treehugger has bounced from Julia Plevin’s offer “what message might invasive species have to share for you” to the Just Language invitation to pay more respect and humility to them. Now Jenny Liou leads us through a critical rethinking of invasive species. This is the episode where we tell shories about identity/politics, our entanglement with weeds, the invasive vs. native ideology and more.

Jenny Liou is an English professor at Pierce College and an avid naturalist and ecological restorationist. She likes thinking and writing about bodies – bodies of thought, the mineral body of the loess-covered plains where she grew up, bodies of water – the rivers along whose banks she has explored the Pacific Northwest and her family’s history in China, the body of the Pacific which divides her from that part of her family. She lives and writes near that ocean in Tacoma, Washington.

“Am I an Invasive Species?” in Hight Country News from July 9, 2020

Washington Native Plant Society South Sound Chapter – “The Invasion that Sustains Us: Himalayan Blackberries and Invasive and National Discourses in Native Plant Conservation” https://www.wnps.org/events/1527

Samples of Jenny’s work and more on her website https://www.jennyhwayuliou.com

Muscle Memory from Kaya Press https://kaya.com/authors/jenny-liou

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