Why You Can't Easily "Move" Woody Plants: It's in the Roots
So often I hear people making the assumption that small trees and shrubs and other woody plants can easily be "moved", but in most cases this is a pipe dream and destined to fail.
Why digging up and moving trees and shrubs often doesn't work :
The only parts of the roots that are engaged in absorption of water and nutrients are the distal few inches of the root, where the root hairs are (the part of the illustration circled in red), but root hairs are somewhat short-lived and don't last long as they are continuously replaced as the root grows.
As the roots continue to grow and elongate, root hairs die and are not replaced at the same site the way that branches are, which may resprout from dormant buds on the stem or shoot. Root hairs are only produced at the root apical meristems on tap roots and lateral roots, the rest of the root above that is only plumbing and transport, not absorption, though lateral roots and secondary roots can also have growing tips which produce root hairs.
When you dig up a plant, you are mostly severing those distal (as opposed to proximal) root segments that contain the root hairs, which mean that the plant now has no way of absorbing water and must regrow new roots. This is the main reason why "moving" plants so often fails. The only way to ensure that you do not sever the parts of the root that contain the root hair when moving something like a small tree is to make sure that you basically remove the entire crater of soil that the tree is growing in, which usually necessitates the use of a tree spade mounted on a small dozer.
If you ARE able to get a decent amount of roots with root hairs when digging a plant, be aware that sometimes the best way to ensure success is to sever some of the shoot up top, maintaining an adequate root-to-shoot ratio and preventing evapotranspiration of moisture from leaves.
Growing the Texas/Mexican Madrone
People say that Texas Madrones are hard to cultivate. Indeed they can be, but it is certainly not impossible. In Alpine Texas I have seen multiple large, beautiful specimens in people's yards. They are always growing in protected locations however, like the north or east side of a house, were they won't get cooked in the hot summer afternoons. This makes sense when you keep in mind that the few places that they can be found in Brewster and Pecos County, for instance are relictual habitats like narrow washes and canyons, protected from the hot afternoon sun.
No doubt like many of the members of subfamily Arbutoideae (of the blueberry family, Ericaceae), They harbor specific kinds of mycorrhizal fungi and they have the root morphology to do it, consisting mostly of many fine fibrous root hairs that provide ample surface area for the fungi to colonize. That said the exact species of fungi have most likely not been genetically sequenced or analyzed, which is yet another tragedy of how understudied so many aspects of Texas botany and ecology are.
Dr Michael Powell at Sul Ross University states that the limiting factor is for the most part the very narrow window of water that they require when young. It is very easy to let them dry out And it is very easy to overwater them to the point that they easily rot. The trick is keeping the soil moisture level within the boundaries of that fine window in between two wet and too dry. Others have stated that products like root shield can inoculate them with the fungi they need, but others state that it is not necessary. Depending on how hot and dry the climate is, they are probably best with morning sun and shade in the hot afternoon. They do like water when they are old, but they do not like swampy soil.
At the University they are grown in narrow tree tubes. With a large volume of fast training soil it seems safer to prevent them drying out while also preventing them rotting. The fast drainage prevents rot in the larger soil volume prevents drying out quickly. Perhaps a mixture of half organic substrate mixed with a quarter pumice and a quarter pine or cedar bark chips (which are organic but also resistant to fungal attack) would be the key. Vermiculite might also help since it holds moisture but is not easily eaten by fungi. Keep in mind that most pathogenic fungi get their start eating organic matter that is already dead and decaying and then gain enough strength to attack living tissue, like the roots of the madrone. If the roots are inoculated with the beneficial mycorrhizae, then attack by pathogenic fungi is probably less likely, since mycorrhizae have been known to “ward off” pathogenic fungi in various settings. This makes sense, since there is a self-interest on the part of the fungi in protecting its own food source (forgive the anthropomorphizing, lol It just helps in an explanatory sense).
Whatever the specific code is to growing madrones, It is important to keep trying. This is such a great and beneficial plant for pollinators and wildlife and should be revered in Texas horticulture as many wild plants continue to succumb to drought and a changing climate.
Things to remember when growing Arbutus xalapensis:
Avoid root disturbance at all costs. If you grow a few seedlings together in the same pot keep in mind you cannot separate them at any stage during their later growth. Just let them grow together and accept that if you might die or they might all grow together to form a single tree. It's not worth disturbing the roots and breaking those fine sensitive root hairs.
Protect young trees from deer. If a tree is damaged when it is young, it will resprout leaves but the leaves will likely wither and die. No one really knows why this happens but they do not recover from deer browsing when young. It is worth culling deer when possible unless you have the help of a local mountain lion.
The most important thing to consider when growing Madrones is to keep the soil in that fine and narrow window between too much moisture and too little. Do not water them unless you have picked up the pot and felt how heavy it is, since The weight of the pot changes according to how much water is in the soil. Sometimes you can eye the top of the soil level too but that will only give you an idea of the top inch of moisture content, when it is the roots that are most affected by overwatering or underwatering.
All photos and auto-correct typos my own.
Why “NATIVE” Plants?
What do we mean by "plant native" and why? What is a "native plant"
I focus on learning what's native no matter where I go because there is a very important context there to be had, and it gives us a much broader perspective on the ecosystem and living fabric of which we are all a part.
What is a native plant? A native plant is a plant that existed in a place before humans were able to transport plant species across the globe by the thousands, haphazardly mixing key elements of ecosystems that prior to had been separated for millions of years by oceans, the equator, and the polar zones.
When you see a native plant, you are looking at the original living skin of the Earth in that place. You are seeing the green living skin of the Earth that is specific to that place : it exists there and specifically looks and behaves (flowering time, interactions with pollinators, dispersers, etc) the way that it does as a result of literally millions of years of natural selection and evolution in THAT SPECIFIC PLACE. That environment, that landscape, that geology, that climate, those native herbivores, those native pollinators - those are just a few of the factors that selected for and essentially bred that plant to be what it is today.
As humans mindlessly continue to dismantle the biosphere - an act that is similar to cracking open the hood of a Chevy and just beginning to whimsically rip out tubes, rotors, belts, and gaskets like a happy-go-lucky moron without even trying to figure out what those pieces do - the vast majority of us in our ignorance lack any context for which the living fabric around us evolved. This is easy for us to do because most of it has been destroyed and we have so thoroughly been disconnected from the land and worldwide biosphere of species that supports us. We are tinkering with a giant Jenga Tower, removing important blocks that are essential to holding up the tower because we selfishly assume that because those wood blocks don't observably directly benefit us that they can be disposed of. We behave this way because we LACK CONTEXT.
