You know, when I originally saw this post on my dash, I was like "hey i agree but also disagree, because I don't think shaming people will reconnect them with the curiosity and openness to learn that was probably shamed out of them in the first place"
But then when I made a post about how it's good to be curious about nature and how it's a responsibility to have some basic knowledge of living things in the ecosystem you live in, talking about how it brings a lot of pleasure and reward to be able to participate as a caretaker in your ecosystem and reap its gifts, a number of people legitimately took this as me saying "You're not allowed to care about anything except plants, you should have the same interests that I have and if you don't you're a fundamentally broken person"
So. I mean.
I would just like to say that, yes, learning some things is a responsibility you have as a human. I know this doesn't feel good if you were subjected to the average educational system, and you might want to lash out and bite at it because you are reminded of that trauma, but that is something we have to come together and heal from as a society! Of course the responsibility parts might never feel good, but there is reward enough to make it worthwhile.
If you can do any of these things, it is important to learn how to vote and be somewhat politically aware. It is important to learn how to clean up after yourself. It is important to learn to be considerate to other people. It is important to learn basic things about your body and physical health, and some basic first aid. It is important to know which household chemicals not to mix together. It is important to be able to cook at least a few simple things for yourself.
Our obligation to the world of other living things—the biosphere—is exactly the same, but even more far-reaching, and it is important to learn things about non-human living organisms around you.
Why? So you don't dust chemicals on your flowers that will cling to bees like pollen does and kill the entire hive when they return. So you don't get scammed by landscaping companies that will lie to you about how fungi work to get you to remove a rotting stump for 700 dollars. So you don't spend over $10,000 installing an irrigation system for your lawn that wouldn't be needed if you understood basic facts about how evaporation works. So you don't kill every insect you see. So you know why fallen leaves are important. So you don't expose your family repeatedly to dangerous chemicals because that's just what you're supposed to do if you see a bug, never mind whether the bug is harmful. So you don't buy an invasive species at the Lowe's garden center. So you can properly identify venomous snakes. So you aren't completely dependent on buying products marketed as "green" and pretending climate change doesn't exist as your only means of having a positive impact on the environment.
Read for 5 minutes about how DuPont, Allied Chemical and Monsanto created the American lawn care industry out of whole cloth in the 1950's and it will make you angry enough to eat glass.
No, the American education system doesn't teach us shit, and it's also legal for random people to buy pesticides that are banned in the whole of Europe and sprinkle them around like table salt. If you don't take it upon yourself to learn about these substances—beyond an antivaxxer-esque 'Chemical Bad' knee jerk reaction—you can inadvertently do incredible damage because you just didn't know better.
Honey bees are not on their way to extinction in the USA. However, bumble bees are. The American bumble bee, once common, has declined 90% in the past 20 years. Did you know that? I didn't either! It's horrifying! Some bumble bee species are endangered or critically endangered. And native bee species as well.
There's this pesticide sold frequently at garden centers called Sevin dust that is basically a fine powder people sprinkle on their plants. My dad used to use it on his roses to keep the Japanese beetles off them. They have changed the recipe in recent years, but up until 2018-2019-ish, the active ingredient was a carcinogenic chemical highly toxic to both humans and bees. (The current active ingredient is less dangerous, but still dangerous)
If you put that shit on a flowering plant, every bee that visits that plant probably will die.
And since Sevin dust is in the form of powder, it often clings to bees just like pollen does, and with social bees, it is brought back to the hive where it kills the entire hive.
If I had not specifically looked this up, I would not know it. I had no idea. And most people who buy the stuff have no idea.
Chemical companies market chemical solutions to non-problems. I don't know how it is in other countries but the American lawn care and landscaping industries are fucked to the core, and ruthlessly exploit people's ignorance of basic natural processes.
Most popular lawn care practices are self-defeating vicious cycles that make you increasingly dependent upon more and more expensive products, and enthusiasts lionize "Hard Work" in a way that makes it feel lazy and immoral to literally work smarter.
I spent some time in r/lawncare and these poor people knew nothing. Like, "could not visually identify clover as clover" levels of nothing. These people routinely dropped hundreds, even thousands of dollars on trying to keep the literal most miserable patches of grass I'd ever seen alive. They were hardcore devoted to having a uniform grass monoculture, and were developing problems I didn't know grass could have.
They would water their grass until they had algae encrusted mud in their lawn. Their watering schedules boggled my mind—these folks were putting many, many times the amount of water on their grass that I would on a vegetable garden. They would dump fungicide regularly after noticing fungus decomposing their soaking wet, already dead grass.
The fact is, they were cutting the grass so short that the sunlight was baking it to a crisp, and monoculture lawn soil is so compacted that it can't absorb water anyway. Thus the necessity of spending hundreds if not thousands trying to irrigate the poor grass.
It is common practice for serious lawn enthusiasts to obliterate every plant in their yard with herbicides and start over from scratch. There was a guy that spent $2,500 physically ripping up every square foot of sod in his yard only to start posting in despair that the "weeds" had not been eliminated.
Basic ecological knowledge would save these people from their Sisyphean torment. And from poisoning themselves and every aquatic organism within a mile with every pesticide and herbicide under the sun.
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