Gorse is Rooting For Us Animist Anarchy and Plant Allies
The Ally
Gorse (Ulex europaeus) was introduced to Aotearoa New Zealand in the early 1800s for control of stock as a “living fence”, providing shelter, and as a general hedging plant. Ancestors of settlers had used it for this reason in Europe, but the climate in Aotearoa was much better suited to the plant, which began to flower and seed twice a year instead of once. Now gorse is considered perhaps one of the worst scrub weeds of these islands, claiming vast tracts of agricultural land and enjoying a kind of notoriety uncommon in a plant, even among city dwellers. I was raised rurally and a large part of my youth was spent in a no-holds-barred fight against the advance of this vigorously self-seeding, fast-growing, spiky shrub, hacking mature plants down and dumping agrichemicals on the stumps and seedling alike. Safe to say I see things differently now.
Gorse is a member of the Fabaceae/legume family, forming a beneficial symbiosis with bacteria in the Rhizobium family — these colonise the root tissue of the gorse plants, forming clumpy nodes of tissue rich in accumulated nitrogen. As root tissue dies and is sloughed off, this nitrogen is released into the surrounding soil and becomes available to surrounding plants and the community of soil micro-organisms. Nitrogen availability is a major limiting factor in the development of plant communities, and while the context of Aotearoa is different to other ecologies with many native plants preferring lower nitrogen levels in soil, gorse still performs a valuable ecosystem function. Gorse has also been recognised as a valuable bee forage plant. Perhaps more importantly in these deforested islands, gorse functions as a “nursery plant”, sheltering native tree seedlings more tolerant of low-light conditions:
The very nature of gorse as a pioneering, fast-growing, short-lived shrub means that it can only survive where the land is constantly open and disturbed. Undisturbed, gorse grows vigorously for the first few years, but then slows to a relative standstill. Because it needs full light to germinate, gorse cannot regenerate significantly under its own shade. More shade-tolerant native species such as mahoe (whiteywood), fuchsia, wineberry, lemonwood and five-finger, together with taller trees such as totara, matai, kahikatea or beech, grow up through the ageing gorse canopy, overtop it, shade, and kill it. The irony here, as Hugh Wilson has noted, is that a deliberate policy of disturbing gorse as little as possible will rapidly lead to its demise. (Source)
This quote also highlights the complete bull-headed stubbornness of standard management practices in Aotearoa — the author notes later that the practices of grazing gorse with goats (the only animal with enough raw power to eat it) or burning areas off are almost completely useless at eradicating the plant, as they just recreate the ideal conditions for germination of the seeds. Agrichemical use is also extremely dubious. While I grew up using glyphosate (a chemical with its own set of health risks, including a plausible case for its carcinogenic properties, the recommended weapon for years was 2, 4, 5 – T, a chemical defoliant and component of Agent Orange. AgPest recommends a “less controversial” set of chemicals now, such as triclopyr 600 EC (acutely ecotoxic, orally toxic, as well as targeting specific organs, the skin, and the eyes of anyone who uses it), metsulfuron-methyl (very toxic to soil and aquatic life), or triclopyr/picloram (damages eyes, sensitises skin, toxic to target organs, ecotoxic).
What can we learn from this? That gorse is a plant with varied functions in the ecosystem, many of which are extremely valuable to the plant and animal communities around it, as well as having numerous uses to humans — the flowers are edible and can be used to create dye, while the ash has been used in traditional soapmaking and as a fertiliser. Meanwhile it aggressively disrupts industrial farming practices, reclaiming land and excluding humans and human domesticates as it heals soil and nurtures the next generation of native forest. Cultural responses to this plant in these islands are painfully misguided, and can be taken as symptomatic of a way of life that denigrates wildness, a way of life totally oppositional to the development of self-willed areas and independent, resilient communal relationships.
Succession, not Progress
An idea all radicals should become familiar with is the concept of ecological or forest succession. This theory is nothing more than an acknowledgement that species composition changes over time, and favors the development (in the long term) of the climax ecosystem of a given place. Climax ecosystems are more or less steady states, usually characterised by long-lived species engaging over tens, hundreds, or thousands of years. Each generation of the succession process creates the conditions needed by the plants that follow along, with simple beginnings wildly diversifying and diverging, producing truly unique and beautiful communities. The nature of this ecosystem varies from place to place, as the interplay of factors that make up local climates and microclimates will support different species. Having just called these ecosystems “steady states”, it has to be pointed out that disturbance is an essential part of the succession process. This gradual flow, which sees life complexify and diversify only to be destroyed and renew itself literally from the ground up, is what allows for the building of resilience and adaptability in an ecosystem and its component species. This knowledge enables us to see succession as so much more than a linear process by which an ecosystem goes from simple to complicated, mimicking discourse around progress. Instead, it is a rampant, joyfully cyclical process by which life enacts a thousand spirals in the wild flux of being.
