To restore biodiversity and habitats, we have to change the way land is managed. Mowing and spraying are an endless war on nature's efforts to re-wild our entire world, and our upper hand against her is incredibly fragile. Nature is tough as nails and she doesn't stop.
Now I can identify so many native plants, especially trees, as seedlings, and...they're everywhere. There are dozens and dozens of plant species in a lawn that isn't constantly laced with herbicide, and many of them are beautiful flowering plants that just never get a chance to bloom because people keep mowing them down.
Furthermore, common "weedy" species proliferate largely because of constant, destructive human management. Most "weeds" are just plants that take over destroyed areas and get them habitable for other species. "Weed" isn't a real category of Evil Plant, but it isn't an arbitrary descriptor either—"weed" is a job.
When a swath of forest burns or is felled by a tornado or something, somebody has to stop erosion from stealing all the topsoil, give the creatures a place to hide, attract birds and mammals that will spread new seeds, and keep the ground shady and moist. And that somebody has to be a quick, aggressive grower. That's where "weeds" come in.
So by intensively and indiscriminately weeding and mowing, humans keep their yards and gardens in a constant state of "oh shit, emergency," and the weeds try to take over because....that's what they're supposed to do.
So people see a "weedy" lawn with two months' overgrowth and think, "this is terrible, we can't have this, look at all this thick grass and weeds, it is full of ticks" and decide that the Only way is to keep mowing the whole stretch of land constantly, forever, instead of recognizing that the weedy overgrown lawn is 1) an early developmental stage of something else and 2) 40% invasive species that you put there
I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm just generally frustrated that it's not common knowledge how nature reclaims land.
Most online quips about "guerrilla gardening" show a fundamental lack of understanding about this natural process. If you try to plant something else on a golf course, it will get killed with herbicides and/or mowed down. Those are the ONLY things stopping the golf course from becoming a prairie or forest or whatever it was before.
I think people really want edgy illegal action to be the answer but the answer is actually "talk to people, educate them, and give them the resources to do better." I'm realizing also that the average person knows nothing, nothing, about plants or native species or ecosystems, and people appear to not care because they don't know.
"Water usage! Conservation! Biodiversity!" all that stuff is meaningless squawks to people that can't put it in context. People will generally pretend to know the importance of words like this even if they don't. It's a social thing.
But when you explain to them what bees do for plants, or how many kinds of grass there are, or what plants provide food for birds, it immediately becomes apparent that they actually don't know anything about the natural processes around them, and most people at this point are trying to keep up a dim facade of being sort-of-conscious of environmental concerns, but don't actually have an accessible point of entry to Actually learn about their world
