# 17
The challenge of weed as a metaphor for broader societal issues
THE INFINITE LAWN: You can throw the intruder in a place where it cannot re-root or scatter seed. When one starts to uproot a weed, immediately another one springs up a little further away, and another, and another. In short, that patch of turf that seemed to require only a few trimmings turns out to be a lawless jungle.
Nothing left but weeds? Worse still: the bad weeds are so thickly interspersed with the good ones
that you can’t get your hands in the middle and pull. It seems that a complicit understanding has been created between the seed and wild herbs, an easing of the barriers imposed by inequalities of birth, a resigned tolerance to degradation. Some wild herbs, in and of themselves, do not have an evil or insidious air at all.
Italo Calvino, Palomar, 1983Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What if everything is entangled
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Let’s talk botany. The contemporary world, by orchestrating the material conditions of movement, facilitates our transplantations. Flowerpots, nurseries, greenhouses, open country. Is it only coincidence that modernism was from start to finish a tribute to the root? It was radical. In the course of …
This quote has been selected as part of one of the thematic collections of Alterlibrary, titled Entangled Matters.
In this collection, we gather inspirations that invite us to look beyond the boundaries separating nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and their environments. We explore how thought, knowledge and imagination emerge through networks of relationships and interdependencies — and what we might learn from thinking of societies as ecosystems.
Here you can explore the collection Entangled Matters.
