Sneak Preview: Community and Adaptation
The megafauna may be long extinct, but it never hurts to be prepared.
Note: The following is a draft for an article that will be published in some form for Communities Magazine. I thought paid subscribers would appreciate a sneak peek at this piece in its raw form. Ignore the typos, as you always do.
Are you at all familiar with honey locust trees? (Gleditsia tricanthos for my latin speakers out there.) It’s a fairly common pioneer species out here in Northeast Missouri, the ecological landbase for Sandhill Farm, Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, and Red Earth Farms. I like to think of our Tri Communities here, (that’s how we’re all classified on the email list) as mutations of each other. Sandhill sprang up as an egalitarian farm, Dancing Rabbit as a fairly lofty experiment in village scale community, and Red Earth as a conglomerate of homesteads held in trust. Each variation on shared and simple living has formed to respond to some condition or pressure, ecological, social, or whatever. We’re all a short bike ride from beautiful Rutledge, Missouri, and on that ride, on will encounter many honey locust trees.
The honey locust, for those unfamiliar, is not a popular tree in its prevailing form. It is an evolutionary anachronism, armed with an intimidating sheath of branched spines to prevent long extinct mastodons, giant sloths, beavers, and other megafauna from damaging it, because its good at setting boundaries, even with members of the ecosystem that it needs. The honey locust produces sugary, nutritious pea-like pods. The hard seeds contained within germinate best when passed through the digestive tract of herbivores, and thus, we have a stubborn, prickly tree that can not only endure the hostile terrain of heavy animal impact, but requires some significant evolutionary pressure to thrive.