In lockdown I installed solar panels on my roof and I cleared the bindweed that had spread itself across a large part of a hedge in my back garden.
My solar panels sit big and solid on my roof. The bindweed filled only a small part of my council green bin. Thinning the honeysuckle which had lain beneath the bindweed looking stifled, I found it laced with a fine dry filigree network of threads that had been the previous years’ growths of bindweed. The honeysuckle, I have been happy to see, has regained its good humour, bursting with new leaves and flowers. And the bees, which were enjoying the bindweed’s simple white trumpet flowers, have transferred their interest to the more complex floral arrangements of the honeysuckle.
While I was managing the solar panel installation, and while the bindweed was growing, climbing, spreading, at some point I read a book on global capitalism, and was reminded that while I was engaged in my domestic tasks, and while the bindweed was going about its bindweed business, other people were moving capital about between companies that make and sell clothes, or deliver letters and parcels, or consolidate the processes of marketing, processing and manufacturing the foods we eat. Only tangentially, through the light it shed on hedge funds, venture capital and other new economic instruments, did it touch on how that same capital also moves into weapons development, manufacture, and deployment, the rebuilding of whole countries afterwards, and into whole new sectors that emerge to satisfy our consumer urges and deal with our other complex needs, the management companies that buy out health providers, the vets, the dentists, the opticians, the fur and puppy farms, the chicken, pig, cattle producers, the insurance companies, the charitable, development and disaster industries.
Bindweed could enter itself into a competition for the most efficient of plants. It wastes next to no resources on building itself a skeleton. Instead, mostly water in tough but filmy tubes, it climbs up the stems of other plants until it gets to the sunshine whereupon it drapes its leaves like washing spread out to dry across the top of everything else that has grown up there, taking all the light and casting all below it into deathly shade. Its leaves then manufacture long chain carbohydrates and other complex chemicals, stored energy, building materials, and manufacturing stock, and pumps them all down, some whole, some as components, into its robust storage pipe roots which it lays down in long lines through the soil, pushing through anything in its way, happily passing through a potato as readily as through loam or building rubble. Any piece of bindweed root contains the resources to burst into new bindweed life. The judges of that competition might point out that its efficiency is entirely contingent on the work of other plants. In its defence, bindweed would point out that it spreads itself as readily across expanses of bald concrete. The judges might say that is not natural or normal, and outside the competition rules. Bindweed, or its advocates, in rejoinder will claim it is the new abnormal, so get over it.
Rather laboriously I organised the installation of solar panels which capture solar energy relatively inefficiently (but which nevertheless sets my old electric meter spinning backwards in rather a fun way) yet clear away in an afternoon the expanse of self-organising bindweed that has been capturing solar energy infinitely (or many times) more efficiently. In lockdown, focussing on the local, it all seems utterly futile.
Bindweed, like us, is the product of around 3.5 billion years of evolution: matter, energy, time, perhaps all one and the same thing, working together, following what we assume to be universal laws, though we don’t know all that they are.
The money I use to pay for the solar panels is of the same system that shifts capital around the world. My solar panels make me feel more virtuous, but they are a drop in the ocean, not much of an answer to anything. We behave as if the laws of economics are as fundamental as the laws of physics, though equally we don’t really know what they are. Yet they are just human constructs. It seems we are destroying the biosphere though life for many of us is easier, more comfortable and diverting than it used to be. We like to think we are cleverer than bindweed. But I’m not sure we have any more choice about what we do than the bindweed does.