TUSHA YAKOVLEVA on the Invitation of Invasive Plants /307

Detail of a milky-green trail curving and looping across a vibrant green burnweed leaf pocked with small holes and other hints of traffic and services provided. Photo courtesty of Tusha Yakovleva.

This week guest Tusha Yakovleva calls on us to remember our millennium-old relationship with weedy beings and the gifts of wild and invasive plants. It’s estimated that worldwide spending on invasive species exceeds one trillion dollars annually. But if we were to cease our violent relationship with weeds and invasive species, what might we find? Cultural cooperation between plants and people? A whole slew of plant-relatives that are thriving in increasingly challenging landscapes?

We are challenged to think about our capacity, or willingness, to know invasive plants - Tusha queries listeners to ask “Do we know their reasons for making home in unfamiliar soils? Or what gifts and responsibilities they carry?” We are left with much to think about in the realm of curiosity and acceptance, two muscles that need an exceptional amount of exercise in a time where so much is rapidly changing environmentally and socially.

“Who are we to fully know the lives of these so-called invasive plants? Do we know their reasons for making home in unfamiliar soils? Or what gifts and responsibilities they carry?”

— Tusha Yakovleva / Episode 307

Photo of Tusha Yakovleva by Melinda Braathen

Tusha Yakovleva is an educator, gatherer and ethnobotanist whose work revolves around generating strong, respectful relationships between plants and people. Tusha’s botanical knowledge is rooted in rural and urban lands within northern temperate forests across two continents. The foundations of her life-long foraging practice come from her family and first home - the Volga River watershed in Russia - where tending to uncultivated plants and mushrooms for food and medicine is common practice. 

Tusha’s efforts in growing reciprocity between land and people have included running a wild food program, learning the gifts of weeds, working with food sovereignty groups, keeping seeds, growing perennials, organizing community gardening and forestry, and sharing the stories of plants. Tusha is the author of Edible Weeds on Farms: Northeast Farmer’s Guide to Self-growing Vegetables — a resource for wild edible plants on cultivated soils. Tusha is currently completing graduate work at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry on Onondaga Nation homelands. Her research is in support of cross-cultural partnerships for biocultural restoration and takes place under the guidance of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Tusha spent 15+ years in the Muheconneok/Hudson River watershed and presently lives in Ute ancestral homelands near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, where she is meeting many spiky plants and missing sphagnum bogs.

♫ The music featured in this episode is “Overture” and “Hold On” by Ali Dineen and “Meet Me In the Garden” by Violet Bell.

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