Tag: biodiversity

Weeding as a Radical Act

Posted on | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment on Weeding as a Radical Act

I'm coming to the end of my sojourn in Yellowstone National Park, my "vacation" spent weeding invasive plants, those species that imperil the health of natural communities, and impoverish us all. 

Here's what I accomplished in the past ten days:

  • Worked 35.25 hours
  • Hiked 47.5 miles
  • Dug approximately 3,050 houndstongue (Cynoglossum officianale) plants (plus musk thistles, Carduus nutans, and a few other invasive weeds)
  • Hauled 25 trash bags weighing around 290 pounds of adult houndstongue plants loaded with prickly seeds to the trash dumpsters for safe disposal. 

Two large houndstongue plants I dug up this morning, including their extensive roots. For scale, my plant knife is a foot long including the handle!

Beyond the data, I got to spend time living in Yellowstone. (The photo at the top of the post is the view from my "office" one morning after a rain. You have to imagine the resiny fragrance of rain-washed sagebrush leaves, and the musky smell of a small herd of mom and calf elk downslope.)

I got to watch elk calves so new they were still wobbling on their long legs. I learned the herd-mama "Wah-ooo-ee!" call, which means "Get over here now!" and the calves "Wah! Wah!" cry, which could mean either "I'm hungry!" or "Where are you?"

Mom elk calling her twin calves, right in the Mammoth Campground (I shot the photo from my truck, no telephoto lens needed).

I also saw pronghorn fawns still wet with after-birth, two glossy black bear cubs, plus a mom grizzly bear with twin cubs, her pale-tipped fur a straw-gold nimbus against the sun. 

Spring is baby season in Yellowstone, from baby Richardson's ground squirrels, the lunch-meat of every larger predator out there, to baby bears. And baby birds, too. The baby wrens at the restroom nearest my site at the Mammoth Campground were ridiculously loud for such tiny 'uns!

I worked in every kind of weather spring in the Rockies can deliver: snow, rain, and sizzling heat. 

Weeding in wet snow is cold and nasty, but the white landscapes surely are beautiful!

I usually worked alone, but I also got to spend a morning weeding with my boss, Park Botanist Heidi Anderson, and her crew. Their main focus is mapping and restoring wetlands, so catching up with them was a bonus. 

I also had two mornings with longtime Yellowstone "weed warrior" Dan Smith, who is in his tenth summer of volunteering. Dan came down from Lake, a scenic but long drive, to help me dig out two particularly daunting patches of houndstongue, each involving hundreds of plants. (Thanks, Dan!)

A twenty-pound bag of houndstongue full of seeds, part of our morning's weeding haul… 

My days in the park are simple and retreat-like (albeit physically grueling). I wake with the light at five-thirty or quarter to six, and greet the day in my sleeping bag as the robins, western tanagers, chipping sparrows, and other birds weave the dawn chorus. 

Once up and dressed, I set my backpacking stove on my truck tailgate to boil water for instant oatmeal. As I inhale the hot meal, I think up my daily haiku. After cleaning up from breakfast, I drive up uphill to the Mammoth Store, where the cell reception is good enough to use my phone as a wifi hot spot, so I can share the poem and photo, my gift to all. 

I fill my to-go cup with cocoa in the store, and then head for wherever I am working. If I'm hiking, I shoulder my day pack with weed bags, first-aid kit, bear spray, water, and extra layers in case of rain or snow. 

Look closely at the dead tree: The golden-brown spot on the left-hand side is a Coopers Hawk with wings spread wide to dry after a drenching rain. I've never seen a Coopers Hawk do that before!

And then I dig houndstongue until I wear out, usually around noon. While I work, I scan my surroundings for wildflowers and wildlife, like the sow grizzly bear with twin cubs I saw one day from a distance. (No, I didn't think to take photos. I was too busy making sure I wasn't in their way!) 

After I get back to the truck, I dispose of my day's haul of trash bags full of weeds, take off my gloves, clean my plant knife, and head back to camp for lunch. 

The rest of the day is my time. Some days I drive downhill to Gardiner, Montana, the nearest town, to charge up my laptop and cell phone, and use real internet. While in town, I also go to the grocery store. Or take a shower. Or do laundry. 

Some days I want more solitude, so I ramble in search of new wildflowers, and then sit and identify them. Or perch on a rock in the sun and read a book. Or write a letter… 

One of my favorites: Penstemon cyaneus, blue penstemon, an endemic plant found only in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. 

Yellow bells, Fritillaria pudica, another favorite. 

After eating my simple dinner, I curl up in my truck-topper cocoon: a super-comfy, four-inch-thick Thermarest mattress, sleeping bag, and pillows (yes, more than one). Cozy, I read or write in my journal until sunset.

After which I say my gratitudes for the day, brush my teeth, and sleep soundly, snug until the light wakes me before dawn to hear the bird chorus. This morning's chorus began with the distant howling of wolves, a ululant grace. 

Dawn from my campsite. 

Weeding to nurture biodiversity in a place I have loved since childhood is deeply satisfying. Even if my inner economist reckons the dollar cost high–as a freelance writer, I live perilously close to the financial bone, unlike those who have salaries to offset volunteer time.

