Heather Thompson Heather Thompson

Free, Free, Dandelions.

Personally I’ve always liked the blotches of yellow amongst the green,  especially when they are allowed to reach their full height and tower over the other wild plants. But in the suburban lawn of my parents, they are cause for what I can only describe as a very strange and specific kind of stress. 


It wasn’t until I was helping my mom weed that I began to understand the layers of this response and its connection to the larger system of supremacy and erasure we live in. A quiet and seemingly innocuous symbol of resistance and resilience that I was ripping out in clumps with my gloved hands.


Me: “Why pull these out? They’re cute.”

Mom: “You have to, it’s illegal not to.”

Me: “Ummmm that can not be true mom”

Mom: “It is! There are by-laws”

Me: “Who enforces them, the dandelion police?”

Mom: “Just pull them out Heather, everything doesn’t need to be a whole thing”


Oh but it does.


A Whole Thing


Dandelions grow in acidic, compacted soil that is otherwise inhospitable to plant life. Their bright yellow caution lights tell us that the land beneath them has been disturbed and needs time to recover before attempting to draw any further nutrients from it. But they go even further by telling us “hey, don’t go extracting nutrients from this soil just yet but here, in the meantime eat me and you will get a nutrient dense cocktail of Vitamins A,C,K, E, B, folate AND iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, minerals AND inulin fibre AND beta-carotene AND polyphenol antioxidants to protect your mammalian cells from damage.”


Oh my god dandelions thank you, you shouldn’t have… because we make it a point to kill you on sight. 

The kind of soil-healing dandelions do, if they are left alone long enough to do it, isn’t the kind of healing you have to imagine is happening because you paid someone to wave their wellness wand at you. It’s real, its measurable, its visible.  Their long tap roots which can grow as deep as 15 feet in ideal conditions, search for the exact minerals and nutrients lacking in the topsoil and bring them to the surface where plants with shallower roots can access them.  Some examples of plants with shallower root systems are… all of the vegetables. 


Even in their death they are working to heal the soil. Once they seed and begin to decay, the tunnels of their roots act as channels for drainage. Their remains also provide sustenance for detritivores like earthworms whose castings go even further to both nourish and neutralize the acidity of the soil. Their leaves also decay and infuse the soil with the long list of nutrients, minerals and antioxidants above. 


They first appeared to heal the acidic, compacted land that the retreating glaciers left behind after the last ice age (approximately 30 million years ago) in what is now Asia and Europe. Their work made those areas hospitable for human survival when they started showing up in those areas 2million and 45 000 years ago respectively. 


And because these early humans didn’t have RoundUp they valued dandelions and even preserved and carried their seeds with them as they migrated throughout the globe. Which is why dandelions began appearing in North America in the mid 1600’s along with the first waves of European settlers. Not coincidentally this was also the time the Hudson’s Bay Company began to establish a “trade” route in what is now called Canada and was then called Rupert’s Land by nobody that actually lived there.


By the time “Rupert’s Land” was sold by the HBC to the freshly incorporated Canada in 1870, the loss of human, animal and plant life had forever re-shaped the landscape.  How could a British private company sell very-much-not-British land to an installed government of a British colony made up of men loyal to the crown for 300 000 GBP? Well doy, it’s because Queen Victoria royally proclaimed it. In a letter. On paper so… perfectly legal and still is and no take backsies and I know you are but what am I.


Today 89% of Canada Inc. land still belongs to the Canadian federal and provincial governments. There is no dollar value to describe it but a recent sale of 60k hectares of “crown land” in Alberta made that government $7.4 million dollars… which they spent on black hawk helicopters for border patrol use among other things that aren’t housing during their growing housing crisis. 


Canada is 998M hectares. 89% of that is roughly 888M. If that were divided up into 60k hectare parcels and sold off at this price it would generate Canada Inc. $109B in revenue. A single billionaire is currently worth almost 4 times that amount. Through this skewed matrix of value, one man can have a single mediocre idea requiring child labour to realize it that is more “valuable” than land sustaining life for 40 million people.


*Pause for audible sigh*


25 years before this theft took place, British law passed the Inclosure Act allowing the crown to privatize what had previously been common use land. By doing so the act required clearly defined boundaries between private properties in order to police them. This led to the legal concept of Adverse Possession, a constitutional disease Canada was born with having inherited it from the Queen Mum. It dictates that someone occupying and using land for a long period can gain legal title to it even if they aren’t the original owner.  If that sounds a little too convenient for a country actively stealing land then you would be right to be suspicious.


The way in which Adverse Possession laws were upheld throughout the British empire was through proof of occupancy via the use of land ie.development. I say “were” but it is still very much an “are” thing because the concept was copied and pasted into constitutions wherever the crown had vested interest (in swindling). South Africa’s fascist National Party was a huge fan, renaming it Acquisitive Prescription in order to dispossess the majority of its population, and even as you read this,  Israeli settlers are using Adverse Possession laws to claim land in the West Bank and the razed ocean front of the Gaza Strip. It’s “finders keepers” writ into law which sets legal precedence to use military force in both the finding and the keeping. 