Native plants are this context. The plants that are native in a place are the result of having evolved there. They are the result of traits that have been selected for by the environment itself : by the climate, the herbivores that exist in that region, the specific suite of pollinators that exist in that region, the geology. In this way, we can see that quite literally, everything in an ecosystem is connected.
We lack context for how the land around us functions, for how the life that lives on it interacts, what the relationships between those native organisms are - the fungi, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, and plants. This biological machine, this ecosystem, worked fine before this civilization that we now live under began to tinker with it. It worked fine because it was the result of millions of years of evolution (specifically, of co-evolution). The same way that a species can evolve and change throughout time, so can a large ecosystem. A species of plant or animal is just the smallest unit of an ecosystem or bioregion. When we zoom out both spatially and temporally - when we think beyond our own short human lifespans - we can begin to see how the ecosystem functions in keeping the land and all the organisms within it healthy. If the ecosystem somehow couldn't keep the land and the smaller units which comprise it healthy, these organisms would begin to blink out and go extinct - a phenomenon that we are seeing right now. The more species that begin to drop off, and soon enough the phenomenon becomes a cascade. Remove enough blocks from the Jenga tower and it will eventually collapse.
Our entire civilization is disconnected from the life and the land that surround us, despite how much it nurtures and supports us, despite how much it makes our lives and existence so much more pleasant and bearable. Our entire concept of what plants are and what purpose they should serve around us is tainted. We think plant species should only be planted to "look pretty" (whatever that means) or feed us, not realizing that all plants are responsible for sustaining us. We think the plants that exist on the landscapes that we surround ourselves with should be the garbage that we purchase out of bgi box stores like Home Despot or Lowe's - the overbred, greenhouse-hybridized descendants of plants that evolved 5,000 miles away in places and regions that in no way resemble that ones that we live in. We don't even know what's "natural" anymore. We have normalized the abnormal. We don't understand how the living world around us functions, and we have no clue how we even fit into it. We are lost. This is the fundamental tragedy of the modern day.
The living web that we are a part of nurtures us, keeps us sane, cleans our air, mitigates the effects of our heat waves and our floods, creates the pleasant smells we smell at night when we walk next to a field of photosynthetic, respiring organisms.
We are philosophically disconnected from this world. We made the mistake of thinking that severing our connection to it was a good idea simply because - due to the intellectual minority among us - we gained the technology to do so. Rather than stay united with the living world and using our technology to nurture our relationship with it, we have abandoned that living world altogether. We lack all context for it. Native Plants are the foundation of that context. Native Plants are how we lead our asses out of these lonely dark ages that we have put ourselves into as a species. Plant the Native Plants and everything else positive will follow.
One of Texas' Rarest Plants - Paronychia congesta
I recently got a chance to visit one of Texas's rarest plants, which not surprisingly gross on a unique soil formation that appears to be pure caliche. This plant has only been collected from two different sites and I believe it has only been collected twice. It recently received endangered species status.
The genus Paronychia has quite a few species, most of them occurring on dry sites or in dry regions. Paronychia jamesii is a more common species throughout much of Texas, built as it is to tolerate heat and drought. Paronychia congesta, however, seems uniquely adapted to tolerate the brutal heat of South Texas. All species in this genus are generally smaller plants and tend to be somewhat matted. P. congesta has very abbreviated leaves with short-to-nonexistent internodes, the branches and leaves covered in hairs and scales which no doubt greatly benefit it and prevent it from transpiring moisture while at the same time reflecting heat and light.
It was co-occurring with Euploca torreyi, Liatris punctata var mexicana, Stenaria nigricans, Calliandra conferta and Nahuatlea hypoleuca on these harsh caliche exposures. Caliche is basically a natural cement formed by the dissolution and subsequent precipitation of the minerals weathered out of calcareous country rock.
Thornscrub Por Vida
For those of us who are advocating for more native plants in landscapes here in the Rio Grande Valley I think it's important to point out that what has collectively been referred to as "brush" or Thornscrub here (what might be called "chaparral" in California or "matorral" in Chile) IS the kind of habitat type that occurred here and which lived here for many tens of thousands of years before Europeans and even humans in general came here.
Yet there seems to be this subconscious distaste for "brush" within the mainstream culture of the Rio Grande Valley and much of South Texas, where "brush" was often something to be feared because it's where snakes lived and the plants could poke you. I see a similar fear or ignorance of the native habitat in many places around the world.
Rather than understanding and appreciating the native living skin of the Earth at this latitude and longitude - at this particular unique place on the North American continent - the "brush" is usually seen as something that stands in the way of development or agriculture (nevermind the fact that it harbors life and literally acts like nature's swamp cooler by evapotranspirative cooling).
Instead of appreciating and nurturing the plant species that form these habitats, many local gardens historically have tried to mimic traditional European gardens by blending mowed turf grass (which makes no sense whatsoever in this climate) with orange dyed wood chips and landscape beds hedged into topiary shapes.
Changing this paradigm and outlook - which one could argue is immediately hostile to the surrounding native ecosystem - and getting people to appreciate the Thornscrub and brush is key to creating a healthy and liveable landscape in the RGV.
As someone who learned botany in deserts, I've always been attracted to spiny plants. They are often the coolest examples of what can evolve under the intense natural selection of hot seasonally-dry environments. I first came to the Rio Grande Valley in 2014 SOLELY TO SEE THE PLANTS HERE : many of these species don't grow anywhere else in the United States.
I think pointing out to people - city hall especially - that "brush" or Thornscrub is the only thing that makes sense here. It is what evolved here and nourished the many animals that live here and which make the RGV a destination for winter Texans, birders, and "ecotourists". You plant a few of the native shrub species and you get a pair of electric hedgers to give it a "haircut" every once in a while. Trying to have a lawn at a subtropical latitude in a place where rain is sporadic and temperatures remain at 100° for 8 months straight is absolutely INSANE.
Plants define a place and a region like nothing else does. We need to encourage people to stop pretending that they live in a villa in Tuscany or a palm-tree-candyland in Fiji. We live in a place with Ebanos, Mesquites, Retama and Coma trees, with tough plants that take getting blasted with hot sun and surviving months without a drop of rain and still feed our rare birds, butterflies and insects. They are beautiful and they deserve to be respected rather than bulldozed or called "weeds" by people in suits who can't name even 3 of the native plants that lived on the land they grew up on for centuries before they were born.