The thing is, I cannot afford to not do this work. Weeding for biodiversity is my gift to life. The light in my soul as I lug another heavy bag of houndstongue down the trail is life's gift to me. This work is a positive statement in a world that feels far too negative. This is my mission, the why of why I am alive:

I nurture and celebrate biodiversity, plant by plant, word by word. That our planet may thrive, and we–all the gloriously diverse kinds of us–along with it.

Nurturing biodiversity is a spiritual practice, and a radical act. A plant knife dug into the earth to resist global climate change. A sweaty step toward healing all beings–humans, bears, sagebrush, yellow bells and lupines and bumblebees, and the earth we hold dear. 

Fieldwork: Weeding for Biodiversity

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I ended last week's blog post with a draft of a mission statement for my work. I've been trying to explain to myself for years what unites the varied passions that propel me through life.

I'm a writer and plant ecologist, a person happiest outdoors, whether just in my yard or in wilder places. (Though my yard is pretty wild at times!) I'm rooted in the inland West where sagebrush perfumes the air after spring rains, sandhill cranes bugle as they migrate in to nest in summer, and winter days are edged with snow. 

I'm passionate about nature, both the study of earth's web of life and reconnecting humans to our place in the planet. Specifically, I'm drawn to plants, especially those native to this continent, for their ability to evoke place and also their myriad of relationships that weave that web of life.

I have spent decades restoring nature, often on my own and without pay, particularly nature in the places where we live, with a special interest in gritty industrial landscapes and urban creeks and rivers. 

I garden with an eye to growing habitat for pollinators and songbirds, as well as providing food, scents and colors, tranquility, and beauty for humans. 

I write as a way to understand and explore the meaning in life, both my own life, and the larger cycle of capital 'L' life, existence. To show us why we are here, and to reveal the wonder and incredible variety of the world we live in, including the myriad of other life forms with whom we share this planet. 


The thread is clear: I'm passionate about nurturing and celebrating life in all its glorious diversity, with a particular emphasis on plants and words.

Which is why I'm spending my annual  "vacation" in Yellowstone National Park, digging out invasive weeds to help restore these iconic landscapes to health. So that this island of wild biodiversity may continue to thrive and inspire us all. 

Houndstongue, AKA Cynoglossum officianale, a plant imported from Asia and one that truly does not play well on this continent.

Wait! You say. How does labeling plants as invasive weeds and then killing them square with nurturing biodiversity? 

Like everything else in life, it's complicated. The phrase "restore the integrity of nature" is key to what I'm doing in Yellowstone. Some species don't play well when they're transplanted to new places, where they lack the interrelationships with other species that give them a positive role in the community.  

They may "go rogue" and actually endanger the health of the whole community. Think salt cedar or tamarisk in the inland West, crowding out the diverse ribbons of species along the region's rivers and streams, and poisoning the soil as they shed their salty leaves. 

The plant I'm focusing on, houndstongue (Cynoglossum officianale), a native of Eurasia, protects itself from grazers by manufacturing compounds that act as liver disrupters in wild ungulates like deer, elk, and moose. If for instance, an elk calf munched enough of houndstongue's large, felty leaves (which are at their most attractive just as the baby elk are learning how to graze), it might well die of liver failure in a few weeks or months.  

Houndstongue may also do something more subtle and potentially more disruptive to Yellowstone's ecosystems: it may co-opt the attention of native bumblebees by growing tall stalks of flowers that bloom for a long time and are attractive to native bumblebees.

Bumblebees and other native bees are critical to the survival of Yellowstone's native wildflowers: they pollinate their flowers and ensure the next generation, seeds. If say, a plant from somewhere else takes over whole areas and keeps bees from pollinating the native flowers, they decrease and the invader increases, which fragments the integrity of the ecosystem and ends up reducing biodiversity. 

So here I am in Yellowstone, digging up trash bags full of one invasive, non-native species to nurture biodiversity in the larger native community. (I hiked five miles yesterday, and dug up about 50 pounds of houndstongue. Hard, rewarding work!)

I'm working for the health of the lupine (the native wildflower being pollinated by the bumblebee in the photo above), the sagebrush, the elk, and the whole interwoven community that forms these iconic landscapes.

And I'm having a wonderful time, camping in Red, and listening to elk and western tanagers, admiring wildflowers and hot springs, and taking in time in a place where I began this work of celebrating and nurturing biodiversity decades ago.  

Of course, I'm still playing with that mission statement. (Writing really is 95 percent revision!) Here's another version:

I nurture and celebrate biodiversity, plant by plant, word by word. I work to restore the integrity of nature and to honor all forms of life. Because diversity is key to health–of cultures, neighborhoods, and ecosystems. That our planet may thrive, and we along with it.

The Gardner River below Mammoth, roaring with spring snowmelt.

Writing for Biodiversity

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I spent the weekend in Gillette, Wyoming, a nearly five-hour drive east of Cody, over the Bighorn Mountains and out on the spring-green northern plains (plains photo above).


