Tales From The Bearded Spock Universe

     There’s no point to writing satire any longer. As soon as a satirist produces a fresh item, our crazies decide to make it happen in real life:

     “The world is facing a looming existential threat caused by exploitative habits and intentional human negligence.”

     That is how Brandon Edwards-Schuth and Marco Cerqueira, a pair of graduate students at Washington State University, describe the pending global crisis as they see it in their recent Northwest Journal of Teacher Education article.

     Their solution to combat this dystopian future? “Plantifa.”

     Plantifa is situated “at the intersections of anti-fascism, eco-justice, decolonization, and arts-based curriculum theories,” the scholars write.

     “We feel that education rooted in a Plantifa curriculum can be one potential way for both teachers and communities to use a diversity of tactics to fight climate change and subvert power structures working against environmental justice,” the scholars state in their November 2022 paper.

     If adopted, the authors note, they envision Plantifa being carried out by communities, as well as incorporated into current classroom lesson plans, perhaps as a final class assignment.

     For that assignment, the scholars suggest students engage in the practice of guerrilla gardening, “a subversive and communal eco-justice approach to environmental degradation and inequity.”

     Unlike traditional gardening, which the duo describe as taking place in “designated flower beds or defined community gardens,” guerrilla gardening, they write, entails intentionally “gardening without borders,” for example on somebody else’s land.

     Anti-fascist guerrilla gardeners, they write, assist “nature in breaking trespassing laws, where it is really the insatiable consumption inherent under capitalism which has trespassed Earth.”

     “[V]acant lots, medians, and ‘derelict land’” are just some of the sites anti-fascist guerrilla gardeners may target, note the pair of scholars, as these are all “spaces of eco-potentiality.”…

     “We are nature,” they declare to the world. “We are the yarning tracing ways of common guerrilla gardeners. We are the planet. We are plants. As we plant seeds, we become the seeds. We all are Plantifa!”

     Yes, really. That is a real article that was printed in a real educational journal. Laugh if you please, but the authors of that article appear to mean it literally. They propose a curriculum for grammar schools and high schools based on this lunacy. No doubt high-achieving Plantifa scholars will be eligible for scholarships to special institutions where they can add guerilla hybridization and progressive culling to their skills.

     Really and for true, Gentle Reader: It’s time to ring every “institution of higher learning” in these United States with a thirty foot high, impermeable wall with one door in it: a door that can only be opened from the outside. Thereafter, while individuals will be permitted to enter, no one will be permitted to leave. All electronic communication from within the walls will be routed to the police. The compassionate will be invited to throw canned food and simple manual puzzles over the walls on alternate Tuesdays.