Alvaro Azcárraga

[Left]

Mustard Plant and the Santa Monica Mountains, CA USA.
Collection of media in conversation
with Maru García.

Missions were established in California in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to convert Native Americans to Christianity and enculturate them into a class of laborers for Californios (Spanish/Mexican settler). The concentration of large numbers of Native Americans at the Missions, along with the introduction of European diseases, led to serious disease problems. Medicinal supplies brought to California by the missionaries were limited in quantity. This situation resulted in an opportunity for the sharing of knowledge of medicinal plants between the Native Americans and the Mission priests. (…) A comparison of the lists of medicinal plants use by various groups indicated that only a small percentage of medicinal plants were shared by two or more groups.

McBride, Joe Rayl, Rita Yolanda Cavero, Anna Liisa Cheshire, María Isabel Calvo, and Deborah Lea McBride. 2020. “Exchange of Medicinal Plant Information in California Missions.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 16 (June). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13002-020-00388-y.

[Right]

Research Database
Sample of written sources ranging from academic
journals, thought pieces, books, etc.

The use of simple terms to articulate ecological concepts can confuse ideological debates and undermine management efforts. This problem is particularly acute in studies of nonindigenous species, which alternatively have been called ‘exotic’,‘introduced’, ‘invasive’ and ‘naturalised’, among others. Attempts to redefine commonly used terminology have proven difficult because authors are often partial to particular definitions. (…) A focus on invasion stage has the added benefit of stressing the view that invasions represent biogeographical rather than taxonomic phenomena. As such, invasion stages should refer to individual populations, and not entire species. A similar shift in focus in conservation biology from species to populations has profoundly influenced ecological theory and management practices therein (Hughes et al., 1997; Luck et al., 2003).

Colautti, Robert I., and Hugh J. MacIsaac. 2004. “A Neutral Terminology to Define ‘Invasive’ Species.” Diversity and Distributions 10 (2): 135–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1366-9516.2004.00061.x.

[Left]

Recorded Conversations
Featuring Terrance Huang and Jules Cooch
of the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden

The worship of wilderness has coexisted in this country with the worship of lawn for more than a century – ever since the decade following the Civil War, when America managed simultaneously to invent both the front lawn and the wilderness park. How could one culture have produced two such seemingly opposite institutions? (…) As a nation, we’ve never been sure whether to dominate nature, in the name of civilization, or worship it untouched, as an escape from civilization. It’s always been all or nothing with us: parking lot or wilderness preserve; crew-cut lawn or untended meadow; culture or nature. Neither extreme suggests a particularly useful model for our relations with nature. And neither should ever be confused with a “garden,” a word that used to be reserved for places that mediate between nature and culture, rather than force us to make an impossible choice.

Pollan, Michael. 1994. “Against Nativism (Published 1994).” The New York Times, May 15, 1994, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/15/magazine/against-nativism.html.

[Right]

The Sidewalk Herbarium

Lecture Presented at SCIART Summer 2020

Yes, nature is carefully managed national parks and vast boreal forest and uninhabited arctic. Nature is also the birds in your backyard; the bees whizzing
down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan; the pines in rows in forest plantations; the blackberries and butterfly bushes that grow alongside the urban river; the Chinese tree of-heaven or “ghetto palm” growing behind the corner store; the quail struting through the farmer’s field; the old field overgrown with weeds and shrubs and snakes and burrowing mammals; the jungle thick with plants labeled “invasive” pests; the carefully designed landscape garden; the green roof; the highway median; the five-hundred-year-old orchard folded into the heart of the Amazon; the avocado tree that sprouts in your compost pile.

Marris, Emma. 2013. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. Paperback ed. New York: Bloomsbury.

[Left]

Sidewalk Herbarium
Collection of dried, pressed and scanned specimens.

Plant specimens stored in herbaria are being used as never before to document the impacts of global change on humans and nature. However,
published statistics on the use of biological
collections are rare, and ecologists lack quantitative data demonstrating the relevance to science of
herbarium specimens. (…) The use of molecular analyses to investigate herbarium specimens is still relatively unexplored, at least from biogeographical and environmental points of view. Combined with recently developed procedures to correct biases, herbarium specimens might provide in the near future exciting additional spatio-temporal insights that are currently unimaginable.

Lavoie, Claude. 2013. “Biological Collections in an Ever Changing World: Herbaria as Tools for Biogeographical and Environmental Studies.” Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 15 (1): 68–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ppees.2012.10.002.

[Right]

Collection of plants presenting “wild” qualities (photography)
Summer 2020 at multiple locations in
Los Angeles, CA.

The word appears in English literature at least by the time of Alfred in the 9th Century. The early usage appears to be comipatible with the first definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary: “Weed 1. A herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation.” It should be pointed out that another word, “weed,” meaning clothing, garb, armour, or covering (e.g., “widow’s weeds”) has a different etymology and comes from Teutonic and Scandinavian roots.

Harlan, Jack R., and J. M. J. deWet. 1965. “Some Thoughts about Weeds.” Economic Botany 19 (1): 16–24.