We need to teach people to love the Thornscrub.
Society is garbage, “Nature” is Sacred.
Aldo Leopold wrote “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” I would expound on that to say that being alive in the world in most places today as one who has a relationship with non-human things means living embedded in a society that is innately disconnected from anything real.
I’ve heard so much obnoxious and rhetorical talk throughout the years about “spirituality” from an endless parade of charlatans. It was always hard to swallow because the people who pronounced it rarely ever lived it, and to speak of spirituality if one has never actually done the work to look inside themselves with humility and be honest in the way about their own fears and failures, the way that - for example - alcoholics and addicts in recovery do seems phony at best and outright dangerously dishonest at worst.
At some point along this weird winding road I’ve been on, being fixated with plant life and the things that interact with them - after nights seeing sunsets and feeling rockfaces in my hands and winds on my forehead - I had to admit that there was something more to what I was doing then just obsessive fixation. My relationship with plants and the entire living world outside of humanity became spiritual, and at the same time I moved to a place where the subconscious ethos of the dominant society was inherently pitted against everything I believed in and cared about.
Texas is not kind or tolerant of the living biological fabric that coats the Earth within the make-believe geopolitical boundaries of the state. The doctrines of the silly dominant religion are probably one reason. Christianity is not alone in its mindless disregard and enabling of an Anthropocentric worldview. None of the Abrahamic religions display any large degree of tolerance, awareness or stewardship to Earth’s biosphere, where as most of them believe it to be a disposable by-product or background scenery to what’s really important - the test of faith and behavior that is a human lifespan, all of it one big opportunity to see how much humans can live up to “His” expectations and rules. The biological skin of the Earth is only there for us to exploit and use during our time here.
It is common among progressives today to fetishize anything “indigenous” without talking about the ideologies and connections to the life around them that some indigenous cultures exuded. There is often no mention of the animism or beliefs of some indigenous cultures and groups that made them worth noting in comparison to the present day or what could be learned from them, only a focus on racial identity - outside of a context for racial history and oppression, this is merely another metric with which human social groups - as social primates - have used to self-segregate and divide.
I don’t think it’s preposterous to say that my sense of spirituality, my religion, is the plant life that surrounds me. That is why I nurture it. My religion is the cicadas that sing in the trees at dusk. That is why I smile and thank them. My religion is the rock dust that blows into my teeth on windy days in the desert. That is why I might laugh at how much it sucks, but I don’t complain. It is my belief that I - and no other human - is of no greater importance than any other element of the biosphere, and that if we take from the system that we are inseparably tied to, we must equate by giving something back. I hate lawns because they inherently deny all of this. I hate strip malls because they reduce the human experience to a transaction. I hate all-american sprawl and vehicle culture because it traps us in cars that isolate us from each other and from the world. And though I love people as individuals, I’m only being somewhat hyperbolic when I say that I hate society as it stands today because existing within it is generally insufferable, smothering, isolating, alienating, deadening, numbing and often times rooted in values and ideologies that I equate with vacuous, mind-numbing garbage.
Only a moron...
"Only an unthinking, naive and semi-conscious moron would ridicule the idea that the plants that we surround ourselves with matter. We can humanize our landscapes or we can create bleak, soul-crushing shitholes that make us want to escape our own environments with pills, porn, booze, or other forms of escapism. Like rats in the famous “Rat Park Experiment” conducted by Psychologist Bruce Alexander in the 1970s, when our lives feel meaningless, empty and devoid of a feeling of place or belonging, we self-medicate. Who can blame us. Likewise, when humans are removed from the living world that birthed us into being, we search for other facets of existence to cling to and use to fill the void that's been created within us.
Having a relationship with the living world around us makes us feel complete. It’s not everything - it’s not going to cure cancer or end our stupid religious wars - but it willi undoubtedly take our collective human angst down a few notches.
Creating a living tapestry of (mostly native) plant life around us feeds into our dopamine and serotonin receptors. Our lives, our cultures and our collective intellect as humans thrives in places that nurture us, in places that are alive."
Barry Dopawoski, Insurance Agent and Claims Adjuster, Elmwood Park, Illinois
The Giving Tree
My Version of Shel Silverstein's Epic Children's Book "The Giving Tree", revised for the Anthropocene and the age of Mass Extinction ™️ & Biosphere Collapse
Camouflaged Cacti in Central Mexico
How does a plant "know" what a rock looks like? It doesn't. Instead, its surrounding environment*selects* for it over gradually over lengths of time that far surpass a human lifetime (and far surpass human civilization itself).
There are any multitude of shapes and forms that the evolutionary lineage that produced Ariocarpus kotschoubeyanus could have taken, but since it evolved on slightly-metamorphosed calcium carbonate rock that fractures as it weathers here at 6,600 ft elevation, the tubercles on this plant (which is basically just a flattened stem, like a cylinder that's been smooshed in a vice) resemble the rocks.
In arid regions there is a lot more herbivore pressure on plants than there is in more mesic ones since there is much less on the menu. As a result any individual plant whose phenotype made it easier to spot got picked off.
We have seen the same thing happen most recently with the lily species Fritillaria delavayi in China, which has been subjected to increasingly more intense harvesting pressure by humans who pick it to sell in market as medicine. As a result, Fritillaria delavayi has survived by become much harder to spot in its rocky environment - measurably so, to the point that there was a paper published on it. Such is a prime example of natural selection at work in real time.
I've seen the same thing with pyramidalis in South Africa.
The genus Ariocarpus contains 8 or 9 species depending on which taxonomy you accept. All resemble rocks, indicating that the adaptive benefits of mimicking them have been in this lineage for quite
some time.
Silver Ferns on Marble Mountains at 10,500'
Among the genus of fern Astrolepis - which is renowned for growing primarily in desert mountains and often out of cracks in bare rock - there are only a handful of species. This species is Astrolepis integerrima, distinguished from other species in the genus by the dense coat of scales and trichomes on its upper (adaxial) leaf surface.
And among the different populations of Astrolepis integerrima that exist throughout arid regions of North America, there are various ecotypes - that is populations of the same species that all vary slightly morphologically and genetically, but not quite enough to be considered separate species or even subspecies. Their differing characteristics and morphology is the result of their particular geography and geology and climate patterns having slowly "sculpted" them - evolutionarily speaking - over the last however thousand to tens of thousands to perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. A prime example of natural selection at work.
