Thread by @UrsulaV

Thinking about climate change today, as I often do, and remembering what I wrote a few years back. We are past the point of stopping change completely, but right now, we can still shape the new world to come.

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1129394714824912896

And I don’t even mean “we” in the big huge global sense of interconnected humanity (although that’s a huge driver.) I mean you and I, individuals. This is a threshold. It won’t last forever. But one determined individual right now can help define what species come with us.

I think of people I know on this site like @MyFrogCroaked and @AlongsideWild and @RosemaryMosco and @jeffvandermeer and @Myrmecos and @thebiologistisn. Individuals who, in very different ways, are fighting to bring important things, be they frogs or tomatoes, into the future.

Gardening is a hopeful practical discipline. You hope that this thing you planted grows, and you know that hope isn’t enough, so you do your best to help it. Gardening is full of stories of one seed, one plant, surviving, because of one individual being fiercely determined.

My garden is big, as home gardens go, and minuscule as the world goes. Over the years, at a conservative estimate, it’s been home to well over a thousand cricket frogs. They’re tiny, they’re common in the south, they don’t need much.

They’re also vanishing in the northern parts of their range, at a guess because of road salt melting into the vernal pools they need to breed in. Every garden where they breed is a bastion against that loss.

If you or I can make a home for them—and it really doesn’t take much at all, they are exceedingly easy neighbors—we can bring them into this future world with us.

Doesn’t have to be frogs, either. Could be a rare chicken breed or a tree or a bean.

And if you’re stuck somewhere where you feel like you’re too divorced from nature to be able to help directly, I’ll point you to @NativeSeedsSRCH’s Adopt-A-Crop fundraiser running right now. They grow out plants that are down to minuscule numbers. support.nativeseeds.org/campaign/adopt…

One year I remember they had only sixteen seeds left of a bean that had been grown for centuries by native people. But thanks to people like this, we get to bring those plants into the future with us.

The metaphor I come back to time and again is suitcases. We are packing for the future world. And right now, at this moment in time, we can stuff our suitcases with frogs and caterpillars and ancient grains and pint-sized sheep, with endangered rose mallows and rare orchids.

The future is coming for us. We get to decide what comes with us to meet it.