20 starting points for writing poison ivy (that would be better than anything DC has done)

Read more from me here.

None of these involve swamp thing.

• Once I went to an Aquaponics training and the queer trainer schooled everyone on the use of plastic in gardening. This one woman was like “I don’t think aquaponics is safe because of the use of plastic, which is toxic”. He said politely, “well, do you mean polythene or the kind we use in aquaponics?” Then he drew a chemical compound breakdown of three different types of plastics on the board, and talked about how there are so many restrictions on the study of plastic and gardening because the only places that would fund them are places that focus on cannabis. So until we legalize marijuana, we won’t know truly what impact plastic has on the food we grow. “ The lady didn’t ask anything else about plastic after that.
• The Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, was an “ecoterrorist” group active through the 00s targeted by the CIA and British Secret Service. Many people who were part of the ELF, are still in prison on terrorism charges for destroying private property. The UK in particular targeted British affinity groups with “full force” — when lawyers connected to the group subpoenaed law-enforcement agencies, they found that at least 4 different members of the Secret Service had infiltrated the group, pretended to be active and passionate ecoterrorists, and at least one had married someone in the group.
• In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “In some Native languages the term for plant translates to “those who take care of us’”
• The Indigenous People’s History of the United States talks about how intentional cultivation made the place where John Smith and the rest of the way colonists landed a place of incredible abundance, created over centuries. John Smith said in letters that this was probably the work of God to bless the colonists. They burned it all down.
• “On October 18, 1998, the Earth Liberation Front set fire to three buildings and four chair lifts in the ski resort, causing damages that totaled $12 million.” — Wikipedia
• Poison Ivy tells Batman on multiple occasions that she only pursues crime to “fund a life away from human beings,” which is also the career goal of almost every queer person I know.
• “Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was a Swedish botanist and biologist, who created a system for organizing life that became the basis for modern taxonomy. This system lay the foundation for “racial hierarchy” and eugenics, + created the scaffolding for modern botany, which includes legitimizing the arbitrary gendering of plants.” — From ‘Nice Apples’ and Plant Language by Sophie Duncan
• “Due to the legacy of a coal plant (the demolition of which caused an air pollution crisis itself) and other polluting industries, Little Village also suffers from among the highest levels of cumulative pollution burdenin the city, far higher than the overwhelmingly white downtown neighborhoods just a handful of miles away.”
• Though pheromones are usually only brought up in the Batman comics as “sex pollen”, IRL they can serve one of 3 functions, as far as Western science understands them. Sex, yes, but also to raise alarm or mark a trail. Unrelated: why did we make spinach read email?
• One time I went to Detroit for a food justice conference.
  One person I rode with baked a vegan cheesecake for the person who drove us to Detroit. The recipe for vegan cheesecake she used required soaking cashews for 12 hours. Since we were staying at a someone else’s house it also required getting permission from that person to soak cashews for 12 hours in their kitchen. She made the cheesecake in the middle of the night. “That’s a lot of work,” I remember saying, kind of bewildered. She looked at me then said, “Yeah, care takes work.”
• Flint Michigan still doesn’t have clean water.
• Do literally everything DC is doing now the same, white lady with green skin, PhD in whatever, weird sexualization that is boring and outdated, FINE. Just fucking change the buzzwords. Say climate extinction once in a while, you know? Or if you’re going to keep saying “pollution”, talk about this.
• Remember that episode of Queer Eye with the girl living in the sunrise movement group house? And the Fab 5 is all like “yeah we rode bikes!” And that girl, who in every other way seems like she is struggling with a lot of things around being 20 and identity and self esteem and climate extinction, is very confidently like “Yeah, actually it doesn’t matter if you ride your bikes because like five corporations are responsible for most of what is killing the earth“.
• “In his study on revenge, McKee surveyed 150 university students about their attitudes towards authority and group inequality. He found that the students whose answers showed a deference to authority and respect for traditions and social dominance had the most favorable opinions about revenge and retribution. Still, in many contexts, McKee argues, those who pursue revenge do so out of a lack of any other means of justice. “
• That aquaponics trainer also told a story about his father, who, unbeknownst to him, started growing one of those mini cherry tomato kits in his kitchen during the pandemic. Kits like this require manual pollination by hand, every day. While home for Christmas, the trainer asked his mom if his dad was going to watch “Its a Wonderful Life” with them. His mom said “No! He’ll be too busy fucking his plants!”
• “It is a future where Black reparations and Indigenous Land Back co-exist. Where BIPOC collective liberation is at the core.” From the Land Back Manifesto: https://landback.org/manifesto/
• Poison Ivy’s origin in 1966 was inspired by an 1844 Nathaniel Hawthorne story about a man whose daughter tends a garden with toxic plants until she herself becomes poison.
• Regarding his “nature writing,” Abbey states: “I write in a deliberately provocative and outrageous manner because I like to startle people. I hope to wake up people. I have no desire to simply soothe or please. I would rather risk making people angry than putting them to sleep. And I try to write in a style that’s entertaining as well as provocative. It’s hard for me to stay serious for more than half a page at a time.” Abbey felt that it was the duty of all to “speak the truth — especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic”.” — Wikipedia on Edward Abbey
• “Maiming, mauling, and mutilating are extreme measures, but it’s nothing compared to what irredeemable cruelties humanity’s done to the world of nature.” — Writer JT Krul
• Robin Wall Kimmerer also writes “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”