# 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 …
What if everything is entangled
Our efforts to strip the unwanted from the wanted often turn out to be futile.
But the point of The Infinite Lawn is not that weeds are good. Some plants can indeed become invasive and destroy others.
The deeper insight is that we tend to look at things as isolated objects: this plant is wanted, that one is unwanted; this is useful, that is harmful.
But what happens when we look at the relations instead?
A weed is not simply a weed. It becomes one within a particular arrangement—a lawn, a garden, an idea of what belongs and what does not.
Entanglement does not mean that everything is equal or equally desirable. It means that things exist through relations we may not even perceive.
And this changes the question.
Instead of asking only:
What should we keep and what should we remove?
we can ask:
What relations make this possible—and what else depends on them?
Perhaps this is what makes ecological destruction so difficult to grasp. We can cut down a rainforest tree and see one tree disappear. But we may not see the relations that disappear with it—the soil, water, insects, fungi, plants, animals, climate systems, and ultimately conditions that we ourselves depend upon.
To see entanglement is to begin seeing consequences where we previously saw only isolated things.
Meike Gleim