Under Adverse Possession, to develop land is to disturb it;  plant every square inch of it with a homogenized crop, populate it with hungry ruminants and fence them in, be fruitful and multiply and teach your kids how to shoot a trespasser.  If you can defend the borders of your own personal empire, you can have it, hold it and abuse it. 


Possession in practice


1896 to 1916 saw aggressive UK/European settlerism across Canada Inc’s prairies and their bad ideas of land use with them. The settlers in question weren’t leaving successful farms behind, more often than not they were leaving lives of indentured coal mine labour or escaping debtors prison. Not even a generation later,  their misguided efforts caused widespread “black blizzards”. Up until that point, the rich top soil of the prairies was protected from the strong prairie winds by a tapestry of grasses woven over millenia through the toil of Indigenous stewardship. Imported ruminant herds eating through the grass cover in combination with widespread tilling exposed the topsoil with devastating results.

“Birds fly in terror before the storm, and only those that are strong of wing may escape. The smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack rabbits which perish from suffocation.”

-Lawrence Svobida


We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions.

-Avis D. Carlson


Because European agricultural settlerism was a branch of the colonial project, their role was to develop/occupy the land and generate tax income for the crown. In order to protect the crown’s extractive interests,  provincial governments began not solving the soil problem they created with a series of “Soil Conservation Acts”. 


These established best practices that were policed on a municipal level. Enforcing crop rotations, the planting of winter crops, establishing tree-line shelter belts against the wind, and the construction of dams and dugouts became the singular way forward. All of these practices allowed the farmer to continue extracting from the land without rest and without healing. Irrigating fields with their blood, sweat and tears which, as it turns out, is not helpful. 


Prior to the vast groundbreaking caused by UK/European settlerism in the prairies, the grassland soils of Alberta contained 10% organic matter in its most fertile areas. Today the soils of those same areas contain 5-6.5% organic matter, a loss of 50%. 


These losses cause increased erosion, reduced water absorption and retention which means reduced wildfire resistance and recovery, decreased nutrient availability and a decline in soil biodiversity.  All things that dandelions, allowed a full life cycle, bring to the soil. 


And because these problems would be solved by simply allowing the land time to heal without extracting economic value from it for the benefit of whichever empire is currently controlling the gears, the solution is as unobtainable as “peace in the middle east” and for the same reasons. 


Authoritarian Landscaping


With the inherited intergenerational wealth drained from occupied land by their settler parents, post-war professionals established the suburban lawn as the ultimate symbol of (white) man’s successful domination over nature. Little altars to the empire, then helmed by Winston Churchill who himself was born in a palace with a finely manicured lawn designed by the godfather of English gardens; Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Who was not a Narnia centaur as the name implies but an actual man. 


After a long day terrorizing Northern Irish civilians with a mercenary police force that would then go on to preserve and protect the occupation of Palestine, Winston would retire to his birthplace of Blenheim Palace and stroll the gardens of Brown’s unique brand of authoritarian design. 


Described as the landscape architect who bottled nature, Capability was both criticized and celebrated for creating ‘identikit’ landscapes that uniformly featured a sea of meticulously cut grass, man-made water bodies, pleasure gardens and clusters of trees and shrubs typically bowing to a central “specimen” tree of exotified beauty, topped off with an architectural focal point and all in visual deference to the grand manor. The whole thing would be contained by a trench edged with a low fence to keep wildlife out thereby preserving the view from the house as a perfectly still landscape painting. 


Like all aspirational trends, Capability’s gardens were commissioned by aristocrats, built and maintained by labourers and perpetuated the false ideal that wealth can contain nature. And though his influence would give way to the emerging trends of the Romantics, that old money aesthetic of a tamed nature found new life amongst settler suburbanites looking to prove they belonged where they didn’t. 


But What Do White Dads Think?


My patrilineal line is a winding one with huge chunks missing, a combination of Eastern European what-nows and Irish we-aren’t-sures. My Grandpa came to the prairies via a combination of log riding gigs and the hobo-rail, which apparently qualifies you to join the RCMP. After serving in the North he spent his remaining days erasing those memories with whiskey and milk in a small amber tinted tumbler that was never not in his hand, except for when he was gardening. 


My childhood memory still sees sunflowers tall as trees through my rainbow glistened lashes. And sweet peas my sister and I would descend on like locusts, stripping the vines bare long before they were ripe.  

From l to r; dad’s thumb, me, Grandpa and sister.

I also remember Grandpa’s garage; a dark damp place soaked through with the intoxicating olfactory cocktail of gasoline, cut grass still stuck to the mower blades and shelves of noxious poisons I was forbidden to drink but nobody said anything about inhaling deeply. For every sunflower there was an arsenal of herbicide. 