Succession is a much more elaborate process that this brief description can get across, and I strongly believe that learning to work with local ecologies is a skill at the core of radical culture-building, particularly through practices like permaculture. The techniques given voice by permaculture advise working with succession rather than against it - where conventional agriculture relies on monocultured annual vegetables or perennial grasses for pasture (ecosystems we can now see as artificially held back, deprived of their movement toward diversity and vibrant life), permaculture and forest gardening suggest alternative ways of working with ecosystems to benefit both the human and more-than-human participants in the community. Gorse, along with many other much-maligned shrubby weeds, fits a key role in ecological succession as it often effects the transition from herbacious, often annual plants with shallow roots, to perennial plants with deeper roots and a more robust structure. As mentioned above, this shelters the emergent seedlings of the regenerating bush as well as improving soil. These are characteristics we can learn to value and collaborate with.
Gorse, to me, has both animist and Daoist significance in its activity. In a situation where so much native forest has been destroyed, replaced by the rural green desert of a pasture broken only by token hedges and veggie patches, gorse has represented to me a solidity of purpose that completely transcends an ideological commitment. So many activists of settler descent talk about putting their bodies on the line, where this plant just is the living sword and shield of reforestation. Gorse moves exuberantly into the artificially stunted ecosystem of the field, introducing a hostile, rampant diversity resistant to poisoning and cutting, and sheltering the children of the old forest. This is an example we, as anarchists, can — and should — follow.
With Friends Like These
I tend to self-identify as an anarchist, but spaces where anarchists have a presence tend to play host to a wide array of other ideologues with whom I have little-to-nothing in common; Marxists, socialists, liberals — at a glance, the Left. I am not a leftist because the left is a progressive institution, and my commitment to an antagonism toward all crystalised power structures puts me at odds with anyone who still fetishises those structures. A nominal shared commitment to egalitarianism is not enough to bridge the gap between those who want a state and those who want to exist against the state (per Clastres). My sense of anarchy is exclusive of anything but temporary and convenient collaboration with statist and progressive actors.
If that paragraph articulates some kind of position, it may be a position other people can respect, or feel affinity for. As green anarchists, why would we expect to feel kinship with ideologies which “fail to see that the Anti-capitalist mode of production wants only to outrun its brother in wrecking the Biosphere”? This stance may seem to lose us some friends, but maybe we can see those friends were never real to begin with. Amid all the clamour for “left unity”, can we look to something more meaningful to us than the waving of motheaten flags dyed faded red and dusty black?
Don’t You Know There’s a War On?
The friends we appear to lose by finally, firmly declaring what we stand for — masterlessness, wildness, intimate relation and community — are replaced by allies and accomplices truer and deadlier than anything conjured from the pages of any revolutionary text. Gorse is only one fellow-traveler along the opaque path to liberated being. When we detach ourselves from a view of the world that centers ourselves as humans, as the sole subjective beings present in this experience, and we renew the old, inevitable allegiance to our bodies as a community in themselves, buoyed up by the great community beyond, we begin to tread that path. It is a path that gives us numerous allies toward our own goals, politically and personally, but it reframes our own activity to also become allies. We are not masters; we are not subjects. We are participants in a great struggle, a great dream that did not begin with the advent of agriculture or capitalism or industrial society because it goes so far beyond them. Those apparent landmarks of human history are nothing more than loud games played by children trying to distract themselves from the substance of being, and the knowledge of living and dying.
Our business now is to sharpen our knives and sing slow songs to the trees, to gather our allies and be gathered by turns, and to wait for the openings. The overused metaphor of weeds bursting through concrete is not a metaphor to us — every straining leaf and writhing root is a furious strike against the palace of detachment built and maintained by so much idle activity. We are surrounded by life, by living, active beings who move against our shared enemies. Learning to respect them, to collaborate with and fight alongside them, is, I believe, essential to our process of at once dismembering and deserting this vapid, grotesque, cruel civilisation, along with every practice that continues to create it.
TWM GWYNNE
Grubby animist, poet, gardener. More of his writing can be found at his blog, Y Dyn Gwyrdd, and a short collection of his poetry is published through the Ritona imprint of Gods & Radicals press.