Long walk with Jasper today, Pt. 1:
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That bamboo definitely doesn’t belong there…
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Well, “invasive species” and all that you probably mean.
I believe this is, again, one of our human blunders (and after all we are an invasive species ourselves, no?) … I predict that there will be a time when we will be thankful for ANYTHING that still is alive, especially anything GREEN, and it will be a crime to cut anything plants without a serious justification.
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I share much of the pessimism in that statement, but I think you underestimate the resilience of plant life a lot and overestimiate the resilience of civilisation. If (when) we have harmed the ecosystem so much, there won’t be a society left calling something a crime. There may or may not be a few humans left, living a miserable life.
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Especially the resilience of bamboo… If you have never tried to remove bamboo from your garden, then it’s hard to appreciate how tough that plant is.
I don’t share the pessimism that we’re harmful to life itself. Mass extinction has happened often enough and at larger scale than anything human has done or probably can do. Moreover, we’re top of the food chain, and those on top tend to always go extinct at large extinction events. We’re harmful to ourselves and other big life forms, but nature as a whole doesn’t really care.
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Agreed, and, admittedly, this is a great relief for me.
But all that collateral damage, all that suffering … breaks my heart. (If I weren’t heartbroken already 
)
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“Nature is serious, but never sad.” Lucy/La bete.
Tenho bambu no jardim de minha casa.
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A few other weeds in suburban U.S. that are nearly impossible to eradicate: ivy, poison ivy, Virginia creeper, kudzu, henbit, and Japanese knotweed.
Requisite science-fiction references: “The Ivy War” by David H. Keller, and Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore.
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Just like the climate. There will always be a climate for the next millions of years. It really doesn’t need any saving.
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“The” climate doesn’t need to be saved, but “our” climate does. Although a mass extinction will be no problem for nature, it will be a problem for us.
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Yup. One way or another we as a species will get what we deserve. Unfortunately that is not true on an individual level.
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AWESOME BOOK, that! I always thought I was the only one who ever read it 
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German title: “Es grünt so grün”
(“It greens so green” ≅ it grows so green … quite probably sort of punny because “Es grünt so grün, wenn Spaniens Blüten blüh’n” is the German translation for Eliza Doolittle’s song “The rain in Spain” in the musical “My Fair Lady”.)
</edit>
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Moore also wrote one of my five favorite SF novels: Bring the Jubilee. Also good was Caduceus Wild, a novel about a future medical tyranny, which is absolutely visionary in the wake of COVID.
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it was a lovely day here, the snow thawed completely here, so we did 7 kilometers of walking while looking at the snow filled hills 
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So you had more snow this winter than we had, here in northern Germany? That’s silly.
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It is gone now, but around 50cm of it fell on the plains where I am and almost 85cm on the hills. This is how it looked when I went to take some of the snow down, during the snowstorm:
after that point, another half a broom of snow fell during that day.
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Nice tool.
