I'm a work in progress here, but I wanted to get this down before I forget how I started.

#0a Why

For me, it was the fires in CA. Towns burned down and we checked apps for whether we should wear a mask or avoid going outside altogether. For some people it was devastating or deadly. For my family, it was painful. Weeks of inconvenience and months of sickness.

A big "fuck you" from the fascist federal administration on top of it. And a year to determine the power line maintenance by PG&E was at fault. This is a company that occasionally kills people, goes bankrupt, and gets bailed out. Then this year, they cut the power with a day or two notice. It killed someone relying on electricity in order to breathe. They are somehow in a position to resist being municipalized and their leadership makes millions.

The local government can't or won't keep them in check, and they can't house the homeless in Berkeley or Oakland or SF. The leadership either fears the rich or likes their money too much or both. The human impact is absolutely terrible. A woman nearby was killed with heavy machinery used to destroy and dispose of peoples' tents and other possessions. The homeless crisis gets the worst kind of attention from conservative media who charge the liberals in charge with hypocrisy, decadence, or misplaced empathy.

The first one is true. The liberals in charge, the ones who like money, are total fuck ups. They're better than the fascist right-wing, but they're bad. They don't have solutions to the problems of wealth inequality or climate change. What I thought of as fringe, the "left," (as distinguished from "liberals" by not liking money and war as much) has good ideas, but little authority or representation in the US.

With or without authority, they manage to do some great things. They fought the fascists when they came to Berkeley. They passed out masks and information to the homeless people during the fires. If nothing else, they keep some hope and good ideas alive even when they can't be acted upon at the moment. I think most people tend towards empathy and generosity, but it can be overcome by years of training in greed, racism, sexism, etc.

• The problems of inequality and disaster will continue to be with us.
• Climate change will make them worse, and will create millions of climate refugees.
• Conservatives will proudly kill at the border. Liberals will be more sheepish and evasive about it (but still do it).
• We live in a deeply racist country with an increasingly poor relationship with democracy. Even if most people are good and want good things, electoral politics can't be counted on to enact what's in their hearts.
• The problems were always here and always will be here. Massive tragedies aren't new.
• There were always people who had the clarity or personal impact that made it impossible not to help, and there always will be.
• Incidentally, even if it worked, no one really likes compromising with fascists. The people who think shooting half of climate refugees is the sensible middle can get fucked forever. We need compassion on a broad scale.

#0b What to do?

I went to a CERT training for a weekend. The firefighters are doing good things and they want to have neighbors slotted into their hierarchy in a useful way. Maybe they and FEMA should just have the DOD and DHS budgets. On the rhizomatic/horizontal side (as opposed to hierarchical), Mutual Aid Disaster Relief and a ton of other organizations are working on similar goals.

On a friend's recommendation, I'm studying Spanish. I don't know if it will help much, but at the very least, it's opened me up more to present, past and likely future struggles across the Americas. We have an empire and exploitation problem that goes beyond the current administration.

I read more about ecology, including this course on "social ecology" and systems thinking, a la Dana Meadows. Economics seems to be wrecking the world, and the answers, at a system level, feel like they're somewhere in there. I think we can replace our tired (and finance-based) analogies, aphorisms, and "laws" in tech with some of these concepts. But the analogies and models only go so far without getting more into the philosophy, history, and literal natural systems that go into these ideas. All in the works.

Anyways, what shook out from all of that is that I think learning about plants would be good. Might help to know how to grow food. Might help to know how to sequester carbon. Might help to know what environmental impacts people have in local and global contexts. Might help to know how to better advocate for these things politically.

Might help to be able to point people towards some basics, even if you're not an expert. And here we are!

#1 Plants you already like

First, find some plants you're excited about. You probably eat some plants or parts of plants. What do they look like in their whole plant form? You like flowers? Have a garden? You want to collect fruit in your area?

The first thing for me was when we started picking plums and making jam with them. They are everywhere in Berkeley, and we never noticed until we went to a foraging class. It was the major takeaway. There was a bunch of stuff that we found out we could eat, but really, the plums are everywhere.

The plums were coated in ash a couple years ago.

Anyways, cooking, shopping, tea, growing plants, and any number of other things could be your gateway into more plant curiosity. Maybe you just want to do a little Stardew Valley in real life?

