The city gets worse & worse & worse! So naturally you bomb-over to the largest of parks (the wildest ones) as often as possible to shrive some of the urban enclosures anthropocentric death-dealing pollution pantheon.. shake-off the contaminants shroud. & you know what’s really spectacular for those that know how to look – the ‘unmanaged’ free-thriving stretches of unmolested verdancy …the microcosms that are unscathed by man’s destructive & reductive interventions & obsessions with control, order, allocation, script & plant prejudice.
In wilder regions, they are easily overlooked due to their ubiquity & sizable scale (unintentionally ignored in a larger environment of natural beauty that pleasantly distracts the central attention from the smaller wonders). But in smaller & deprived enclaves (parks/gardens), a starved & weary urban drudge can find spuming vitality in uncurbed verdure. Seeing green things growing, of any sort, bar only something that monopolizes or damages the ecosystem, is extremely restorative, health conductive & gratifying. I don’t require the corroboration or explanation of the mainstream channels to certify this experience/practice/quality, but there are countless scientific & psychoanalytic studies & publications confirming just how profoundly nature-related-exposure helps preserve, extend & replenish human health & wellbeing.
Away from the splendor of the plants themselves is the the inhabitants of this secondary world. Insects! A sky-forest in your backyard if your attention & scale can be recalibrated to a smaller parallel. Damn! – These life forms are wonderful. Like, the most far-out, alien, fantastical & radical of entities, with somatic design beyond wildest-belief. The insect kingdom is just another world in entirety – literally just another planet! So much so that even physics & gravity bend to this magnificently divergent simultaneous realm. The rule book is shredded, & yet we share exactly the same space (albeit on a dramatically differing scale). I still just cannot believe the arachnid! It’s the coolest creation ever – just the most sensational & insane, amazing entity. Their speed is astonishing! They can go from zero to something like 30 miles per hour, in human terms, in the space of a micro second. There seems to be no acceleration phase! It’s immediate terminal velocity. Just astonishing.
The nettle kingdom. Like some kind of super rainforest…observing the inhabitants, I can imagine the thicket like ‘life size’ jungle. Insect empathy, or some kind of live-action visaria/vicarious fantasia based on scrutiny, allows a real-time reinterpretation of scale & for me to partially assume access to a secondary universe (of sorts). Obviously, for some poor city schlep, its enormously awesome, invigorating, inspirational & purifying. Knowing that this world/energy exists, & is eager to flourish as soon as man’s brutal sterility recedes, imbues me with enormous power & sanctity.
This shit is real wild life! The lifeforms. The shapes. The anatomies. The moves/motion/mobility. Mind blowing actually. & all of it just right there given the scantest of chance. Incredible! Beautiful! Gruesome! Brain-boggling. Ridiculous! Monumental!
Anyway, I snapped a bunch of pictures over the last few weeks whilst pissing about in the weeds. Some are pretty good, so sharing a few. Getting them requires ninja sensitivities, as many of these creatures are very wary & evasive, & the camera is old/basic, meaning you need to get right up close with the device to get a decent shot. The difficulty becomes a discipline, & it’s actually quite fun, like a game. The concentration & transfixing on the insect-realm whilst performing this endeavor helps your mind to integrate, transform & cross into this alternative dichotomy as your perceptions ‘shrink to expand’. ‘Elsewhere’. Another plain. Alternative dimensions. Parallel multiverse.
Unfortunately, misfortune & catastrophe are only a stalks-length away. In tandem with the ‘sixth mass extinction’ & severe climate destruction; ‘insect apocalypse’ has seen the natural world lose a barely imaginable 80% of insect biomass in the last 25-30 years. That is, absolutely extraordinary!
If you think that’s favorable, & like the prospect of never having to remove another spider from a bathtub etcetera, remember that insects perform an insurmountable medley of crucial & unique functions to our survival (not in any way to suggest that is their only value) & are fundamental to our ecosystems capacity to perform. A brilliant but extremely alarming recent article of multiple reports on the crisis in the Guardian described insects being at ‘the heart of every food web & “the corner-stone of all terrestrial ecosystems”. Basically, really not something to fuck with at all’ at all! Larger species of wild animals & fish that rely on insects for survival (pretty much everything when you consider the interconnectedness of the food-chain) will die off, a phenomenon referred to as the “bottom-up trophic cascade”. The rapidness of rate is tremendous – a staggering 41% decimation of insect life globally over the past decade alone.
The death cult & the anti-life. “the main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification”/“Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one [factor] that is killing the ecosystems,”. That seems to be the worst culprit, but you can definitely factor in additional habitat loss, urbanization, & pollution. A new, warped turpitude of symmetry/non-natural-obsessed infertility worship, herbiphobia & ecopathia propelled by acute ignorance, if not resentment, of the natural world & any of its phenomena – is starting to gain traction with some of the most disturbed & impaired of the human populace (generally with the greatest concentration residing in cities). This means the total obliteration, extreme pacification or brutalization of anything natural (trees, grass, soil, plants, wildlife), with a preference, if not fetish, for anything man-made & artificial. It is getting more extreme as the year’s elapse – plastic grass, plastic plants, pointless tree felling, the paving over of gardens, municipal extensions & eradication & clearing for parking related provision. With barley any regulation or public consultation operable, people can, will & do, massively gratuitous acts of permanent environmental extermination on a whim (I see & document it constantly & it is definitely getting worse & more frequent). Ecocidal maniacs are proliferating.
Perhaps worst of all, & in direct relation with the ‘intensive agriculture” devastation as well as civic & individual usage – is the pesticides, herbicides & chemicals routinely used with colossal ubiquity in large-scale cheap/standardized food production & municipal/garden maintenance. This is perhaps the greatest offender of all & is inflicting monumental damage, death, disease & deformity, with many humans included in the casualties. pesticides are a very captured & fiercely suppressed topic & industry with gargantuan ongoing profits that benefactors wish to maintain. The fall-out, sickness & death from their prevalent appliance also creates secondary market opportunities that the very same companies can then exploit.
I have run out of steam on this article for now & need to address other clatter. Sides’, enough has been relayed for one day… check back on a similar thread later as the pesticide topic needs an exclusive dispatch.
Get in the growth, cultivate wild plants.
some links to further articles for those that give a fuck –