Weeds and Climate Catastrophes

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Rebecca Randall Gilbert, author of the new Weedy Wisdom for the Curious Forager.

As a person who considers common wild plants to be elders, teachers, and friends, I turn to them when I feel overwhelmed. I live on an island, so we’ve been seeing erosion, sea level rise, stronger storms, and more violent rains. In other places, climate change may manifest as fires, floods, or drought. Here are three ways weeds can help.

1. Weeds for First Aid: It’s not necessary to be a full-on herbalist to use first aid herbs. Two or three are enough—I recommend plantain and yarrow, which are found almost everywhere, are non-toxic, and easy to recognize. Their primary role in first aid is to be applied externally to prevent infection from setting in. If it takes a week or more to access medical care and antibiotics, or if other treatments are unavailable, avoiding difficult-to-treat infections can be lifesaving.

2. Weeds for Food: Once the immediate crisis is past, our thoughts turn to the care and feeding of survivors. It’s quite comforting to look around and see delicious and easily available food close at hand. Also, picking a mess of greens can be a calming and necessary task to help turn the thoughts of shocked and grieving people of any age towards the future. Again, it’s not necessary to be an expert; knowing two or three common edibles means you will almost always have something to bring to the table.

3. Weeds as Teachers: Plants have been around much longer than we animals, and have a lot to teach us about evolution and adaptation. They never thrive alone, but are constantly relating to their pollinators, their predators, the soil organisms, and the mycelial web in many ways, including the constant exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen on which both plants and animals depend. A well-connected, diverse system is much more resilient and flexible than even the strongest individual, and offers more options for responding effectively to unexpected change. A study done after hurricane Katrina found that the clearest indicator of survival was not ethnicity, income, or education, but whether people knew their neighbor’s names. Have you developed the kind of relationships that lead to mutual aid? Do you know the names, needs, and attributes of the people, places, and plants around you, so that we can all take care of one another?

The reality of our physical and spiritual relatedness and connection with the rest of life is one of the most powerful and important lessons plants (and the rest of nature) have to teach us. Until we learn, as long as we think of ourselves as somehow exempt from our responsibilities as members of diverse and complex ecosystems, the storms will continue getting worse. I am grateful that I have wise, funny, and practical advice from my friends the weeds. They give me hope, help, and courage, and remind me to “bloom anyway.”

For specifics about these uses for common plants and much more, with recipes and helpful practices, check out Weedy Wisdom for the Curious Forager.

Our thanks to Rebecca for her guest post! For more from Rebecca Randall Gilbert, read her article “13 Reasons Why I Need Weeds.”