Although humans are dependent on nature, we often consider ourselves its dominator for several reasons. One reason is that we are able to reorganize and choose from it. We call it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, placing labels such as “pest” and “weed” on certain plants and animals, while categorizing others as beneficial, benign and welcome. This categorization subjects the environment to our destructive ideas of what it should be, causing us to think of nature as something apart from ourselves, and we manipulate nature to such a degree that we damage its ability to support us. Trees such as the Hackberry that cause us allergies and don’t grow tall enough to provide much shade are considered weed trees, so we cut them down, then become angry when they spring back the next year, because we decided that they’re ugly trees and should not be part of our nice yards- our small personal bits of nature that we can decide to experience sometimes. But how can we call that land our own? We are part of nature and share it with all other beings. The Hackberry was there first, and does the Hackberry not have the same rights to existence as we do? Maybe the Hackberry causes us to suffer, but allergies are nothing close to the damage that we’ve put nature–our home!–through, by treating it as only a commodity and a source of money.

The 2-sided light box I made shows the two sides of nature as we see them. There are the plants that we support and grow in multitudes, introduce into new areas, and use in our landscaping, and there are the plants that we chop down, weed out and use herbicides to wipe away. We have an ideal version of nature in our minds that is not natural, though over time, we’ve lessened the amount of unpleasant nature by planting, plowing land and introducing new and sometimes invasive species, dominating the land by changing how it looks based on what we favor, and treating it as a tool rather than a partner or friend. In this piece I wanted to show the beauty of both sides of nature and of nature as a whole. Can you tell which side is made with ‘weeds’ and which side is made with landscaped plants?