Chase 🌾 🏳️‍🌈 🌾

07.15.22 prairie chicken

[id: an illustration of a prairie chicken on a yellow background. It is standing on one foot and is surrounded by blue feathers and stylized grass. End.]

The dissertation is officially real!

Want to take home 150 pages of comics on prairies, history, foraging, and restoration, all drawn by yours truly? This is my final revised dissertation and contains a decade of prairie research all in one place.

But seriously, when we got our property, it was all just…grass. A sterile grass moonscape, like a billion other yards. With two big old maple trees. Just grass and maples, that was it. 

But then I got my grubby little paws on it, and I immediately stopped fertilizing, spraying, and bagging up grass clippings and leaves. I ripped up sod and put in flowers and vegetables. I put down nice thick blankets of mulch around the flowers and vegetables. 

When I first was sweating my way through stripping sod, I saw a grand total of 1 worm and 0 ladybugs. The ground was compacted into something that would bend shovel blades. 

Now, six years later, I can’t dig a planting hole without turning up fourteen earthworms, and there are so many ladybugs here. Not the invasive asian lady beetles; native ladybugs. They winter over in the mulch and in the brush pile. I see thousands of them. 

The soil is soft and rich. There are birds that come to eat, and bees of many sorts.

Like this is something that you, yourself, can absolutely change. This is something that you, personally, can make a difference in.

Like, last year I watched no fewer than twenty-nine monarch caterpillars grow up on my milkweed and fly away as butterflies. I watched swallowtails and moths grow. There are hummingbirds fighting over flowers now.

I did that. Me. You can do the same.

Is this post about making a garden or beating depression

As someone with clinically diagnosed anxiety and depression;

Yes.

It’s been a while since we’ve gotten out. Too long a while. By row:

These are all a week old, and the trout lilies are already (almost) all bloomless — they ain’t called ephemerals for nothing. I am absolutely thrilled for the return to bloom of our local Hexastylis offerings, and the trilliums are of course a favorite too. An excellent month for mottled leaves.

Many thanks to @krieper for the use of her photos in rows 1, 3, and 5. Much credit also to these deciduously wooded hillsides, which have previously given us some beeches and their drops.

‘Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to put own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying “Help”?

Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationships with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibility that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things.’

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

"There's no wildlife here. The land is barren and stripped from farming chemicals"

I just saw two blue herons fly super low over our house, which means they've been fishing in the creek behind us, which means there's fish there. Which means there's bugs to feed the fish and algae to feed the bugs, which means the water and soil is worth something damnit.

Yes, I'm sorry the suburb isn't the grand, sweeping swath of uninhabited land that you so desperately crave but would learn to loathe, but saying that the land here is barren and that there's no wildlife here and that there's nothing to salvage- that's a You problem. Nature might be struggling, but against all odds it is at least trying.

And you can help by being its caretaker...

This is what I’m harping on about when I talk about Urban Animism.

The hopelessness, the lack of community, the lack of connection to the natural world, it’s all an illusion.

Migratory birds still use the bayous, drainage ditches and culverts. Moss and lichens grow in the margins between cement. You’ll find fish and turtles in a puddle in a cement culvert. You’ll find pocket prairies struggling to get established in utility easements and empty lots and medians. There are lizards and snakes in the non-native landscaping.

Hopelessness is a tool. If people keep saying it’s dead then you won’t look and if you don’t look, then you can’t build empathy with the natural world around you and you won’t be motivated to heal its wounds and steward its growth. If they keep your eyes on the death and misery, then you won’t see all the life and joy there is to protect.

There are grackles, seagulls, raccoons, possums, and coyotes, all thriving in urban and suburban environments. They’re not vermin, they’re our neighbors. They, too, are worth protecting and they’re everywhere if you look.

And the thing is, it is bad. A lot of these areas are heavily compromised and nothing is being done. A lot of them need tremendous amounts of work to be in a healthful and balanced state. But, when there is so much damage, when there’s so little effort being taken, that’s an opportunity. How little effort you’ll have to put in to make an incredible difference. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be worlds better than it was, and that will matter to your neighbors, the fish, frogs and birds.

But first you have to look, you MUST look, you must see these beings so that you can recognize them as your neighbors.