#grass

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them... “When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#cheatgrass #environment #johnny-appleseed #oyster #love

[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement. ↗

— Gail Collins

#ella-baker #feminism #grassroots-organizing #leadership #naacp

But the worst of all is, according to the old phrase, while the grass grows, the horse starves, but the man of money is the man for Nova Scotia. Those may do extremely well. ↗

— Nathaniel Smith

#extremely #grass #grows #horse #man

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. ↗

— Willa Cather

#nature #prairie #similies #nature

Robots do not hold on to life. They can't. They have nothing to hold on with - no soul, no instinct. Grass has more will to live than they do. ↗

— Karel Capek

#hold #instinct #life #live #more

I didn't have big movie offers, or any big agents wanting to work with me. I had to go grassroots, start at the bottom and go on 150 auditions before someone finally gave me a shot. ↗

— Donnie Wahlberg

#any #auditions #before #big #big movie

There is this idea that appealing to youth is the only way forward. But that is no longer the case. Youth is not everything. Now we have all the baby-boomers in their 60s, like me, who are actively engaged in life - we're not retiring, we're not just being put out to grass once we hit 60. ↗

— Julie Walters

#appealing #being #case #engaged #everything

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#believe #grass #i #i believe #leaf

It is difficult to determine the cause of grass fires. There is usually nothing left behind when we get there, like a cigarette or a gas can, for us to determine what started it. ↗

— John Glover

#cause #cigarette #determine #difficult #fires

I don't really have a favorite bass player. I listen to a lot of bluegrass. But then again, I'm not a typical bluegrass bass player. I was really into the Grateful Dead, and I still am - I don't listen to them too much, but for me they are a big influence. ↗

— Mike Gordon

#am #bass #bass player #big #big influence