Gillette is the heart of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin with its gargantuan coal strip-mines. Coal didn’t call me to northeastern Wyoming; writing did. Gillette happened to be the site of this year’s Wyoming Writers conference.


I hadn’t intended to go this year–I’m too newly returned home and I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed with all I have to do in writing, book reviewing, and house/yard renovation. Not to mention that I’m leaving next Friday for ten days in Yellowstone and my annual “vacation” as a weed eradication volunteer. 



But my friend Patricia Frolander, former poet laureate of Wyoming, a powerful writing voice, a rancher and mom who is newly widowed, asked if I was coming and offered to share her hotel room. Which seemed like an opportunity I’d regret missing. 


So Friday mid-morning I headed east, stopping near the McCullough Peaks just outside town to ogle deep blue Nuttall’s delphiniums and starry white daisies blooming in the sagebrush country.



The snowy ramparts of Carter Mountain on the distant skyline; cobalt-blue clumps of Delphinium nuttallianum bloom in the foreground. 


An hour and some later, I wound my way up Tensleep Canyon into the Bighorn Mountains, passed to the south of Cloud Peak Wilderness Area with its rounded peaks looking like snowy piles of clouds. Coming down the east side of the range, I had to stop again to admire the sunshine-gold swaths of arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) coloring the mountainsides, along with purple spires of silky lupine.  



By the time I got to Gillette, I just had time to unload my stuff in the hotel room, and then head to the conference center to register.


After which the weekend was a whirlwind immersion in writing talks and workshops, informal talks with other writers, and thinking and breathing and even sleeping all things writing. (I even dreamed in typewriter letters last night!)


I’m still processing all I experienced and learned, but two things stand out: First, what a warm and supportive community Wyoming Writers is. Everyone I met was welcoming, and the workshop time was insightful and substantive, without degenerating into the kind of unhealthy competitiveness that marks some conferences. 


Second, keynote speaker Nina McConighley, who grew up in Casper and is East Indian and Irish, talked about “growing up brown” and “the wrong kind of Indian” in Wyoming. In her workshops and her speech, she challenged us to go beyond the myths and stereotypes and look at The West and Wyoming through new eyes.


“Tell the unusual stories,” she said. (If you haven’t read her PEN-award-winning short story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, do. It’s funny, heart-wrenching, and deeply perceptive.)


I thought about McConighley’s words all the way home, driving west across the Northern Plains toward the shining peaks of the Bighorns, winding up and down over the range itself, and then zipping across the undulating surface of the Bighorn Basin toward the rugged ridges of the Absarokas, the mountains that call me home. 


As writers, we have the ability to touch people’s hearts and open their minds, to help enlarge their perspective on the world. In this time of polarized and angry political discourse and yesterday, yet another attack where ordinary people were killed simply because they represent a group, culture, or nation the bombers hate, writing the unusual stories can help us learn to value diversity rather than fear it.



Diversity like this meadow in the Bighorn Mountains, a mosaic pattered by dozens of species of wildflowers (including that gorgeous magenta Dodecatheon or shooting star), grasses, sedges, and shrubs, and this afternoon at least, abuzz with native bees and flies of varying sizes and echoing with the songs of half a dozen kinds of birds.


If we write in a way that reveals the unusual, the stories of lives who do not conform to the norm, we can help “normalize” differences and calm our readers’ fears. If our work gives voice to the sometimes-hidden or overlooked diversity of our communities and cultures, we can help our readers understand or at least have sympathy for those whose lives and beliefs, whose skin color and choices are radically different from our own.


Writing the unusual, we can help break down barriers of hate and fear. 


As a scientist, a plant-nerd, and an older woman, the perspective I bring to this conversation is a voice speaking on behalf of biodiversity. (One thing nature teaches us is that diversity is a healthy attribute for communities and ecosystems.)



The “unusual stories” I tell are those of our fellow species with whom we share the earth, those remarkable more-than-human lives who together weave this planet into numinous and shimmering life. Like the mariposa lily (Calochortus gunnisoni) in the photo above, offering its cup with nectar to pollinating insects. 


I’ve been searching for my mission statement, a succinct way to describe my parallel passions in writing and ecological restoration. Perhaps it is simply this:


I work for biodiversity. To restore earth and humanity, word by word, plant by plant. 


I write for the mariposa lilies blooming in ephemeral profusion before the moisture that fueled their unusually abundant spring emergence vanishes and the clay soil dries hard as brick. For the bumblebees and metallic green sweat bees who were pollinating those saucer-shaped blossoms today, the kingbird sitting on a nearby fence waiting to catch some of those pollinators to feed its growing nestlings, and the prairie dogs that savor the sun-fed sugars the mariposa lilies store in their underground bulbs. For the black-footed ferrets we saved from extinction to feed on the prairie dogs, and the big sagebrush, whose sweet turpentine scent perfumed my drive home. For the whole interrelated stew of existence, in all its glorious unusualness. 


I work for biodiversity, to celebrate all life. Not just the lives like mine, not just the lives I prefer. All life. That our planet may thrive, and we along with it.