And THIS particular ecotype of Astrolepis integerrima was more stunning than any I have ever encountered, especially since it was seemingly everywhere on this mountaintop at 10,500' (3200 m) that was composed entirely of MARBLE. That is, metamorphosed limestone. It was growing next to giant Agaves (salmiana ssp. crassispina), oaks (Quercus crassifolia), and even a cool carnivorous plant (Pinguicula moranensis).
The new growth and emerging leaf blades almost resembled feathers that were slowly uncoiling, so dense were the scales and trichomes on the blade that you could barely see any photosynthetic tissue through it. Hairs of course are an adaptation to many things, primarily drying out, full sun and frost. Surely, in the high mountains of Mexico all three of those factors made for this particular ecotype of this extremely fuzzy, silver fern.
Mutualisms in Cacti at 8,000' Elevation
It's always enjoyable to encounter plant relationships like this in ecosystems. Though I wouldn't necessarily call it a mutualism, it sure does come close.
Here is Mammillaria andersoniana - among a few other species - a very rare and tiny little species of cactus that grows out of rockwalls composed of the volcanic rock rhyolite. This species of Mammillaria doesn't often grown alone, but usually occurs with a Tillandsia species and a species of the "spike moss" (which isn't a moss at all), Selaginella.
Both the Tillandsia and the Selaginella no doubt provide a substrate for the cactus to germinate on this vertical face of rock, but the relationship likely becomes a mutualism once the Mammillaria reaches adequate size, with both partners benefitting & receiving an edge up in this dry environment.
I love noticing these kinds of associations. I've long noticed that plenty of Meso-American cacti species often grow in beds of lichens, mosses, & "spike moss" (the genus Selaginella) & this situation was starkly illustrated for me again recently.
I have no problem anthropomorphizing here, and I certainly think doing so can sometimes help us imagine how these mutualisms benefit all species involved, so long as we are able to think beyond our "bipedal primate frame-of-reference", accepting that there CAN be pragmatic scientific logic behind our depiction of these relationships. I think that lady Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this in that book she wrote, the genera in question being Solidago & Symphyotrichum.
Whatever your take on it, it's an association that's sitting there right in front of you smacking you in the face when you're standing in habitat. It's also another example to me of why studying habitat - as opposed to just "collecting" plants in horticulture or focusing on plant and ignoring the rest - is so important. More importantly, CONSERVING & PROTECTING the habitat is important. These plant communities have a right to exist despite whether us human primates are able grasp the concept of whether leaving them intact and functioning benefits us or not (hint : it does).
How does a plant know what a rock looks like?
Humans always like to think of evolution as a cause & and-effect scenario, as if a plant or animal evolving is a conscious "response" to something else; as if the DNA code and genome of say, a mosquito that evolves insecticide resistance somehow "knows" what's happening to it and so it eventually produces the genes that code for resistance to the insecticide. This is obviously not what's going on. To think about it clearly we have to zoom way out on the times scales that we think of these things happening. We also have to think of the way that humans breed plants and *select* for the traits we like. Plant breeders may grow a thousand tomato plants, pick the three individuals that produce juicier tomatoes or show cold resistance, and throw out the other 997. That person will then breed the 3 seedlings they kept and then continue selecting for the traits they want and throwing out the rest. The environment does the exact same thing.
In the case of mosquitoes developing resistance to insecticide -- it's not as if the mosquitoe population "senses" that it is under attack and dtsrats actively producing mutations in its DNA that code for resistance against insecticides. The mutations that code for insect resistance were likely always there within the population, just to a much smaller degree and sometimes at greater frequencies within the population than at others, it's just that they never revealed themselves and certainly never spread to any significant degree BECAUSE there was no environmental stressor (in this case, the insecticide) to SELECT for them. There was no selection pressure acting on them.
Likewise, how does a cactus that comes to mimic a rock "know" what a rock looks like? The evolutionary pathway that put plants like Ariocarpus fissuratus on the trajectory of eventually coming to look like a rock never got accentuated in the distant ancestor of Ariocarpus UNTIL the climate started to dry out and aridify enough that a more mesic limestone environment (that may have been somewhat akin to the Edwards plateau) slowly began to shift towards a desert climate. It could have been the case that the ancestral, non-rock-mimicking ancestor of Ariocarpus fissuratus already grew on limestone but at a time before the extremely arid conditions developed and the general climate of the region was much more mesic. As the climate shifted towards aridity, the environment - with each passing generation of Ariocarpus plants - slowly selected for plants with a thicker cuticle and a more squat habit until, after many generations, we arrived at what we have today : a cactus that looks so much like a fucking rock that it can be hard to see even when you're literally standing right on top of it.
Return To Baja
Attached are some photos from a recent trip to Baja California that Alan Rockefeller, Jordan Jacobs and myself did. I accidentally uploaded some other photos that were in my quickshare folder but I’m leaving them here for shits and giggles because they’re nice photographs of pleasant places I’ve been, but in case you’re wondering, peyote and star cactus do not occur in Baja, obviously.
Photos from Baja have captions, the rest don’t . I have too much shit to do here and navigating the squarespace layout is a fucking nightmare, so you get what you get here. Enjoy and take ‘er easy.
Must BE PRoofa GAhd
It’s always the same frustrating thing on Natural Science social media posts that highlight an impressive feat of evolution and natural selection. Today, it was a post narrated by David Attenborough explaining the negative electrical charge that flowers possess and its interplay with the positive charge held by many pollinators, like bees. Once pollen is picked up by the bee, the plant itself experiences a net drop in electrical charge, which other bees can supposedly detect, thus being notified that there is not pollen available at present and to come back later once the anthers have produced more. It’s an interesting phenomenon, easily explained by physics.
But the religious fundamentalists always step into the mix - once again knocking down any faith one might have in the ability of our species to mitigate its own slow slide into idiocracy and general decline - expressing a shaming disbelief that anybody could learn about such a phenomenon and still not believe in “god”. Myself, in turn, would express a shaming disbelief that anybody could learn about such a phenomenon and not understand that the concept of amounts of time and processes at work here are much greater than themselves and whatever concept they may have of their human-centered “god”. Why is your inability to grasp a concept which plenty of other people can see occurring before them both on a macro and micro scale - through an understanding of DNA sequences, phylogenies, natural selection by environment and even firsthand studies of organisms with extremely fast generational turnover rates like insects and bacteria - somehow evidence of anything else except that the culture that you were brought up in and the education system that you were subjected to (the entire Southeastern quadrant of the United States, I’m looking at you) failed you? I’m not mad at these people nor resentful of them at all, I’m just depressed about our future. The fall of Rome and the commencement of the dark ages didn’t happen overnight - it took a few hundred years. Is that what we’re presently experiencing?
