dendrytes-deactivated20230731:
What i’ve been learning thru my research is that Lawn Culture and laws against “weeds” in America are deeply connected to anxieties about “undesirable” people.
I read this essay called “Controlling the Weed Nuisance in Turn-of-the-century American Cities” by Zachary J. S. Falck and it discusses how the late 1800’s and early 1900’s created ideal habitats for weeds with urban expansion, railroads, the colonization of more territory, and the like.
Around this time, laws requiring the destruction of “weeds” were passed in many American cities. These weedy plants were viewed as “filth” and literally disease-causing—in the 1880’s in St. Louis, a newspaper reported that weeds infected school children with typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.
Weeds were also seen as “conducive to immorality” by promoting the presence of “tramps and idlers.” People thought wild growing plants would “shelter” threatening criminals. Weeds were heavily associated with poverty and immortality. Panic about them spiked strongly after malaria and typhoid outbreaks.
To make things even wilder, one of the main weeds the legal turmoil and public anxiety centered upon was actually the sunflower. Milkweed was also a major “undesirable” weed and a major target of laws mandating the destruction of weeds.
The major explosion in weed-control law being put forth and enforced happened around 1905-1910. And I formed a hypothesis—I had this abrupt remembrance of something I studied in a history class in college. I thought to myself, I bet this coincides with a major wave of immigration to the USA.
Bingo. 1907 was the peak of European immigration. We must keep in mind that these people were not “white” in the exact way that is recognized today. From what I remember from my history classes, Eastern European people were very much feared as criminals and potential communists. Wikipedia elaborates that the Immigration Act of 1924 was meant to restrict Jewish, Slavic, and Italian people from entering the country, and that the major wave of immigration among them began in the 1890s. Almost perfectly coinciding with the “weed nuisance” panic. (The Immigration Act of 1917 also banned intellectually disabled people, gay people, anarchists, and people from Asia apart from the Chinese…which were already banned since 1880.)
From this evidence, I would guess that our aesthetics and views about “weeds” emerged from the convergence of two things:
First, we were obliterating native ecosystems by colonizing them and violently displacing their caretakers, then running roughshod over them with poorly informed agricultural and horticultural techniques, as well as constructing lots of cities and railroads, creating the ideal circumstances for weeds.
Second, lots of immigrants were entering the country, and xenophobia and racism lent itself to fears of “criminals” “tramps” and other “undesirable” people, leading to a desire to forcefully impose order and push out the “Other.” I am not inventing a connection—undesirable people and undesirable weeds were frequently compared in these times.
And this was at the very beginnings of the eugenics movement, wherein supposedly “inferior” and poor or racialized people were described in a manner much the same as “weeds,” particularly supposedly “breeding” much faster than other people.
There is another connection that the essay doesn’t bring up, but that is very clear to me. Weeds are in fact plants of the poor and of immigrants, because they are often medicinal and food plants for people on the margins, hanging out around human habitation like semi-domesticated cats around granaries in the ancient Near East.
My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant’s young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as “poke salad.” Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.
In some parts of the world, it is grown as an ornamental plant for its huge, tropical-looking leaves and magenta stems. But my mom hates the stuff. “Cut that down,” she says, “it makes us look like rednecks.”
Invasion ecologists are taking seriously how many of our commonly-used terms reinforce xenophobia.
- Time to retire “alien” from the invasion ecology lexicon
- The Language of Invasion Ecology
- Aliens & Invaders & Exotics, Oh My: The Language of Invasive Biology
I had a discussion with someone I work with about the term “pioneer species” and the rather inaccurate and questionable colonialism-tied implications.
I prefer “disaster species,” but “pioneer species” is still the typically used term.
My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant’s young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as “poke salad.” Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.
Okay wait. Wasn’t there that post about the word “pokemon” being used in the early 20th century or something? About how it meant someone who was really slow or something?
Either I’m misremembering it, or there may be a connection here…
Pokeweed comes from an Algonquin word translating to “dye plant” so it’s probably not related.
Wait wait wait is that why USAmericans would rather do all the nonsense involved in importing fucking quinoa rather than like… this is why amaranth is classified as a noxious weed in so many places, isn’t it? Because a hardy pseudocereal that just grows wherever would like, help poor people not fucking starve? And while there are native amaranths in a lot of the US, it’s pretty damn cosmopolitan, so many immigrants would know what to do with it, because there was also amaranth where they lived before?
A lot of the way we live is focused around avoiding the aesthetic appearance of poverty, yeah.
So, it seems what you’re saying is more or less: If people could even partially live off the food growing in their neighborhood, they wouldn’t be as exploitable. If they worked together to build a community farm that built solidarity and diversified nutrition, they would be even less exploitable. So the exploiters use laws and propaganda to avoid such things as much as possible.
So maybe we should be doing more sustainable farming, community gardens, homegrown fibres, and generally more pleasing and diverse environments in our “lawns” (while doing due diligence to ensure that we aren’t causing inadvertant ecological problems)?
That is punk as hell. I am getting many ideas and many questions. Maybe I’ll do research and post something when the Texas heat dies down enough that I can think.
Absolutely.
I haven’t been able to read about it in much depth yet but there’s this concept called food sovereignty which is basically people especially marginalized people having agency over their food systems instead of relying on Corporation which controls their resources
I think gardening and knowing plants and growing food and useful plants as part of a COMMUNITY is very powerful because it creates a kind of safety net that you can partly rely on for your basic needs instead of depending on the whims of Corporation
Kaitlin Smith of Outdoor Afro & Storied Grounds in Boston has a whole historical tour about this, but a lot of anti-foraging laws and policies came into effect in the US following the abolition of slavery, when migrating, poor Black families would have to rely on wild plants to survive.
(Kaitlin also has a talk about how Black enslaved people in the US grew their own abortifacient plants for… the exact horrifying reason you might think. If you are in the Boston area and a Black person or close loved one to one, her tours are for you! Go check them out.)
Also if you’re in the Midwest, Alexis Nikole Nelson AKA @blackforager does really videos about plants, foraging, and the history of racism against black and indigenous people in the US
This ties deeply into indigenous oppression as well. One of the first peoples targeted by for foraging/trespassing law and eliminating “weeds” was indigenous peoples.
It’s well documented that there was no trespassing or law against foraging in early US history. It’s even documented that the founding fathers thought foraging, and the land’s bounty, was a god given right as it kept many alive in the early colonial days.
Once the US government was well established, 100 years later, and expanding west rapidly, trespassing and foraging became outlawed for two reasons.
One was so that towns near indian settlements could have a reason to shoot and harass them. Townships claimed a large excess of food growing forest around them, forest that natives had cultivated for generations as a primary food source, and then forced them natives as they were “trespassing.” Not even getting into that native NA agriculture is food forests….
Second, was after the civil war, plantation owners still needed workers. One of the surefire ways to get them was to criminalize any way to live off the land, and make the only available work for black folks, plantation work.
From what I’ve seen, the criminalization of foraging is far more extreme in the south, lesser in the west, and least in the north east.
But it all ties into classism, racism, and forcing the poor people of the country to benefit the wealthly. Here’s a pretty decent article to kickoff all these ideas.