Are Americans an Invasive Species?

What conditions are needed to birth a home?

May 06, 2023

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My family and I have now been in the United States for exactly two weeks. It took nearly all that time to completely get over jet lag. Some say it takes the body one day for every hour traveled to fully recover. I believe it. The past 14 days have felt like swimming through delirious dreams, like awkwardly waltzing within bardos. But today, for the first time since landing in Los Angeles, I feel finally as though I am fully here. Mind, body and spirit presently walk symbiotically with this Place that has held me, taught me, fed me, inspired me, scared me, loved me, scolded me, attacked me, initiated me and lovingly embraced my returns, walkabouts and departures without judgement for over 20 years. When I smell Mother Rivers here, feel the soft silver sages caress my skin, hear the canyon wrens call echo through the corridors of ancient red stone… I am home.

My wife and I have been nourishing an ethnobotany unschool in Paonia, Colorado from the sidelines in for a few years now. But this weekend I reversed rolls and became a student myself. I joined a course with the great Kelly Moody looking at Springtime riparian ecology. We have been diving deep into explorations of this region’s ethnobotanical his/herstories and the lost art of wild-tending for both ecological and cultural health.

Yesterday we visited a nearby desert canyon, lush from heavy runoff from a massive Colorado winter, flowers blooming in a chorus of excited hope. Kelly offered enticing riddles regarding patterns of the landscape, generously shared details regarding how we can identify specific plant families, etc. All was mixed delicately with a healthy dose of natural and cultural narratives that flow into the present day from conflicting historical headwaters.

My mentor, Martin Prechtel often reminds his amnesiatic students of what intact peoples of the world seem to have always known; people are plants. How strange indeed that modernity has us convinced otherwise. We toss idioms around not thinking much of their origins or what they entail. We say things like “You are what you eat!”, but we seldom reflect over the depth of such a proclamation thoroughly. This statement is more true than most of us generally recognize. No matter what one eats, be it an organic radish, roadkill, paw paws, mangoes, a cow that eats grass, a chicken that eats corn, or whatever else suits ones fancy, we are most certainly all ultimately eating plants (and minerals). And as such, we are plants.

How curious then to consider, when met with the general ecological narrative pertaining to wilderness that speaks of so-called “invasive” species, which suggests that somehow certain plants don’t belong in certain areas whereas others do. I can’t help but recall our initial touch down in L.A. when Americans adorned in official looking outfits fashioned in foreign lands from fibers most certainly attained from “invasive” plants, themselves descendants from other countries who fled their native homes in order to make a new home elsewhere, now merge their backstory within a complex new narrative surrounding U.S. immigration policy where bodies not from here have been mysteriously deemed as experts of determining who is allowed to enter a place that ultimately isn’t their home either. Hmmm. An odd conundrum to be sure.

How parallel human’s journey with plants! We wind up living in random places because of unexpected events and we adapt, as do plants, with what life brings our way. Over time, like introduced plants landing in the desert southwest, we naturalize with our new environment, either by choice or by being forced to. The woman in L.A. who interrogated my wife was, like her, culturally Thai, but the tone she took on most certainly was not. She has become an American. Just as the Elaeagnus Angustifolia, commonly known as the Russian Olive that now thrives throughout the American West, once native to western and central Asia, parts of India, Russia, Kazakhstan, etc. whom has made itself a new home and adapted well here, so do people from all over the world not originally from here now consider themselves “Americans”. The Russian Olive has become native to this place. Just as I, a body whose genetic origins trace back to Wales and likely further still into the Caucus mountains has, over time, become native to a new place. We, like plants, change.

Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume, another knowledgeable ethnobotanist and teacher who shared with us as we courted the coming of Spring yesterday, suggested we not ask where ones home is but instead ask, What conditions are needed for one to make a home? An important adjustment to a considerably contentious question. What conditions are required to make a home? Do modern peoples even understand what home actually is? We move from place to place so frequently I can’t help but consider that the part of us that once knew how to be of a place may have very well vanished from us long ago. What defines home in a world where its inhabitants seems complacent to the fact that we are actively destroying that which allows home to be?

I don’t consider plants to be invasive. If anything, modern humans are the invasive ones. Plants live symbiotically with all parts of the ecosystem. It may not always seem this way a first glance, but wait a while, maybe a generation or two (or a thousand), sink slowly into natural time, not your own culturally conditioned version of it, but the kind of time that allows a river to carve canyon walls and you will certainly see a marvelously executed, mutually beneficial initiation with Place. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Yet observe how “civilized” humans generally enter a new environment and then consider how plants enter a new place. Culturally intact peoples, more aware as they generally are of their symbiotic relationship with plants, move more elegantly, as do plants, with more, shall we say, courtesy.

Massive boulders etched with prehistoric riddles make it hard not to merge the mind with codes offered us from a long-ago time that continues unfolding now. Although we do not benefit from over-romanticizing any one peoples over any other, in a time when rumors of AI takeovers and nuclear armageddon make it increasingly hard to find true moments of full presence that can enable entry into the greater Mind of Timelessness, Wilderness and the vastness of creative opportunity such realms offer, it seems worthwhile to consider what thoughts arose for peoples more intimately connected with the movements and languages of seasons, water, winged ones, four legged ones, the subtle spells cast by blossoming cacti and the medicines held within the integral dances these beings offer. I wonder. And I bow before the possibility of, if not returning to, entering invasively, respectfully, cautiously into, a co-created re-emergence of intercultural honoring and interspecies cross-pollination that might birth a more respectful dialogue with That Which Gives Us Life. Such an act might generate the conditions for…dare I say it, home.

A bighorn sheep, once believed to be extinct gracefully glides across terrifying terrain as a multicolored lizard winks at me from a slab of slick sandstone. A primrose whispers briefly of ancient possibilities being offered here again before vanishing again into the void. The river continues carving a cavernous cathedral as planes arrogantly fly overhead. Oh, The Desert is very much alive. Can we still hear what She says?

The writing is on the wall.

BUY ME A CUP OF COFFEE:)