Why do the simpletons always turn things like this into an argument about religion for their silly concept of “god”? The concept of natural selection and evolution and the vast amounts of time that it takes for both to occur on a macro scale are indeed hard to grasp at first, but they are even harder to grasp if you don’t try because you are immediately throwing your own half-formed ideas about how the world should work and “creation” into the mix, especially if you have no concept whatsoever of the geologic timescale or how the information we as a species used to puzzle-piece the concept together was acquired (ie fossils, radiometric dating, molecular clock phylogenies, etc.). Imagine if you were to take someone from the 12th century and time-travel them to the present, and upon seeing a pocket device that can portray video and sound of another human being from the palm of your hand, explained that it was obviously sorcery of some kind. This is what’s going on with highly religious people stepping into the comments section on social media posts that highlight fascinating phenomena regarding natural sciences.
Further, I don’t see why any concept of “god” and evolution and natural selection have to be mutually exclusive. If you’re religious, you can still believe in both, but that would require a rejection of some of the poisonous things that you’ve been conditioned to believe, like the idea that humans are the most important species in the universe, ecosystems are expendable because Earth is just a temporary stepping stone on the way to “heaven”, and everything was put here for us.
Through out history, religion has been both a blessing and a curse. It has served as a somewhat necessary moral backbone and code required for large groups of a recently-evolved species of ape whose behavior and impulses were still in many ways dictated by its primitive animal neurochemistry, and its also been abused as a tool by individuals and small, powerful groups of said species of ape to enrich themselves at the expense of the collective and keep themselves in power. Whatever the flavor of religion, however, whether it’s any of the “big three” global ones or the many smaller ones which are somewhat localized, the root of the problem here is human myopia and anthropocentrism - a failure to “zoom out” and have any greater perspective on things then our own small and fragile lives and the tiny windows of time that we are afforded a glance at life and the processes of the biosphere and lithosphere here on Earth. This “inability to zoom out” and see any greater perspective - and, when we try to, the ease with which we resort to incredibly simplistic, anthropocentric explanations for such - has been and will continue to be the thing that eventually causes our decline and collapse as a species.
South Texas Land Sell Off as the Tumor Approaches
South Texas is the transition zone between the humid Gulf Coast and the Chihuahua Desert. Cacti grow in mud derived from limestone powder and lots of organic material, the decomposed plants of years past. Lichen coats the blackbrush. The heat is incessant and seemingly year-round. The humidity is intense and the Thornscrub is thick. At first glance it seems like this is the last kind of place you'd consider to label a desert. It's also the last place you'd imagine to be undergoing a period of intense land speculation and an orgy of greed. Maybe “greed” is too harsh a word. “Excitement about money” is a nicer way of putting it.
Many landowners in Starr County are dividing lots that have been in their families for generations, convinced they're going to strike it big and the suburbs are coming. Nevermind that there's no water and the summers are getting hotter. June 2023 was the first June on record that experienced three weeks of 105° temps.
As with most areas where modern humans inhabit, the plants and animals that live here and have evolved here are not highly valued by the dominant culture. They are seen as largely expendable - clutter that just happens to be here and which gets in the way of more important things like making money to buy new trucks and go on luxury cruise vacations and send children to private universities so that they too can get good at making lots of money. It's an illness of the spirit that afflicts those suffering from it and which also causes collateral damage to many other things around it, like the life that lives and grows in the areas being divided up and sold off. Short term gain, long term loss.
This is a shame because many of the plants and animals that live and grow in South Texas don't occur anywhere else in the world. Further, the region is vastly understudied compared the much of the rest of the US. Another case of setting fire to the library before you even know what's in it. Short-term gain, long-term loss - the ethos of modern civilization. The mark of a species that's not as intelligent and enlightened as it would like to think. To make things more unfortunate, it's likely that there they may be an exodus from the region in the coming decades as climate change ramps up, half the land gets converted to parking lots (because this IS Texas), and water becomes a thing in short supply. Places further North that have milder summers and more access to fresh water might become slightly more desirable. All this destruction will have been for nothing.
There's a bit of hope on the horizon, however. Many organizations and even individuals are coming together to purchase land for the purposes of conservation. Not enough conservation will occur, of course. How could it after so much had been lost already? South Texas as viewed from the air above McAllen and Brownsville is an amalgamation of agriculture and car-dependent sprawl, and all of this kind of development is slowly moving West towards Starr County. It would be highly improbable in this cultural climate and general orgy of greed (not to mention the pressures exerted on the general population as our corporate overlords and oligarchs drive inflation up and keep wages down for the purposes of corporate profit) for any large scale conservation to occur. At this point we are trying to preserve crumbs - fragments from which someone can possibly one day use to reseed the surrounding landscape once the sprawl has been abandoned.
Peyote meeting and the empty nocturnal solitude of railroad memories
The meeting last night was rough, only because I was already sleep-deprived and fighting off a virus and not adequately prepared for it. I only had 15 minutes of lucidity where I met the peyote and then ten hours or so of physical discomfort, exhaustion and circular thoughts. But there is no such thing as an unproductive Peyote meeting. There are always good words said, and good prayers given, and the songs always pleasantly reverberate in the mind for days after. It is obvious to me, however that I of course do not have the personality that easily tolerates sitting still for long periods. I spent a few hours, actually, thinking and remembering my time on the railroad and the smell of the humid, cool night air of the bay area railyards. Due to my all-night drive and the heater breaking in my truck the night before, I had slept poorly in the back of my truck the night before on the outskirts of Lordsburg, New Mexico in a gravelly patch a mile south of the Freeway near a small hill called Fraggle Rock, the two dogs nestled by my side like little space heaters.
I had not felt that sense of exhaustion since I worked for the railroad, and it is probably the most insufferable kind - exhausted not because of any physical activity (aside from a five mile run, I had been sedentary for the past thirty six hours while driving through Texas) but only because of sheer mental exhaustion and lack of sleep. We do it to ourselves.
