, he plants very little seeds. Because of that, he has very little harvest. Farmer Flaky On the other hand, Farmer Flaky plants a lot of seeds but he's distracted. He goofs off in the middle of the season. He spends a lot of time on Facebook. He plays video games. He watches all kinds of telenovelas—Filipino, Korean, Mexican, and Martian. He goes off to Hong Kong to eat xiao long bao. In short, he neglects the farm. Many of the crops don't grow. Farmer Fancy This guy farms in the wrong way. He chooses the wrong seed, tills the soil in the wrong way, and harvests them in the wrong way, too. When other farmers give him suggestions on how to improve, he doesn't listen. He's simply too proud. And that's why his harvest is very small. These three Farmers are connected to the first Success Principle from Proverbs.

But the tent caterpillar invasion on university grounds provided the perfect scenario to study his theory in the real world. The besieged trees did eventually change the composition of their leaves, sickening the caterpillars, who would essentially die of starvation through diarrhea. He was pleased. His theory checked out. But he also noticed something else: even the leaves of faraway trees, which the caterpillars had not yet touched, changed their composition too. They’d been warned, and somehow the warning had traveled a long distance. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis,

It's a different way to look at invasion biology. It's not that the species as a whole was necessarily so invasive. But certain individuals were just so flexible that they could fine-tune their bodies to suit their new homes, and were also so good at passing that flexibility to their offspring, that the species as a whole transformed into the perfect plant to exploit their new conditions. It takes time to learn a new place, biologically speaking.

A recent UN survey found that agroecology projects in fifty-seven countries have increased crop yields an average of 80 percent, with some being pushed up to 116 percent. One of the most successful of those is the push-pull system, developed to help Kenyan maize farmers deal with pestilence, invasive parasitic weeds, and poor soil conditions. Without getting too technical, push-pull is an intercropping system in which farmers plant specific plants between rows of corn. Some plants release odors that insects find unpleasant. (They “push” insects away.) Others, like sticky molasses grass, “pull” the insects in, acting as a kind of natural flypaper. Using this simple process, farmers have increased crop yields by 100 to 400 percent.

Botanicaust — an event 400 years ago during which invasive weeds wiped out most plant life on Earth, including the major food crops.

That's what happened when the desert woodrats swallowed microbes that allowed them to detoxify the poisons in creosote bushes. It's what happens when the Japanese bean bug engulfs soil microbes that destroy insecticides, rendering it instantly immune to the rain of toxins being sprayed by farmers. And it's what aphids do all the time. Besides Hamiltonella, they have at least eight different secondary symbionts. Some protect against deadly fungi. Others help their hosts to tolerate heatwaves. One allows aphids to eat specific plants, like clover. One paints the aphids, changing them from red to green. These abilities are important. Across the aphid family, the acquisition of new symbionts tends to coincide with invasions into new climates or shifts to new types of plant.

It isn’t hard to plant the seed of an idea in someone’s head, and it takes very little water for it to germinate into a rapidly-spreading invasive species of mental vine that chokes out rational thought and common sense.

Because if there is a garden of maybes, you are the invasive plant I can’t ever get rid of.

If this is a garden of maybes, you are the invasive plant I can’t ever get rid of

I’ve spent my whole life creating narratives. In PR, a good narrative has a beginning, middle, and end. Truly effective narratives become invasive thoughts we plant in the public’s mind.

- Hitler prepared for battle by infiltrating Frances airwaves. Germany hired native-French broadcasters to unsuspecting listeners to tune in to amusing radio shows and music. Many listeners were oblivious to the propaganda was subtly included. These radio commentators expressed worry over the German army’s dominance and military strength, and predicted that France could not withstand an attack, The doubt Hitler’s radio programs planted in French minds quickly spread. Edmond Taylor, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who lived in France during this period, witnessed Hitler’s intricately choreographed propaganda campaign and how it crumbled Frances resolve. Describing it as a “strategy of terror,’ Taylor reported that Germany spent enormous amounts on propaganda and even bribed French newspapers to publish stories that confirmed the rumors of Germany’s superiority. According to Taylor, Germany’s war of ideas planted a sense of dread “in the of France that spread like a monstrous cancer, devouring all ocher emotional faculties [with] an irrational fear [that was] … uncontrollable.” So weakened was the confidence of the French that something as innocuous as a test of Frances air-raid-siren system generated ripples of panic; the mere innuendo of invasion somehow reinforced the idea that France would undoubtedly be defeated. Although the French government made a late attempt at launching an ideological counteroffensive by publicizing the need to defend freedom, it was as effective as telling citizens to protect themselves from a hurricane by opening an umbrella. When the invasion finally did come, France capitulated in six weeks. By similarly destroying the resolve of his enemies before invading them, Hitler defeated Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in addition to France, all in under a year. Over 230 million Europeans, once free, fell under Nazi rule.

To make good environmental decision, we must stop focusing on trying to remove or undo human influence, on turning back time or freezing the non-human world in amber. We must instead acknowledge the extent to which we have influenced our current world and take some responsibility for its future trajectory…We should not seek to carefully control every plant and animal on the planet. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.