#2 Trees around you

I heard an amazing idea from someone on twitter. He wants to replace our corn-based agriculture with trees, specifically chestnut trees. He thinks this would be good for carbon sequestration, avoiding carbon intensive farming, and diversifying ecology. Seems good and maybe necessary. Chestnut trees are an interesting possibility, because they used to be one of the most common trees in the US, and then a lot (almost 9 million acres) of them were killed in a blight.

So you probably don't have many chestnut trees around you. But there are probably a lot of other trees. Many are distinct based on their leaves. You can probably memorize 10 kinds just by paying attention for a week or two. If you look up identification guides, they'll throw some terminology at you, but if you're just getting started, I'd say just get down a few based on distinct shapes. Being able to match pictures is easier than methodically following a guide.

You could do the same with flowers if you like flowers better. It seems like there's more terminology (mostly "morphology" for the structural parts of the plant) to note if you're not going for common cultivars. Another disadvantage is that flowers aren't as consistent as leaves.

If it's winter, then you might want to identify evergreens/conifers. This video is a good place to start.

#3 Stories (Lifecycles and Friends)

In the "might helps" from earlier, I was describing potential benefits of not having what a couple of researchers (Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee) called "plant blindness."

I think here is where curiosity takes over more. Plants have to reproduce (somehow disperse seed and germinate) which sometimes involves them having friends (real biologists might say that "mutualisms" are first and foremost for organisms to benefit themselves, but it's more fun to think of plants as being friends with birds and ants). They also need to germinate (find a good place to grow from a seed) which means they need to be friends with rocks, soil, fungi, and other plants. How does all this happen?

For this, I really like the In Defense of Plants podcast. Its episodes have real scientists and they break down a type of plant or another bite sized topic really well. If you want something like that, but for animals, Creature Feature is great. Also, because animals tend to eat plants, live in them, or eat things that eat them, animal stories can also be plant stories. If you like your botany with lots of swearing and misanthropy, the Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't youtube channel is a good option.

#4 Morphology

If you're getting into identification, cultivation, preservation, at some point, you'll need to look at the parts of a plant more systematically and learn some terminology. The book A Botanist's Vocabulary is a good reference book, but identification and observing many plants throughout their lifecycles are, I think, the best way to lock down terminology.

At this stage, I think it's possible to use and possibly contribute to do some observational work assisting researchers in person or through something like iNaturalist.

#5 Diagnostic Keys

This is the step I'm on right now. To this point, for identifying plants, I've looked for between 1 and 3 very strong indicators of what something is. This step systematizes that into possibly dozens of steps answering yes/no questions like "are the leaves compound?" It's kind of like a game of Guess Who. These are called "dichotomous keys," and if the questions are possibly multiple choice, then they're called "polytomous keys."

Sometimes keys don't have a single entry point. "Multi-access keys" allow choosing from multiple characteristics. So instead of a branching structure or choose your own adventure type book starting on page 1, you'll have a product of many properties combined that gives you a result. My understanding is that this is more practical as an interactive computer program rather than a paper guide.

Using these keys to figure out what a plant is is called "keying" or "keying out" the organism. I recently got a couple of Peterson Field Guides to help me work on this skill.

#6 Phylogenetics

Plants aren't just organized by apparent structures. There are keys that work with scientific classifications called "synoptic keys." Pursuing identification like this might not be practical without lab equipment to know the deeper connections between plants. Sometimes plants that were thought to be connected at some branch in the genetic tree have been updated by evidence gathered through genome sequencing.

If you're doing this kind of work, I suspect you'll start climbing up to families and learning scientific names as often as common names. Warning that the rest of this will be even more speculative, as I'm guessing based on what people who seem good at this seem to be up to.

#7 Specializing

Based on what I've seen from the botanists I've followed, they tend to end up with some specialization. Maybe it's a particular species or family. Maybe it's some interspecies interaction. Maybe it's something like "roots" or "tree rings." I guess you can't be an expert on everything, because there are a lot of plants out there.

#8 Applications

Nutrition, herbalism, foraging, gardening, agriculture, and so on. Some aspect of this might have informed the "#1 plants you already like" impulse to get started. But doing it with a stronger base of skills will probably somehow add to it. I'd like to plant some sensible trees and maybe even work on a public food forest.

#9 Related Sciences

Chemistry, sociology, physics, ecology, meteorology, biology beyond botany, geology, archeology?

Personally, I'm interested in how math, computer science, and philosophy can connect with ecology, especially to what extent it's possible to do this formally with analogy and homology.