I almost felt like I was back in the locomotive cab working pool freight in the Feather River Canyon and desperately trying not to be lulled off to sleep as we trudged upgrade at a shit-slogging 18 mph. The intermittent muffled grind of flange squeel mixed with the rumble of a GE AC-44 locomotive becomes a white noise machine, its static ambiance only broken occasionally by the locomotive passing a desolate crossing gate and the accordant bell with the Doppler effect in full swing. The locomotive alerter going off every six minutes was the other thing keeping us awake, the conductor often on the other side of the cab snoring and occasionally farting.
I have memories of many railroad nights like that. The memories themselves are almost soothing, and certainly cathartic. I only wish that I had written more of them down. Working pool freight, it was easy to be lulled off to sleep. But working midnight locals and switch jobs, it was anything but.
First off, it was usually chilly as hell and that alone prevented sleep, coupled with the fact that you were often out standing at a switch with the packset radio on your hip turned all the way up. It could be mind-numbingly boring, so to avoid it you had to remember how to day dream, or at least explore your immediate local surroundings and maybe tag an old no-trespassing sign or the chain-link fence post of the industry or loading dock that you were delivering boxcars too. These days, I’m sure that many switchmen just stare at their phones and browse social media (something that’s of course against the rules while attending a switch and waiting for the locomotive and the rest of the crew to finish spotting-and-pulling an industry, but who’s going to give anybody grief for it at 2 in the morning?), but up until the last few years that I worked there, that wasn’t really an option, and thank gahd, because these lousy devices that we are all addicted to tend to prevent day-dreaming and exploration of self. I would've missed out on obtaining the memories of these moments and places that I have now.
Standing at a switch near the tank plant in Martinez, standing at a switch at the Georgia Pacific loading dock in Fremont, standing at a switch near the chickenhouse in the West Oakland yard…the memories are ingrained in me, often because I was stuck standing there in the quiet cold solitude of old industry, alone with my thoughts, forced to process all the things I was feeling in my life at the time, and usually totally exhausted as I could rarely sleep during the day where I lived due to the fact my shitty neighbors always left their dogs outside to bark or the gentle ambient sound of the freeway was anything but soothing.
It’s funny how headache sets in when the body has reached a particularly exhausted state. Since I was still drinking back then it was often hard to remember whether the headache was a product of being hungover then going on a short run or whether it was just good old mental exhaustion. Despite the discomfort and shitty work hours of these times, I was grateful that I experienced them. I feel like I learned a lot about myself in the process, and there’s always something about quiet solitude while surrounded by the remains of half-abandoned industry in a city at night that does one good. When I was 19 and would be aimlessly walking around the streets of San Francisco looking for places to illegally paint my name, it was a similar feeling.
Experiencing populated, busy places at night, when they are instead desolate and lonely, it is always easier to think more clearly and with more perspective, and you have the added bonus of feeling like the chaos of human aims might almost be tolerable.
Homage to the most important shrub in South Texas - Vachellia rigidula
Finally got around to drawing the blackbrush tribute. I love this damn shrub so much, keystone species of the Peyote Gardens of South Texas.
The AchomAWI
I first found this book in an obscure little bookstore in downtonw Klamath Falls, Oregon, while on a day off working as a conductor of the railroad terminal there. It must have been nearly twelve years ago. "Netting the Sun - a Personal Geograph of the Oregon Desert" was the title, by Melvin Adams. It had a cool cover that looked like it was maybe designed on a home computer, with a picture of some petroglyphs and the volcanic plateaus of the high desert that I had already come to know so well. I took a look in it and purchased it, getting the feeling that it was something akin to "A Sand County Almanac" but for Southeastern Oregon.
I can say that it is probably one of my five favorite books. I have no idea why it remains as obscure as it is. It is probably because, I suppose, the region that it covers is somewhat obscure. Not many people know the landscape of Northeastern California and Southeastern Oregon - a landscape of high dry desert, blisteringly cold in winter, and magnificent as hell in spring and summer. A landscape dominated by old volcanoes but where only 12 million years ago Dawn Redwoods used to grow (and can still be found in near-entirey, encased in volcanic tuff).
Below is one of my favorite excerpts from the book. It is about the Pit River Tribe of Natives that inhabited a landscape where I spent so much time learning botany years ago while scamming time off the railroad. Back then I was just trying to take in as much as I could about this new world I felt I had just discovered.
The last paragraph of this piece strikes me the hardest. It is still tought for me to not tear up when reading it.
The Achomawi
In the desert night,
in the fullness of memory,
the coyote
chants to the moon,
it is the closing hour,
nothing is lost.
I first saw them in a picture made about 1910 somewhere near Goose
Lake. There are twelve of them on horses. The one in the middle, prob-
ably the leader, has a hand raised to the sky, palm outward, in a gesture
of greeting. Several of the men wear head dresses of feathers while ante-
lope horns adorn another, probably a shaman. The women wear blankets
around their shoulders, scarves over their heads, and beads. One of the
women, ahead of the rest, also stands out because of her white horse
Perhaps she is the wife of the leader or the leader herself. It is a picture
of remnants of a proud culture which lived in a beautiful place for thou-
sands of years before Christ, before the printing press, before the wheel,
before even the bow and arrow.
They had probably lived on the land for ten thousand years. There
were never more than three thousand of them altogether in the tribe, which
was scattered in small bands over a large area of what is now northeast-
ern California and southeastern Oregon. They were the Achomawi or Pit
River tribe, but some of them frequented the shores of Goose Lake.
They believed that the world was made by a silver fox thinking about a clump of sod, and fox sang while he held the clump of sod. He and coyotethrew the cump of sod down from the clouds and by singing and dancing stretched it out and made mountains, valleys, trees, and rocks.
The Achomawi thought that everything was alive, even rocks, and that the
shaman could travel to other worlds through circles pecked on the rocks.
The Achomawi also knew about dinihowi" - luck in gambling, love,
and hunting. They went to the mountains to find luck. They would be-
come tired and scared, cry, go hungry for days. While in this state they
would attract the pity of an animal and be taught its song. The animal could be a wolf, a blue jay, or even a fly.
They would be taught its song
and when they needed help they would return to the sacred spot and sing the song,
and the animal spirit would return.
Some natives would obtain
damaagome"- more mean and quarrelsome than the peaceful
adinihowi"-and would possess the medicine to be a shaman.
