On the difficulty of being a ‘Weed’ ….

Native and cultivated plants are protected, both by warrant of their being culturally valued and by virtue of their being a form of life that is culturally remembered for their continuity within a specified landscape – ‘that plant has grown here for thousands of years!’. On the other hand, a weed is not valued positively at all, or at most, valued only grudgingly. The weed is a cultural ‘invader’. Therefore, the weed has no claim to cultural landscape continuity in any positive sense, either from the point of view of production, or conservation. Indeed, it is often a ‘declared pest’ and must be killed, usually by poison. As an unwanted visitor to ‘our’ world, the opportunistic weed is feared and maligned – it gets what it deserves. To hunt down and kill weeds is, therefore, to avenge culturally on two levels. The weed disrupts our sense of commodified agri-ecological continuity (both the farmers and the ecologists say, ‘it is evil’), so the weed must be destroyed for its affront to the interests of those who control culturally ‘productive’ land. This is understandable and straightforward, but there is something more.