My dad, now 80, is his father’s son.  He’s more of a rum and coke in a red solo cup kind of a guy than a whisky and milk man but much of the rest is the same. Especially his relationship to land. I’ll let him tell you himself, severely stuffed up from days of inhaling wildfire smoke with 80 year old sinuses.  Everything really is a whole thing. 

Re-Possession


In 2022, under a far right leaning provincial government led by a woman that co-chairs fundraisers with Ben Shapiro and poses in photo-ops with Donald Trump like she’s 14 and he’s a member of BTS, Alberta has re-written the very Adverse Possession laws that allowed for the destruction of native botanical ecosystems in the first place. 


Possession is no longer 9/10’s of the law because it allows for “squatters” to “trespass” through a legal loophole. Or in other words, the laws that allowed UK/European settlers to steal Indigenous land are being re-written to prevent their stolen land from being reclaimed. These new laws give the RCMP a legal precedent to arrest land protectors and pipe line protestors, the human dandelions trying to sound the alarm, crying for time to recover on behalf of the disturbed landscape.


The dandelion police, it turns out, are real.


In this way anyone and anything preventing land from becoming overdeveloped in the interest of western imperialism, is the enemy.  Even and especially those that would try and heal it. The hoarded, poisoned land, once the foundation for life becomes the stage upon which the west commits slow, intergenerational suicide because wealth can not contain nature indefinitely. 


Enoughness


I think many of us would agree we’ve had enough. Enough of the grief, anxiety and fear of witnessing the unaccounted costs in life that empires are willing to pay in order to hoard wealth. But what do we know of enoughness?


Like many 2nd or 3rd generation settlers fat off stolen land and raised with more-than-enough as a baseline, we can genuinely not know. The fear of living on less when the social narrative is screaming at you to hoard for survival props up the central logical fallacy of western imperialism; that we can infinitely produce our way into having enough.


Through the inverted film negative of Capability’s perfect landscape lens we look out at our urban environment and see a hellscape snap shot of what happens when you fail at hoarding. The spectre of homelessness, of hunger, of wanting and not getting, haunt our waking lives and drive us to produce or die until we die. 


But if you brave examining that horror by putting yourself in the picture, details emerge you didn’t see before like small blooms of yellow shouting out from the concrete about the sustenance they’ve seen below the surface.  The unrealized opportunities for healing, the happiness buried in waiting. 


Urban dandelions have evolved to utilize higher temperatures AND higher C02 levels for reproduction, growth and photosynthesis, an adaptation that allows them to thrive in climate crisis conditions.  They didn’t achieve this change by fortressing themselves against the world, they dealt with the reality of their surroundings and created new survival systems based on what was within their reach. 

Canada produces almost twice the amount of oil it uses and yet spends billions of taxpayer funds on building pipelines in order to sell off the excess. But lets shift our gaze to the future and examine the logical conclusion of Western Imperialism through the example of American consumer capitalism that Canada is doggedly following.

In 2024, the US produced a record high of 13.2 million barrels of oil per day. 95% of which (12.6million barrels) was consumed through military use. The US agricultural system produces enough food to feed 136% of its population while 47.4 million Americans live in food insecure households. It sends $3billion to Israel to weapons test US made bombs on Palestinian hospitals while 47.5million Americans can’t afford healthcare and their rural hospitals can’t afford to keep their doors open. 

The US has more than enough to feed itself, to provide healthcare for and house its own citizens. It would even have more than enough oil to function and protect itself if it weren’t actively destabilizing democratically elected governments in the Middle East and Central and South America while simultaneously leading a nuclear arms race. But like those early UK/European settlers drowning in dust, the seed of the solution can’t be seen because its simple, quiet, and free. 


Enoughness asks; what systems of healing do we have access to that we have been denied or distracted from habituating? What food sources, housing options, transportation choices and clothing practices do we already have that could satisfy and sustain us?


Generating enoughness for me is about consciously pausing the pursuit of external resources and taking inventory of what I already have. Right now and right here.  The future is still unknown and petrifying but it's likely I will also have an inventory of things right now and right here, when I get there. 


Of course there are people whose personal inventories do not meet their needs in a landscape manufactured by greed.  But rather than using their suffering as a reason to hoard, we could look at our own inventory and realize we have more than enoughness and that excess could be shared without diminishing our own personal comfort. 


Freedom from scarcity doesn’t come from reaching the unobtainable goal of becoming enough, it comes from collective enoughness. 


I’ve recently added to my list of small, daily enoughness practices the spreading of dandelion seeds wherever and whenever I encounter them.  Helping them along on their journey to reunite with the soil that needs them. 


An act poetically echoed by a Chinese netizen’s recent post on Bilibil, where Dandelions (Pu Gong Ying) and not watermelons are used to express solidarity with the Palestinian people,  “The children have grown up from the ruins of the city, and now they have turned into dandelions and drift towards the hometown that their ancestors have missed for generations”.


Free, Free, Dandelions. 

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