Those who became shamans faced a more dangerous life and none
were anxious for this. They were required to suck their patients in the re-
g7ons of disease to remove the poisoning sometimes placed by other sha-
mans. They were also in danger of losing their souls. Departing souls of
the dead, not wanting to travel alone, would induce others to follow, and
the shaman was called upon to bring back souls enticed to such travel.
Since no one wanted to give a departed soul a reason to return, the names
of the dead were taboo, and the dead were cremated and everything be-
longing to them burned.
The lives of the Achomawi were suffused with stories and spirits. The
old stories were told during winter nights as small bands huddled in the
partially subterranean, tule-covered lodges for warmth. To them there was
no apparent difference or division between religious feeling and earth, or
between nature and spirit, or between story and place. Over forty sacred
places were located and named, and art was pecked onto the rocks at some
of these places by shamans. Entire mountains such as Sugar Hill on the
southeast shore of Goose Lake were deemed sacred.
The Hewisedawi group of Achomawi lived on the north fork of the
Pit River and on Goose Lake. They dug pits along the river to catch deer,
hence their European name. They caught Goose Lake
redband trout and the Goose Lake sucker: large landlocked species with no outlet to the sea.
Numerous streams including the Pit River were used to harvest salmon,
bass, trout, and mussels, Rock corrals were built in the streams to spear
and net the fish, They hunted deer, antelope, and mountain sheep in the
Warner Mountains, the faulted rims to the east of Goose Lake. They made
bows of yew and juniper, gathered abundant wild plums, camas bulbs,
and seeds from many plants. Sage hen, rabbits, beaver, bears, deer, squir-
rel, otter, wolves, and mountain lions were plentiful; in the spring and fall
Goose Lake teemed with thousands of geese and ducks. Plant fibers were
used to make baskets and nets. When rain was needed, holes were pecked
in sacred rocks by the rain shaman.
When the Hewisedawi were unaware the more aggressive Modocs to the north and west would raid and take them for slaves to be traded as far north as the Dalles on the Columbia
River.
By 1936, due to disease, poverty, and cultural disintegration, about
five hundred Achomawi were left. None live on Goose Lake or near the
sacred Sugar Hill. The flocks of geese and ducks are a mere remnant of
their former number. The Goose Lake sucker, redband trout, and tui chub
are rare and in danger in the lake's waters, yet the Goose Lake Valley and
the Warner Mountains retain a raw, primitive beauty.
The Achomawi called the European invaders "*inillaaduwi" (tramps).
They said about them, ""They do not believe anything is alive. They are
dead themselves. On crystal fall days when the wild plums are sweet, and
the winds in the canyons of the Warner Mountains carry a hint of the cold
weather to come, and you can see a hundred miles across the desert, and
the aspen leaves are changing color in the high air, it is possible to believe
in redemption for ourselves and for the land. It is necessary to invest in
the land some measure of spirit and to sanctify it as did the Achomawi.
What Exactly is “settler colonlialism”? WHO cares? Just be sure to make a display of posting against it online.
"Settler Colonialism" is the newest buzzword belched out of Liberal Arts academia (a field that I have found to be just as, if not more ignorant of Earth Sciences and biology than many others) that I've seen parroted throughout various circles to describe a very vague and broad multitude of modern ills afflicting our declining biosphere. My annoyance at this due of words and it’s silly nonsensical modern context spilled over however, when I saw a slant against Steve Irwin, the beloved conservationist who inspired millions to see beauty and awe in organisms and habitats that they might not have otherwise cared about. I was never a Steve Irwin fan, but I respect the guy for getting others to have respect for wildlife and ecosystems. So I had trouble finding out why he was the target of a rather obscure and deranged rant (by a college professor on twitter, of course - where else?) against him that mentioned he was guilty of "settler colonialism". I never found anything,I think it was just because he was white. Or maybe it was because it was the 90s and white liberals hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of publicly lashing themselves, emptily declaring that they’re an “ally”, and gasing up their audiences with land acknowledgements yet. Whatever the case, Steve Irwin was now being cancelled. What a useful expense of energy.
While I've been hearing the word parroted mindlessly (nobody ever giving a clear definition of what it is - I had to look it up, and even then, like most things puked out of "progressive" academia, it was still rather vague and definitions seemed to vary) for a few years now, it finally seemed like it was becoming popular enough to say without any clear description of what exactly makes someone a "settler colonialist".
To be clear, the exact definition of "settler colonialism" is "a a society that seeks not only to take the land of another culture and society, but that seeks to eradicate that culture and society". Say what you will about history, but in America that seems pretty close to what 18th and 19th (and even parts of early 20th) Century European arrivals to the new world (as we call it in biology) seemed to do. The historical context of "Settler Colonialism" has a very real and easily-defined definition.
But the terms in which I've heard it parroted by young academic white kids trying to explain racism to each other never uses it in the historical context - it's always in reference to something that is going on today - not that it has left a legacy that we still live with today, but that it is actively still occurrring. Sure, why not…
While I don't give a shit what anybody believes so long as they don't try to tell me about it if I didnt' ask, I do identify - for better or worse - as a "leftist". I believe in the colletive good over individual profit,I want equal opportunities for all, I want affordable health care, decent education, and I think things like money worship and wealth worship lead to a deranged, values-less society. I could go on about the things I believe in, but the fact is that due to what I believe in I find myself in leftist circles. I don't pay attention to what the right does because, frankly, their beliefs have always seemed fucking insane to me. Boring and vacuous at best and sociopathic at worst. The right is the party of the rich and the climate deniers. The right is the party of those who have seemingly never explored themselves - not to mention had a bad trip, had to ride the bus on a cold night at 2 am, etc.
But it seems like the last ten years I've found myself so perpetually annoyed and boderline grossed out by elements of the "perpetually-online left" (because that's what its become - perpetually online) that I reach for the bottle of Tums when reading takes from my own "side" more than I ever thought I would ten years ago. I blame most of my nausea mostly on the left’s recent embrace of identitarianism - that 2-dimensional fixation on ethic identity which is something wholly apart from (and should not be confused with) an acknowledgement of a history of oppression, racism, and other deranged worldviews that were so ingrained in America and many other first world european-based socities for much of recent history.
