KOCHIA

PROCESSING INVASIVENESS:

Kochia– an aggressive colonizing, migrant species; “an undesirable weed”. Prodigious in its tumbleweed method of seed dispersal; indicator plant of poor soil conditions; drought tolerant; resistant to herbicides; “ornamental”- and brought into the US for this reason around 1900.

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…. “A colonial mode of relationship blocks consciousness.” .…

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-Manu Karuka, (p. 25) in Empire’s Tracks

Invasiveness is deeply embedded into my experience of life as I am really just a visitor on the lands that I once believed I belonged to. I am realizing that I don’t feel like I belong to any place and long to know the physical earth that feels like I am of it. I’m paying attention to the ways that we invaders take root and displace thriving native communities, violently forcing intelligent systems out of balance. This imbalance ripples outwards.

How to reconcile this?

I first took note of this plant in the Bosque near the Hispanic Cultural Center. It stood out to me because of its assertive pink color which I was told was in reaction to the recent frost. After that initial sighting and gathering, I continue to encounter it everywhere and in very large quantities.

I revisited Valle de Oro after discovering that kochia had essentially lined the entire path on our walk to the Rio Grande and had completely overtaken the fields. It appeared on the roadside on 2^nd Street in Mountain View, framing the AT&SF superfund site.

Kochia dyed handmade paper and deconstructed canvas thread

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ROOTEDNESS (stillness)

Center of the Universe?
Found marker in Manzano Open Space, Albuquerque, NM, near to Manzano Mountain which had been hollowed out for the storage of nuclear weapons

Ryan said on day one in the Sandia Mountains that when the sprawl came to Albuquerque after/during the war, it was as if we laid a grid on top of the land, and that really stuck with me because I work with grids and want to address this impulse in myself and in settler colonial society, and to look critically at what effects laying the grid down has produced.

JUNIPER MISTLETOE
Phoradendron Juniperinum is a parasite- a colonizing plant. Looking into this invasive species I learned that this mistletoe results from a bird “dropping the seeds off” via its waste onto a branch, where it will germinate and grow.

PIÑON seeds and pods

Both Piñon and Juniper (and their parasitic mistletoe) offer food to the Pinyon Jay, perhaps whose feather is in the photograph below. The jay in turn assists in the propagation of these species, both of whom are suffering die-offs due to drought and an increasingly aridified landscape in the Southwest.

UPROOTEDNESS (movement)

BLUE REMINDERS

I wonder if these jays will or are already migrating poleward considering the dwindling Piñon population.

Drought

and Heavy Water

I am interested in researching in more depth the nuclear history of New Mexico and how this as well as local extraction and energy endeavors have directly contributed to the degradation of local ecosystems, the migration or die-off of species, and the negative impact on human health and wellbeing. What is the connection between all of these things? What can be done?