User:Anthere/Listening to our garden

There's a word commonly used nowadays, it's the term pest. But why are they labelled pests ? They aren't pests, they are just populations of an organism that we choose to call pest because it is somehow preventing the proper development of fruits and veggies we wish to eat, of flowers we wish to contemplate.

And what about weeds in our garden? Even worse, in french, we call them mauvaises herbes (bad herbs, wrong herbs ?). We go out and we look at the plant we cultivate. And then, we discover a weed. We want to remove it, be it by mechanical means or chemical ones. But the weed resists. It is strong, it is very well anchored in the soil, it is just growing well here.
Well, sometimes, it is not anchored very well, and the weed can be removed. That mostly means the weed was not growing in a very suitable environment. In a suitable environment, the weed will resist us.

What is wrong with the weeds and the pests ? They prevent our crops to grow, our flowers to bloom...but...in a non-cultivated environment, what happen ? Any plant could be a weed. Or rather, any weed is a plant, with a right to grow. And any pest is just an organism with a right to multiply. Plants and animals grow together, support each other. The plant hosts and feeds the bug. The bug helps the decomposition of organic matter, helps pollination...
The plant, the bug are just part of the game, together.

In our garden, bugs should not be looked at as pests. They are important too; they should be looked at as indicators. They help us to remember to actually look very carefully at the crop. With not pest, we would not look so much at the crop we grow, we would not spend so much time tending it. We must look at the plant as if it was our child, to know it, to sense it, because without this information, we will not understand its needs.
We should listen more to our plant.

Pests (and weeds) are both indicators of how healthy a plant is. If it was not, no other life would try to share energy with it. We want to use the energy given by our plant, so we need it to be healthy.
However a massive invasion of pests, a multiplication of very well anchored weeds is also an indication that our little ecology is unbalanced. The solution is not to remove all the weeds and all the pests, it is to understand why they proliferated to such an undesirable extent, and to find a way to restore a healthy equilibrium.