10/28/2026
Wednesday
There are two primary schools of thought on how horticulture can help / adapt to billionaire-caused climate change: 1) breed new crosses and / or import species that can withstand the local changes better (at least for a time); 2) plant as much regional stuff that's super adaptable and thereby hope to give fauna a chance to adapt at speeds they likely can't adapt to anyway.
The problem with both, I suppose, is that the changes are accelerating. I've been reading a lot lately about how we're going to sail by 2 degrees warming much earlier, and likely to hit / sail by 3 degrees much earlier. And with the United States federal government slashing laws that are burdensome to corporations -- like clean air, clean water, drilling on public lands, slashing roadless rules, and conserving what wilder places remain -- hope is a hard thing to find. But sometimes it's rage and anger and empathy that can unleash hope giving it legs.
I don't know how to marry the breeding or importation of new plant species -- say, crossing American and Chinese elms for greater climate adaptability -- with trying to plant as much regional ecotypes as possible, especially the more resilient species. I'm in a very vertical ecoregion that stretches from Oklahoma into southern Canada -- does that mean it's ok to use Oklahoma ecotypes here in Nebraska as the climate pressures shift? Maybe? How much is that supremacy and how much is it science?
But this entire conversation to me feels like a magic 8-ball -- who knows. And when we practice supremacy in garden design or larger landscape management, it feels like a symptom of the same root cause that started this whole mess. To a degree, anyway.
We clearly need to foster connection and empathy to life, period. To wasps and bees and bugs and flowers and plants and hawks and frogs and snakes and rivers and stones. If that's with a species from China or one from Nebraska, a species that may or may not one day become invasive, what matters more?
I think horticulture is often as much a solution provider and cause instigator (or status quo champion) depending on who you talk to, what organization you're working with, the person standing in front of you, and the time of day. It's a chorus, after all, and somehow we have to work together when we don't agree on a ton of stuff.
The simple fact is we don't know how to plant for the future in our gardens, or how to manage the wilder places, when the changes are coming so fast and it appears that no one in any government is doing anything but allowing corporations and mega donors to call the shots.
Maybe a resilient prairie, forest, lake, or garden starts with getting money out of politics. Maybe it starts with realizing we're stuck in a flawed extraction-based system that's slowly killing us from many angles. Maybe it's to start watching birds or planting an aster. Or to stop fertilizing the lawn.
We'll keep debating and arguing and feeling the deep emotions, because in some ways it's all we have left, but if we all agreed on the solutions the solutions would already be here. Personally, I'm overwhelmed by the shifting balance of how much we should rely on human intervention and how that intervention is targeting the wrong things (the surface level) on some days, but how on other days we need to live in the surface level (gardening) just to preserve some sanity, hope, resilience, and connection that so many work hard to avoid because the grief of what we all know is happening is simply too much to bear.
That's why I think unlawning is seen as a threat; it pierces the veil and overwhelms us, because we know. WE KNOW. And can't carry another burden even if it's one that can save and liberate us.
