Woolly Hedgenettle

Welcome back! You're getting this newsletter a few days later than usual, and that's because it is also... a reminder. This Monday, 8/25 is the final order cut-off for Be Not Afraid #4, and Issue #3 comes out this Wednesday, 8/27.

We've been blessed with really great reviews for Be Not Afraid – it's finding the people it's meant to find and resonating with them – so I strongly encourage you to reserve a copy of both #3 and #4 at your local comic shop.

However: You will note that I am not dropping a link to Comixology, and I will tell you why. Boom! Studios was recently acquired by Penguin Random House, and the process has caused a delay in sending issues to Comixology and other digital retailers. Issue #1 is still available, but all the other available issues should drop at the end of next month.

In the meantime, please do head out to a comic shop and buy the thing. It's extremely pretty, and it would really suck if some administrative shuffling resulted in this comic not finding its readership, and in the team not getting credit for their work.

A little while ago, a new plant arrived in my backyard. It was pretty — broad, silvery, furry leaves with small purple blossoms — and oddly familiar-looking, though I had never seen it there before. Its name, according to the wildlife app I used to look it up, is “woolly hedgenettle.” It’s an ornamental plant, grown in gardens, but it has increasingly been going feral and cropping up in wild environments; it is, in the words of the wildlife app, a “successful escapee.” 

I loved that: The idea of a plant escaping. Entering the food chain, propagating its species, flourishing outside the borders meant to contain it, like all plants do. Life is life, and it doesn’t heed the arbitrary boundaries we set for it: My yard and your yard, garden and meadow, wild and tame. To plants, those rules simply don’t exist. They do what it takes to survive.

Not long ago, I spoke with an old friend — one of the first trans women I ever knew — on Zoom. She’s living in Canada now. She’s thinking of applying for refugee status. Right before she left, she says, she lost her passport, and had to get an emergency replacement, and with the Trump rules in place, she had to get a passport with the sex that is on her birth certificate. Now all her documents — in Canada and in the US — identify her as a man. It’s such a banal, petty act of humiliation. There is no cause, no reward; there is no point. 

If you re-enter the country after travel abroad, she told me, you’ve got to scrub your phone first. The customs agents are allowed to look at it, and if they find anything critical of the administration on there, you’ll be detained. Probably not deported — no U.S. citizen has been deported while re-entering the country yet, she says — but detained, definitely. It’s something I should know, because I might leave the country and come back, at some point. She isn’t coming back.

My friend is a successful escapee. A garden plant, living wild in the forest. Losing the world she grew up with didn’t make her happy. I hope it makes her free. 

I get a lot of solace from thinking and reading about nature. It helps me to know that we live in an infinitely complicated system, one that knows how to take care of itself, and that we are just one tiny part of its plan. 

This is not to say that the system is always kind. History is full of stories about human beings tampering with that system, or trying to fix its problems without fully understanding it, and being destroyed. 

Like: Here is a story about “diversity,” and it starts with Irish potato farmers. The potato plant is not native to Ireland; it’s from South America, and came over pretty recently. However, it is a little-known fact that potatoes — balanced out with a little bit of dairy — provide all the nutrients a person needs to live. As long as you add a little milk or cheese, you can eat potatoes for every meal for the rest of your life and not starve. 

Now: Here is one country made very poor by colonialism, receiving a plant from another continent recently devastated by colonialism, and that plant seems to solve all its problems. It’s a cheap, low-effort crop, which, all on its own, can keep an entire family fed indefinitely. Naturally, every working-class family in Ireland plants potatoes. More than that, they all plant the same kind of potatoes — one particular strain that yields the biggest crop in the poorest quality soil, called the Irish Lumper — and come to depend on them for nearly all their daily food intake. 

It’s a perfect plan. Because as long as you have potatoes, you won’t starve. 

You know what happens next. One virus — HERB-1, which for some reason particularly affects the Irish Lumper strain of potatoes — and over a million people starve to death. There is no backup plan for the potato crop. There isn’t even a different, more disease-resistant strain of potato to fall back on. One plant feeds an entire country, and when it dies, they die. 

