In California, we have Tumbleweed, and it’s actually really useful for stabilizing/fertilizing loose, disturbed soils and making shelter for native grasses and plants to start growing near. They also love to fuck with cars by jumping out in front of them at every opportunity.
Crap, took a calculated risk on that one, sorry. I know England is getting rough with car dependency, but I wasn’t expecting Ireland to be that way. Derry Girls lied to me.
Another swing and a miss on my part. I was trying to make a joke at my expense by being an American who got his knowledge from TV shows. Anyway, that’s not an apology. I’m sorry for making that assumption.
That’s a tricky one. The problem is that power is, more often than not, a one way street. Once organizations or people have it, they tend to not want to give it up. It takes a LOT of effort over long periods of time to walk that power back, and particularly when the money’s against it. The US is already practically a fascist (and I mean this in a textbook, unsensational sense) economy what with how tightly the public-private partnerships run, so you’re fighting a three way battle between getting the government, the investors, and the corporate leadership to all agree all at the same time to decrease their power. The corporates and investors have been getting some really sweetheart deals put of this arrangement, and they’re not going to want to walk away from easy money guaranteed by market coercion.
I think the path of least resistance here is going to be widespread local action, at the level of the state or below. It’s not unprecedented, this is more or less how marijuana legalization went mainstream. If we waited for the policy to change at the federal level, well… [Gestures wildly at the house of representatives] maybe your grandkids will live to see some moderate change. But the states and especially local government have a frankly shocking amount of power, and they beat the feds in legal battles a surprising amount of times when their laws come into conflict, though this is largely dependent on the views of the circuit of appeals court that presides over your area. The fifth circuit are a bunch of authoritarian whack jobs that once heard of the constitution but think it sounds like a pinko hippie, for example. But we’ll never get there if we don’t try, and effecting change at the local level is both possible and realistic. For my part, I’m working on creating the first YIMBY group in central California, and I want to work with others to pressure central valley urbans to have better urbanism, cheaper housing, more public transit, and all around be more livable and affordable.
Increases fire hazard (though may be a hazard primarily to human landscapes).
In other words, it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the overall ecological fire hazard, you’re mostly talking highway veg fires and stuff, which happen with or without tumbleweeds.