As long-time readers (since before this Substack) know, Nikki Hill and I have been working on turning our 2018 zine into a book for the last three winters. The book is tentatively entitled, “Don’t Blame the Messenger: A critique of the ‘invasive plants’ narrative.” The original zine, called "The Troubles of 'Invasive' Plants," is still freely available for download at my blog, Macska Moksha Press. Though it contains a few errors (ironically, most of them mathematical ones in the "Funny Math" chapter 🤣), it remains a decent read.
In 2021, we decided to expand the zine into a book because our knowledge of the topics had been growing, both from our own observations and from additional research, as well as many conversations with other critics. We have also gained a deeper understanding of the importance of the cultural elements that influence the "invasive" narrative, which arguably play a bigger role than the science in shaping the story being told. And the zine, because it was a zine, was a bit snarky, and we wanted to move away from that tone entirely.
That winter, 2021-2022, we worked on expanding old sections and writing new ones, and when spring arrived, were nowhere near finished. 2022-2023 was the same. Over the course of this winter, we could see the conclusion coming into sight, but now the time has run out.
For both of us, heavy-duty reading and writing is not a warm month activity. Spring to Autumn, we're both focused on outdoor activities. For me it's mostly been agriculturally-focused the last few years, helping friends on their small farms, and then spending as much time as possible in wild or less-domesticated landscapes, foraging and wildtending, and just generally communing. This year, I’ll be headquartered out of a market farm (veggies) in Sonoma County so if you’re going to be in the area, please let me know! For Nikki, Spring through Autumn has been about wildtending first, but also about her paid job with Grow With Trees, an organization that consults on vegetation management for utility companies, trying to steer them away from just mowing and spraying under their power lines. She gets to collaborate with the people doing the work, teaching plant ID, setting up surveys, etc. As part of the job, she ends up researching topics like fire mitigation, biodiversity, pollinator pathways, etc., which informs the book project. She is also active in efforts to stop lithium mining in Nevada and Oregon, and I pitch in there as much as I can.
The book is far enough long that we both plan to work on it as we find time and space, and we’d love to have a full draft completed this calendar year. We’re also planning to send out pitch letters to publishers, so if you have any suggestions for houses where our work would fit, let us know.
Paying subscribers here and on my Patreon will continue to get exclusive access to excerpts at least once a month, both from the “’Invasives’” project, and from previous books.
Anyway, I just wanted to drop this update, as I figured some people are curious. Thanks for all the support!