Agave americana, garingbome

This Agave americana dominated view meets the visitor in many parts of the Little Karoo and the Great Karoo in inland, arid South Africa. Century plants or garingbome look so much at home here, as if they have always lived here, belong here. But that is not so! The plant arrived from America or Mexico through actions of people who thought they did good at the time. These agaves found conditions to their liking, stayed and multiplied.

Many other plants and animals have done what people do all over the world, immigrated by themselves, or via human intervention. There is a common sentiment of attaching greater value to the plants and animals of a region that did not arrive or intrude during the time period within human memory. What is from the area since times immemorial is deemed better. How such plants and animals got here so far back cannot be held against them, as nobody knows what transpired then. But these rules are all made by people who are also late arrivals, immigrants and squatters, taking the land, or sharing parts of it with the real locals who could not prevent them. Almost all original inhabitants are merely earlier arrivals.

The look and feel of the Little Karoo would not be the same today without the garingboom. But so say observers who mostly took to the land not so long ago, calling it the land of their fathers, their grandfathers having been foreigners. Let's not nitpick how many generations.

Plants have no right and wrong things, only live and die things. People have self-made rights and wrongs, in endless plural forms. They make choices that harden into rules and laws. Then they use force to uphold some such rules and laws opportune in the moment, breaking their own artificial rules when they do no longer suit, or reword them. (Handy things these words in strings. Plants and animals don't have them.)

Power sometimes sorts the rule breakers out. Rule breakers include people, animals and plants. Some plants and animals might well feel that they are rule breakers by the mere fact of existence. At other times the power, the manmade force, is measured, balanced, benign, or socially acceptable. But there is always force behind human control and getting things done. Some new plants and new people may be allowed to join in a particular spot, or not, depending on the strength of the decisions rules and laws of the time, plus the enforcement strength that is current. Sometimes the human controllers give up, when nature gets too strong.

Right has always been might with people, the clothes it wears may only become smarter, silkier, more in vogue. Accepted by enough sustains the system for the time being, and a little distance into the always unknown future. There are always people who are entitled, and others whose entitlement is in dispute.

Come to think about it, people have populated the earth since the origin of their species by migrating to spots where living conditions were more favourable than where they started out from, or as their numbers growth dictated. Human laws organising such movement always depend on decisions of powerful enough groups denying other groups, forcing the issue. Clem Sunter said the big bear sleeps where he wants to sleep.

Think of the oldest nations on earth. Their ancestral leaders arrived somewhere, often meeting settled locals where they arrived. Force, guile or assimilation sorted things out, and still does. Plants grow where their seeds find favourable conditions for germination.