When “nature” is a collection of weeds, one might think that colonialism was complete and that we are living in the end times. Weeds, smoke mixed into the winter fog, the morning sun scarcely burning through. It looks like a story of death.

And yet some of the weeds are the original settlers here, which have escaped bondage. Theirs is a world oriented to birds, yet eager to include us.

We might call this age the anthropocene, but we are not the only actors on this stage. The Earth is changing. We speak so often of species at risk and species being lost. Too often we don’t mention that we are one of them, unless we adapt to the new Earth. Those weeds?

This is a landscape dissimilar from the early one that immediately followed the ice 12,000 years ago and which this land’s first people’s tracked across on their hunts. In other words, this is not the end. This is the beginning of a new land.

It will have room for us if we allow it to change us, if we do the one thing we can do: hunt across its terrain. It will change us, if we let it. If we don’t, then we will live in poverty in the ruins and will continue to do what we do best right now: hunt each other.

A Complex Human Soul Trap Erected in a Former Grassland in the Okanagan

We, the weeds.