I went to a native plants festival over the weekend, and I felt like I found my people – well, kind of. Wearing a shirt that said, “Yes, I Really Do Need All These Plants” certainly helped me feel accepted. A lot of people responded positively to the shirt, even though the images on the shirt were all of tropical indoor plants.
This caused me to realize something – most Native Plants enthusiasts are gardeners who dabble in native plants, rather than hardcore anti-lawn folks. Its just kind of funny, because there were maybe 200 people at the festival, and I heard some people who were disgusted by the use of plastic pots by the nursery because of the potential for microplastics, and then there were native plant societies giving away cheap plastic keychains.
So, even in this small community there is obviously a spectrum of different values surrounding plastics, and probably also on every topic, and I just wonder if many of the problems of society are the fragmentation of beliefs that seem like they should fit together.
I’d think native plant folks who are generally looking to improve the environment by creating pollinator gardens would also want to reduce their plastic consumption and generation of microplastics. I’d assume that everyone at the festival was liberal, but the populace certainly skewed older (which tends to mean conservative), and as late-30s guy, I was certainly on the younger end of the spectrum. I guess I need to find a way to coalesce the subset of liberal homesteaders from the larger group of native plant enthusiasts…
Hypocrisy at it’s finest
But I’m also a bit of a hypocrite myself – I’m interested in AI, but only if it leads to Universal Basic Income (UBI) – and there are so many bad paths surrounding AI, that I’m losing hope for UBI. I’m anti-consumerist, but I also sell merch that no one really neeeeeds. Want? Yes. Need? No. I mean, I have to make money to support my family, and it useless stuff worse than bad stuff like military aircraft? Idk man, it’s like all the science fiction predictions from 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Minority Report, and Handmaids Tale are all coming true all at once.