This all brings us to "settler colonialism". If it has a historical context, why is it frequently being used to describe something that is festering today? Buzzwords sound good in memes, but they bring out the laziest and sloppiest among actual ideas. So what are shitty condescending social media comments getting at - and what are memes that are attempting to cancel Steve Irwin - actually try to articulate when they sloppily wave the sword of accusation of “settler colonialism” and the “settler colonialism mindset”?
I think about what's killing the world that I love everyday. Everyday I think about why there is less and less habitat, why there's a mass extinction going on, why it becomes harder to find time or places to spend time around the things that I find sacred - wild plants, wild habitat, intact biological landscapes and ecosystems. I used to joke that the grandiose entity that's behind the annihilation of what I love is the "Honky Death Cult", until I began to travel and realize that this mindset and worldview that's responsible for such is seemingly everywhere. It wasn't just white people doing it. And why would it be? Lack of melanin content, respectively, doesn't code for worldview. Culture can, I suppose, which is sometimes tied to that impossibly small section of the genome that us humans used to make up the idea of "race", but the "death cult" as I call it, was everywhere. Tracing its origins seems a lot harder than just focusing on the idea of one culture taking another's land and almost annihilating the culture that lived there. Even more, the destruction that I saw was happening EVERYWHERE, in multiple countries and on multiple continents by multiple "races" (because remember, race doesn't exist, we're all the same species - race is just a series of alleles that code for melanin production and some other miniscule superficial features ...all of which evolved in response to a particular population of humans spending a prolonged amount of time at a particular latitude that received a particular amount of solar insolation throughout the year).
So if race wasn't an accurate predictor of where the "death cult" (we are using this label tongue-in-cheek, for lack of a better word) came from, I guess that means that we have to look at the actual values of the "death cult" worldview and paradigm itself. Ugh….how laborious! It’s so much easier to just verbally fart out buzzwords!
Anthropocentrism, a subconscious belief that the only living things which possess any inate value in this world are those which directly benefit humans, a belief that the world was put here for us and us alone, a feeling that we have no responsibility to take care of the land that we live on and that it and all the life forms on it are expendable, endless growth, success and happiness as defined by material wealth, beauty as defined solely by external appearances, a belief that any individual who has trouble achieving self-sustainability must be discarded as there is no inherent societal responsibility to take care of them and see that they succeed....That list is just off the top of my head. It is what I came up with in 90 seconds. I could go on.
If somebody asked me what I thought was killing the world and I were to just say "settler colonialism", not only would I feel like a fucking jackass but none of what I just stated would be articulated. It would be confusing and vague, and I would just *hope* that whoever heard me knew that I was was talking about was bad and that they too should be against it. But if we don't articulate problems, we can't fix them. Since "settler colonialism" just refers to the taking of land and the extermination of a culture, and most people alive today in the United States don't have any present-day context for that as it happened here 150 years ago, it just sounds fucking confusing. But again, that's ok because in the case of "settler colonialism" it's just being read online and whats important is that we all like and share the post - even though none of us really have any idea what the fuck it means - and we all receive moral validation from our peers and we go on scrolling and viewing the world from a rather foggy and vague moral filter based loosely around the identitarian lense of whether someone is "bad" or "good" based on what race they were born into.
No matter what, the actual ideas and values of the worldview that got us into this mess of mass extinction and climate change and civil unrest continue to be obscured and ignored. Great idea.
How fucking sloppy.
And of course, since most people are NOT critical thinkers and tend to just swallow and parrot whatever their social group puts in front of them without taking it apart and analyzing it, the lowest-common-denominator value that gets put on all of this, of course, is "race"... and so we get endlessly-self-flagellating honkies desperate to prove that they are, indeed, "allies" and we get people who are basically on the same ideological "side" and who want the same things and who COULD be supporting each other in solidarity as a means of acheiving those goals instead endlessly attacking each other online and being accused of not "centering" a particular race and of not "being a true ally", or we get them fixating on the totally wrong things which in the end are just a distraction from the actual ideas, etc. So much dischord and moral policing sounds like a great way to ensure that nothing ever actually gets accomplished, and further, it sounds like a great way to ensure that people who are not already in the small ideological bubble through which all this silly bullshit already percolates NEVER gets turned on to it because it seems like a silly, garbled, high-strung mess parroting vague words that nobody can really seem to define. Sigh. And so here we are. If I were on the opposite of the ideological spectrum and wanted to take apart a political or ideological movement, this is probably the strategy that I would choose. Except I wouldn't need to, because the people in that camp already did it themselves.
I guess that's what happens when we let college kids build the structure of ideology for us.
DENYING INVASION BIOLOGY
The word “Invasive” doesn't just mean aggressive - plenty of native plant species are aggressive, but they are kept in check by the fungal, animal and insect interactions that they have evolved with over millions of years. This is what an ecosystem is, a network of St Patrick relationships that have evolved together over millions of years
These ecosystems are kept separated by huge barriers such as oceans, the equator, vast mountain ranges, deserts, etc. When these barriers to isolation are crossed and a species arrives in a new ecosystem but the fungi and insects that keep it in check don't, it can outcompete the species that have spent millions of years evolving there.
Humans have helped thousands of plant species do this in a span of less than 150 years. In the millions of years preceding the evolution of humans, there were of course the occasional dispersals of plant species across oceans and other huge barriers that kept ecosystems separated, but they were apparently relatively few and far between and mostly occurred because of birds or debris rafts that floated on the open oceans. We have no way of knowing how much disturbance the arrival of one plant species to a new ecosystem may have caused or the extinctions it might have caused in those ecosystems in the distant past when these dispersals occurred, but we do know that they have almost never occurred at the rate that they are occurring today.
To be ignorant of the role that invasive species can play in an ecosystem that they did not evolve in is to be ignorant of the very notion of ecology. It is to be ignorant of the very idea of ecosystems and the relationships that exist within them. This can easily be forgiven because we live in a civilization that is fundamentally and ideologically disconnected from the biosphere that supports us. It is understandable and can be easily sympathized with, yet as an ideology it still must be addressed.
Certain actions and behaviors can help people educate themselves about the many interconnected relationships within their own surrounding native ecosystems, such as spending time in "nature", being observant and asking questions ("what chewed holes in this leaf?", "why is this flower shaped like that?" "How do the seeds in this plant's fruit get dispersed?"), and if possible, recreating the native ecosystem on your property by KILLING THE SHIT OUT OF YOUR LAWN and planting native plants, at which point the native moths, butterflies (and their caterpillars) and the birds that eat them will show up.
If you build it, they will come.