Let’s Not ‘Weed Out’ The Weed From Our Lives: Unlike Us, It’s Not Transient

Hold your horses. I am not going to discuss the kind of plant whose parts make some people get high and happy. The title is a bit misleading. This piece is about any plant growing where it is not wanted and our losing fight with it. The story of our fight with weeds is just not limited to the state excise department burning them deep inside some forest or apprehending the contraband in baleful during transit. It is as old as humanity’s fight with hunger.

Perhaps humans dealt the first dent in nature by altering it, when they identified the plants they need for food and shelter, and they understood how and where plants grow the best. And then they chose to be settled agriculturists from the hunter-gatherer life of earlier generations.

Human civilisation blossomed when humans were assured of their basic requirements of food, clothing, and shelter. Their engagement with agriculture provided those basics. They kept on improving that craft and the skill to deal with agriculture. That craft made humans alter the contour of the land, change the quality of the soil, and regulate the quantity of water that is required for the plant to yield its best. And obviously, they didn’t want to share these carefully and painfully curated resources with anyone else. They built borders to lay their claim over the land, built fences to prevent wild animals and other humans from eating and destroying their crops, and developed various poisons of a special kind to keep the weeds, microorganisms, and animals trying to live off the same soil by consuming its nutrients.

If June made us rejoice with the arrival of the monsoon, by August, we are seen suffering its excess. Flood, vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue, and water-borne diseases like typhoid, cholera, and dysentery become commonplace. Not to mention cold and cough, which visit every household. The rainy season in our kind of semi-tropical climate is known as the disease season. The abundance of water and sunshine make plants of every kind grow much faster. Man, while struggling with excess water, has also to deal with diseases and overgrown trees, and shrubs everywhere. On the roof, at the shades of windows, driveway, garden, under the trees, and in a well-curated lawn. Knowing that any effort to take them out is pointless, he patiently waits for the rains to stop before he does a major de-weeding.

This battle of man to banish the weed and the millions of known and unknown microorganisms, which naturally lived on the land he has staked his claim to recently, is an interesting one.

The size of the academic institutions and research laboratories and the industries, which collectively supply him with the knowledge, technology, tools, tackles, equipment, and chemicals are of staggering size. Man’s struggle with the weeds is routine and perpetual.

It’s like a fight between Tom and Jerry of the Walt Disney animation series.

And both parties are stubborn not to give up.

So stubborn is man about his confidence in eliminating anything and everything that he doesn’t want or is of no use to him, that he has forgotten that such pursuits have rendered the air he breaths, the water he drinks, and the soil he grows his food are rendered poisonous because of the novel chemicals he is mindlessly pumping to control the living beings which are not to his liking.

A documentary by David Attenborough on such plants comes to mind.

In it, he throws a different light on these plants. He shows how these resilient species strike their roots in the most inhospitable places like cemented courtyards, stone walls, cobblestone paved sidewalks, and a small hole in the drainpipe system to strike their roots and grow. Not only do they strike their roots for a short period, but they also allow similar species to colonise their surrounding areas. It’s said that if humans vacate their modern habitations and dwelling structures, nature will reclaim these properties in just a few years and these weeds will be at the forefront of such reclamation. The stone structures will last hundreds of years but steel and glass won’t last more than a few decades. Trees will certainly dominate the landscape within just a few years.

Natural processes continue in and around even occupied cities. One could reasonably argue that once cities are abandoned and human influence is removed, it is immediately reclaimed by nature because all that’s left are wild animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. In the case of Chernobyl, a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone was abandoned 31 years ago because of a nuclear power plant accident. It has been reclaimed by plants and wildlife that appear to be able to live and reproduce despite the radioactivity.

The hubris of humans to de-weed the world is rightly matched by the nemesis of nature, which threatens to recolonise their lost land anytime. These weeds are lurking all around us waiting to find a small crack, a crevice to find a toehold just enough for its seed or spore invisible to us. They need only time and our absence.

We should be happy about one thing. If the human species is wiped out from the face of Earth for its follies or due to some dramatic natural calamity caused by any extra-terrestrial events, there is still hope for this blue planet to regenerate its past glory.