Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology,

culture, and spirituality.

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, Accusation, and Claire's Head.

In this essay, Catherine dwells within the understory in a time of mounting ecological loss.

As invasive plants proliferate around her childhood home in Toronto, she considers her family's

own transplanted history and how acts of

reciprocity and care for the land might unknit despair.

In the 400-acre park, a few blocks from my home, I uproot plants, small rosettes of serrated palm-shaped leaves, slim stalks of jagged-gidged green top with florets of tiny white flowers.

It's mid-morning. I've brought garbage bags. I make no attempt to be clandestine.

I'm not foraging, like the old Polish-Canadian ladies, who come to pluck fresh nettle leaves in the

spring, or the older man whom I spot cutting orange chicken of the woods mushroom from a decomposing log.

Of course you're not supposed to harvest here.

I abandoned my stuffed bag by the garbage bins. In clearing the ground around a couple of

aged black oak trees in Toronto's high park, I've stopped perhaps a few hundred thousand

seeds of garlic mustard from forming, an infinitesimal drop in the bucket of the invasive

plant growth that is spreading through the ravine understory. Futile, likely, but I'm searching

to kick-starter response beyond the complicated grief I feel at the site. Everywhere humans have

traveled, we've brought alien species, intentionally and unintentionally.

Arriving in a new place, the populations of some such species explode, cause land trauma,

displace and eliminate native species, chemically altering the soil to make it inhospitable to other plants.

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