download Seek by iNaturalist

you don't even have to read the post just download it

These days, I am newly acquisitive of wonder. Here’s a groundbreaking observation: the world has plants in it, and you can find those plants, and learn about what they are. You can do this by downloading Seek by iNaturalist.

Seek feels like Pokémon Go felt, if Pokémon were real and you could eat them. You wander around your part of the world and find some organisms. Scan them with Seek, and the app will tell you what they are. It’s really good at identifying well-lit plants and fungi, and okay at everything else. It also gives you some basic information about the organism, links to the relevant Wikipedia article, and keeps a list of everything you’ve observed.

I’ve been using Seek for about a month, and it is tremendously enlivening. I am a person who is not used to knowing what things are, just in general, but now I can walk down my block and know what almost all of the different weeds (there are so many!) are on sight. A lot of them have weird properties I didn’t know about—my favorite weed, cleavers, feel like Velcro when you touch their undersides, and their fruits contain caffeine. I don’t know whether the things I am learning are common knowledge to people who live in areas with a metropolitan population smaller than 6 million people, but I have never done that, so this is all wonderfully novel to me.

Cleavers, aka Gallium aparine

Also, the world has things other than plants in it, and you are probably not noticing those things either. I have a vivid memory of reading a particular Simpsons comic at summer camp in my childhood, in which Marge notices that she has literally worn a track into the carpet going between her bedroom, the laundry room, and the kitchen. Something about this still makes my inner nine-year-old go oh Jesus. And yet, if I could hold some kind of magical blacklight up to my life, I would see the same tracks, running between my apartment, the grocery store, the synagogue, the CVS.

BUT NOT ANYMORE, because Seek gives you challenges where you have to find particular organisms in your area, and maps where others have spotted those organisms, and then you end up trying not to commit criminal trespass while hunting down garlic mustard, and along the way you find a used bookstore you’ve never heard of and spend several hours and too much money in there, and oops your world has become larger.

Lastly, you should download Seek because if enough people download Seek then my newfound behavior of abruptly crouching down in the middle of a sidewalk in West Philadelphia to scan a cool weed will be seen as less bizarre. The other day, I encountered a mystery: a plant that looked like another plant that I already could identify on sight, but had slightly differently shaped leaves, maybe. Seek informed me that this plant was not a red deadnettle, as I had thought, but a henbit deadnettle. Learning this caused me to yelp loudly in joy, startling several people around me.

I would prefer to live in a world where the people who are out yelping at weeds outnumber the people who pass them by. I also prefer being the former kind of person myself, and I would like to invite you to try this out for yourself and see what happens. You may be surprised at what has always been out there, shoving itself through your sidewalks and then quietly awaiting your recognition.