The Healing Power of Plants Summit
April 15th-18th
Online + Free!
Interview: Connecting with the Land through "Invasive" Plants
This interview series features 15 wise herbalists and plant people sharing about deepening your connection with the green world
My interview, on connecting with the land through "invasive" plants, is a controversial topic, I know! And, spoiler alert, to me it's not an either/or issue and my intention behind sharing about it is to bring some nuance to the convo and share an animist perspective too.
Although I have certainly done my fair share of Bittersweet removal along with other non-native plants, it still hurts my heart to read folk's comments online about how much they "hate" certain plants and their eagerness to pull-out the Round-Up (aka glyphosate) and poison the earth in the name of ecological restoration. Which tends to inherently come along with the human-centric assertion that us humans are the experts on plant migration in the midst of climate chaos and a global a mass extinction. Overall, I feel that the narrative around "invasives" is a language of separation that deepens our severance from the natural world and, as an person who's life's work is connecting people with plants and helping facilitate folk's re-establish their connection with the land, I can't help but to speak-up and be voice for the plants, no matter where they're from
I recently came across the name "displaced plant relative" for these plants, offered by the indigenous scientist Jessica Hernandez, and I gotta say that THIS is where it's at for me in terms of re-framing our relationships with these plants!