When non-human animals are killed simply because they 'don't belong' and not because they are clearly causing some measurable harm, we have decided that erasing the taint of th ehuman is more important than the lives of animals (who, lest we forget, have no conception that they are in the 'wrong' place). This does not feel like humility in action. It is often the case that we hurt and kill animals because they are having effects we don't like, perhaps by predating on rare animals or eating rare plants. That's a trickier question--one we will tackle in due course.

The masters of the Fratery then disseminate the details of their oracles to the lower orders of their cult. By my estimation, the Fratery numbers several thousand, many of them apparently upstanding Imperial citizens, spread through hundreds of worlds in the subsectors Antimar, Helican, Angelus and Ophidian. Once a ‘prospect’ as they call them has been identified, certain portions of the ‘cult membership’ are charged with doing everything they can to ensure that it comes to pass, preferably in the worst and most damaging way possible. If a plague is foreseen, then cult members will deliberately break quarantine orders to ensure that the outbreak spreads. If the prospect is a famine, they will plant incendiary bombs or bio-toxins in the Munitorum grain stores of the threatened world. A heretic emerges? They will protect him and publish his foul lies abroad. An invasion approaches? They are the fifth column that will destroy the defenders from within. They seek doom. They seek to undermine the fabric of our Imperium, the culture of man, and cause it to founder and fall. They seek galactic apocalypse, an age of darkness and fire, wherein their unholy masters, the Ruinous Powers, can rise up and take governance of all.

Millions of acres that are now lawn in the United States once supported the native herbaceous plants that fed lots of grasshoppers and crickets. Grasshoppers, despite their name, depend primarily on broadleaved forbs, while crickets mostly develop on dead plant material. In pursuit of our obsession for neat landscapes, we have eliminated both in too many places. Finally, areas overrun with invasive groundcovers such as Japanese stiltgrass, vinca, or English ivy wouldn’t support grasshoppers because the plants grasshoppers depend on have been replaced by species they cannot eat. We can bring grasshoppers and other insects back if we plant more of our private and public spaces with the native plant species they require.

A: Every plant can be evaluated through a cost-benefit analysis. The ecological costs of autumn olive are enormous. They are one of the most invasive plants we have, and they decimate local plant and animal diversity and thus threaten ecosystem stability and function wherever they spread. Autumn olive berries might provide cancer-fighting benefits, but so do berries of many native plants (elderberry, for example). We can take advantage of other sources of lycopene. In my view, this is a clear case where the costs of planting a nonnative species far outweigh the replaceable benefits.

You can’t escape the cultural associations embodied by plants. You can’t have one without the other.

Progressive Era reformers saw themselves as the ones needing protection, like the native plants and animals they did so much to save from invasive species. Accordingly, they granted themselves asylum, turning universities, neighborhoods, and as much of the country as possible into a walled garden. They also created hospitals, graduate schools, and public institutions, but blurred science and social science, illness, intelligence, and inferiority, and kept for themselves the power to define which was which.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear – fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed – it would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity – enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence – confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations – or civilising epochs – have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid. So if one asks why the civilisation of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear – fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed – it would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity – enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence – confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations – or civilising epochs – have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid. So

Silent, cruel Takeshi Watanabe at this moment is the most important man among all the teeming hundreds of billions who inhabit the Thousand Worlds. For he rides up to start a war among the stars. He will plant Pyotr’s lie on an airless moonlet yet change Orion forever. Troops and warships are waiting to gather at jump-off bohr points. Waiting on his word. They they’ll swarm over the Krevan frontiers to launch the first multi-system war in three centuries. 'It’s war at last! Gods, I do love it so!

When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it allowed tropical species from the waters of the Indian Ocean to move into the Mediterranean. And they did. Yet while 250 species of all kinds established themselves, there has only been one recorded extinction. Similarly, when the Panama Canal joined the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in 1914, biodiversity increased on both sides. North America has morre birds and mammal species than when the Europeans first landed. And the addition of some four thousand plant species has added 20 percent to biodiversity and not, so far as is known, resulted in a single plant species being lost. Likewise, the UK’s twenty-three hundred additional species have not directly caused any known local extinctions.

You see refugees as the problem. They aren't. They are a symptom. You see them in our fields as weeds, invasive species, but you never ask, what is a weed, but a flower in the wrong garden? That is the real problem with Lebanon, and the whole Middle East, we are all flowers in the wrong garden. You English should understand this; this is the garden you planted.

Why does it seem like the prettiest plants are the invasive ones?” Garrett chuckled. “At the end of the day, even the invasive ones are just fighting for survival.

Invasive plants were like all evil things; the only way to ensure that they wouldn't return was to face them head-on, battle it out, and win. Anything else was only a temporary fix. I sighed, thinking of my own life. I was letting the weeds grow all over me. They were threatening my happiness and, in some ways, my life. So why couldn't I face them?

Limiting the say of outsiders, no matter that they were also Indigenous, these First Nations were protecting the integrity of their community. That is why it is important that the invasive plants are not given a voice in places they don’t belong and in decisions they ultimately have no stake in.