Sounds real fancy, doesn’t it? Didn’t go to college for nothing, you know.
In no particular order, what seed bombs can teach us:
- Fine motor skills
- The biodiversity of our particular place – flora AND fauna, and how the food web works and how it is all entangled and enmeshed in the ecosystem
- The soil food web / composition of our particular place
- The history of this particular place – what the environment has been like over the past millennia/centuries/decades, who the people are who’ve been on this land, how people and the land/flora/fauna have interacted historically and presently
- About the Indigenous presence on this land, historically and presently
- Math – spheres or something, or velocity when you throw it, radius… I don’t know; I’m not a math person, but I bet it’s there
- Making pottery / clay objects, its history, the art form, etc.
- Stories about plants, where they come from, their teachings
- How the seeds will benefit the environment / how they can be used as food/pollinators/guard against erosion/coverage/etc.
- The history of seed bomb making, usage, and farming
Honestly there’s probably more but those are just off the top of my head. It occurs to me that, were I an elementary school teacher or a summer camp counselor, this would be an amazing activity to do with kids that would keep them busy for hours and present tons of opportunities to learn. It sounds fun and educational to me as an adult, quite honestly.
I am inspired and wondering if perhaps this would be a thing for me to do for Solarpunk Action Week at the end of this month. I have already been thinking about making all the plastic bags I’ve been saving up into plarn and then doing something with it (sleeping mats to donate being the obvious choice). I’d been going back and forth on it because hnnngh microplastics but I think I’m overthinking it. I’d like to be able to repurpose waste material into objects that can help other people.
There are loads of empty, biologically desolate strips of land in this area, and I suspect that the best thing to do would be to lobby the city to quit mowing along highway medians and on the shoulders. But that is a process that takes quite a while so, while I am inspired to write to my counselor and government officials, making seed bombs is perhaps a good way to reintroduce biodiversity to natural areas that – while not being actively destroyed by the city – are not at all helped in their thriving. To my knowledge.
Research time, of course.