That’s what “diversity” means in nature: You never plant just one crop. You never cultivate a monolithic or homogenous anything, because if you invest all you have in just one thing — one crop, one idea, one plan, one worldview, one culture, one way of life — and that one thing fails, you’re fucked. Variety and conflict ultimately help you, because you have more resources to draw on in the face of change.

Here is another story, about killing, and it starts with sparrows. This is in China, under Mao, and he wants the nation to unite under one big project, something to bring them together. So it is decided that the people of China are going to hunt the common sparrow to extinction.

There is a reason for this. Sparrows eat grain, which reduces the people’s share of the harvest. It’s a campaign against pests, essentially, and it’s also fun — every child over age five is let out at recess to go kill birds, and they take to this with zest, the way children unfortunately do take to killing things. The population of sparrows is pushed to near extinction. In some places, their corpses are so thick on the ground that you have to clean them up with shovels. 

This is when they realize the problem: Sparrows don’t really eat grain. It’s part of their diet, sure, but not the most important part. What sparrows really do is eat the bugs that actually eat the grain, and in their absence, the insect population explodes, and the entire country loses its food supply. The ensuing horror claims thirty million lives. It makes the Irish Potato Famine look like a cakewalk. People ate their neighbors to stay alive, and then, those people starved. 

To this day, the Great Chinese Famine is one of the single biggest natural catastrophes ever recorded. But that’s the point: It wasn’t natural. Neither was the Irish Potato Famine. Before their systematic impoverishment by the British, Irish farmers did plant more than one crop; the reliance on potatoes, and thus the famine, was caused by a specific set of human-created conditions.

Human beings tried to control the world without understanding the world, and it blew up in their faces. This is the problem with a sufficiently complex system: Anything you do within it can have unintended consequences. Any piece you remove can turn out to be the piece that keeps it from breaking down. 

So: Let’s say you’re a white American who is really angry about “immigrants.” People who grow food, who build roads and houses, who keep cities and trains and hospitals running, who take care of children and the elderly — let’s say you want to remove all those people, overnight. Let’s say you don’t like trade with other countries, and you want to shut it off: Your coffee, your perfume, your sugar, your cheap office chairs, your t-shirts and fresh fruit and flowers in January, you want that gone. 

Let’s say you want the homeless eradicated and locked up. Let’s say you want to shut the “mentally ill” away in prisons or institutions so poorly resourced as to be indistinguishable from prisons. Let’s say you don’t like trans people — a lot of people don’t — and you want them gone, too, driven into the closet or across the border or just plain dead. Let’s say you want everyone strange or different or difficult eradicated, let’s say you want to raze the earth and plant it with just one lumpy potato-white crop, and let’s say that you think, once you do this, you’ll have all you need, forever. 

But look around — look at all these different people and things you’re trying to remove from the system that supports you — and ask yourself: Are they the bugs, or the sparrows? 

Can you be sure? 

I figured out where the woolly hedgenettles were coming from. We live near a rich family’s summer house; they leave it empty for most of the year, and in the absence of anyone to tend it, their garden had started slowly migrating over the fences and toward our yard. The hedgenettles were just the first arrivals; a week or two later, I found that I was, without my knowledge or intention, growing a healthy crop of zucchini. 

This is what escapees do — make the world richer, flee from the places that haven’t tended them and start feeding places that do. I hope my friend takes root in her new home. I suspect she will only be the first of many arrivals. I hope she knows that the letters and labels and names stamped on her passport are artificial boundaries; they do not describe her and cannot contain her. She thrives outside of the walls and borders imposed on her from the outside, by those in power. 

She is life, trying to live itself to the fullest, and life is more powerful than any set of rules. Yet those rules undeniably get in life’s way and usher in destruction. I hope we survive whatever collapse we’re causing now, or else I hope we escape it. I hope we find ways to thrive in places not made for us, like newly wild things do. 

I learned the story about the Irish Potato Famine from Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and the story about the Great Chinese Famine from Bethany Brookshire's Pests. Both are great reads that I couldn't find a way to cite in the main text.

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